The project seemed trivial at the time, according to Hoffman, but the magic of the Internet is such that the footage went viral. “It was astonishing,’’ he said. “But what I noticed was that when you take people 65 or 75 or 80 years old and ask them to tell a joke, they become kids again. There’s a sense of genuine delight when they get a laugh.’’
Hoffman will be discussing his work in a comedy night also featuring stand-up comic Jon Fisch and Brookline’s Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, author of “The Big Book of Jewish Humor,’’ at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, 333 Nahanton St. in Newton.
Before the evening ends, three audience members will be selected to tell a joke, and their success will be measured by audience response.
In Hoffman’s original video, he said, one of the most popular segments involved his mother, Diane, telling a joke about broccoli.
“At the end, she curses a little bit, and then you can see her getting embarrassed about having cursed, and then after that you see how proud she is when the crowd starts laughing.’’
So popular was the project that it evolved quickly into a website called “Old Jews Telling Jokes.’’ (In his mind, the emphasis is on “old’’ rather than “Jews,’’ Hoffman said. He doesn’t really care about their religion or ethnic background; he just likes the way seniors recount a funny story.)
When he and his business partners at Jetpack Media took the project on the road to New York and Florida, it garnered increasing interest. Now, the “Old Jews Telling Jokes’’ enterprise includes a book published by Random House and a DVD. However, he said, more important than the project’s reach is its depth,
“What’s been interesting to me is that what started out as a fun little comic concept has become in large part a folklore project,’’ Hoffman said. “Older Jewish people have a specific way of telling jokes that is different from how younger people tell jokes. There’s a certain kind of comedy that in large part has been spawned by Jewish culture.
