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July/August 2008
Jewish Word
A Shtickl on Shtick
Jack Benny’s shtick was that he would forever remain 39 and stingy. Lewis Black screams and Jerry Seinfeld “yada-yadas.” Sarah Silverman is charmingly and unexpectedly vulgar.
These days you don’t have to be a Jewish comedian to have a shtick. It is one of those Yiddish expressions that has completed its journey into everyday English. Used by East European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century to describe vaudeville and Yiddish theater performances, it is derived from the German “stück,” which means “piece,” and is related to the French word “pièce,” which means theater. In Yiddish/English, shtick literally means “bit,” as in “Give me a shtik cake.” (In English, bit can also mean a comic or dramatic routine.)
Like other transliterated words, it has a multitude of spellings. In his 1968 The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten spelled the word as “shtik.” The most popular spelling today is “shtick,” which yields 1.12 million results in a Google search, while “shtik” calls up another 33,000 mentions. The word can also be found as “schtik” and “schtick” along with its diminutives “shtikl”—a little schtik (on YouTube, you can get “a shtickl” taste of the quartet Listen Up) and “shtikeleh” (an even smaller “shtik”) plus of course its plural, “shtiklech,” or the more frequently used “schticks.” The most ingenious spelling is found in Red Scht!k magazine, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, satirical publication.
“Shtick as a Yiddish word about theater is neutral; when it entered English it began to take on new meanings and connotations,” says Michael Wex, Yiddish cognoscenti and author of Born to Kvetch. American culture took shtick’s connection to fun and laughter and broadened its meaning as a “piece of clowning or prank” beyond show business. It has been further broadened to signify a person’s typical behavior, focus of interest, job or hobby. John’s shtick may be financial management, while his friend’s shtick is pie-eating contests. Such combinations as “hippie shtick” and “West Indian shtick” reference special interests. Combining languages, the web site Gyaff (a Guyanese word for chat) referred to Apple’s recent releases of the Safari Internet browser and iPhone as CEO Steve Jobs’ “schtik.”
In this sense, the word now also applies to organizations and companies. In a 2003 Texas Monthly article, Pamela Colloff writes about “lip shtick,” to describe the Neiman Marcus store’s marketing of cosmetics. In painting a picture of the upscale Boston Liberty Hotel, housed in a 19th century prison, a New York Times travel section writer calls it “a well-done theme hotel that plays its schtik to perfection.”
Because the word has become so popular in English, it is easily used to characterize Christian phenomena. The Sunday Views Commentary News has a section called “Church Schtick.” In Gabe Lyons’ and David Kinnaman’s What A New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity, one statement reads, “…young outsiders are skeptical of ‘the Jesus shtick.’”
It has also found its way into politics. Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama was accused of having a “messiah schtick” in March 2008 by Bookworm, a pseudonym for an American Thinker author. And earlier in April 2006, in Slate.com, Adam Reilly attacked the governor and future presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his “clumsy Mormon shtick” when Romney defined his Christianity as being “a person of faith.”
The word’s delicious sound lends itself to puns, as in “Carrot and Schtick,” the title of two separate articles. One, appearing in a March 2008 entry on Snopes.com, debunks an urban legend that baby carrots are bad for your health on the basis of a shtick that baby carrots are deformed large carrots soaked in chlorine. The second article, by David Kauffman in an August 2007 issue of the Jewish Daily Forward, plays on Bugs Bunny’s use of a carrot as part of his shtick and claims that the wascally wabbit is really a Jewish vaudevillian.
Today, shtick is often a putdown: Critics show their lack of enthusiasm for new shows by coming up with such statements as “Familiar Schtick Fails to Reap Belly Laughs” (from a critique of a New Zealand comedy festival). Billy Crystal’s one-man Broadway show is praised by Issac Guzman in a June 2003 New York Daily News article for steering “clear of standup shtick.”
This negative connotation appeared when shtick evolved to describe a once-clever action that has become dull through repetition. This usage is widespread. There’s a blog called “Too Old for This Shtick.” Julie Andrews inserts the word in her recently published A Memoir of My Early Years to describe someone’s contributing his “usual shtick” to a show. A 2007 issue of Rolling Stone describes Michelle Obama during the Iowa primary campaign as “about to read a story to a bunch of local kiddies ... the standard issue campaign-wife-with-kids shtick...”
If awards were given for innovative uses of shtick, they might go to the inventors of a sport called Shtick. It’s played by two teams with two or more Frisbees and operates much like the playground game Capture the Flag. The goal is to get a Frisbee into a small square without getting tagged by the other team. The game is popular in Australia and has spread to China and Korea, which is perhaps why there is a website called “Sports on a Schtick.”—Joan Alpert