Abstract
ABSTRACTAs a common platform for stigmatized outsiders, subversive comedy holds special interest for Jewish cultural studies, feminist media studies, and critical race studies alike. However, these fields have just begun to analyze millennial Jewish women’s transgressive TV comedy, a subgenre taking America by storm in series like Girls, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Broad City. Further, feminist and critical race work on these series sometimes overlooks Jewish difference, reflecting a wider tendency in both fields to conflate Jews with white gentiles. To advance scholarship on race, gender, Jewishness, and millennial TV comedy, I analyze the CW’s musical romantic comedy series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019). I argue that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend originates a new paradigm of the “Jewy/screwy Leading Lady” and uses this figure to disrupt rom-com gender scripts from within, especially the rom-com myth that women can find wholeness through straight romance. My analysis invites Jewish studies to better grasp millennial Jewish American women’s experience and artistic production. I likewise expand feminist theories on race in comedy to better analyze Jewishness in romantic comedies and millennial “precarious-girl comedies.” More broadly, I invite these fields to converse with Jewish studies in order to address Jewishness as a salient ongoing difference in the twenty-first-century United States.
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