‘You People’ Is So Aggressively Stupid, It’s Difficult To Be Offended

Honest self-observation is the foundation of some of the most entertaining humor, and certainly some of the greatest Jewish humor. Perhaps we could produce more culturally relevant, irreverent output on race relations. “You People,” Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris wrote it pretending to be such an effort. It is a millennial version. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — which is to say, intellectually, emotionally, and artistically vacuous.

“You People” is the story of a love-starved Jewish man named Ezra, played by Hill, and his black Muslim fiancé, Amira, played by the talented Lauren London. They can make it work. They can’t if their parents interfere.

We learn very early in the movie that Jews over the age of 40 are either sexual deviants or drooling idiots, American Jewish success is grounded in generational wealth rather than work and tradition, and Jewish culture — insofar as it even exists — is based on materialism. We first meet Ezra’s family at a Yom Kippur service, where older congregants played by Hal Linden (born, Harold Lipshitz, a child of poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrants) and the once-great Richard Benjamin act like depraved nincompoops. And when Ezra is set up by a woman from his family’s temple, she is, naturally, turned off by his lack of concern over money and status.

Amira is not possessed by these greedy fears. Ezra is encouraged by her to quit his job. “finance” — boy, everyone hates those guys! — to pursue his dream of being a podcaster. Ezra’s business partner, an androgynous lesbian woman of color, is, unlike his bumbling parents, a font of deep wisdom and reliable advice. Ezra, the product of privilege, listens to his partner’s pseudointellectual identitarian gibberish and learns great lessons.

The parents are the ones who prevent the couple from moving forward with their wedding plans. Ezra is from an insecure Jewish family. His members obsequiously and hamfistedly scream at each other to show their openness about Amira. Shelley, played by Julia Louis­Dreyfus, is a bumbling mother. She is perpetually offending Amira and her family by either good-intentioned overreacting to imaginary racist slights or by saying things she shouldn’t. David Duchovny, who plays Ezra’s dad, a hip-hop-loving doctor, doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to say anything interesting. They are probably just like you and racist without even realizing it.

On the other hand, Amira’s parents, Akbar and Fatima, are dignified and successful. They are played by Eddie Murphy, Nia Long and Louis Farrakhan. This could have been a funny premise if the movie hadn’t been so cowardly. However, antisemitism has been dismissed as an eccentric view. While Ezra’s parents keep making far-fetched faux pas about race, Amira’s parents praise a Holocaust denier and accuse Jews of being slave traders. Both of these positions are equally offensive. (Producers would have to pair these two positions with a family if they really wanted to make a film about similar offensive positions.