The Stereotypical Portrayal of Jewish Masculinity on TheBigBangTheory

Abstract

Jewish men in the United States. On the popular comedy The Big Bang Theory , Howard Wolowitz, played by Simon Helberg, is an engineer at a prestigious university in southern California. Howard is also the epitome of the stereotypical Jewish male; he is thin, awkward, big-nosed, and a mamma's boy; basically, a nebbish. For much of the series, thirty-something-year-old Howard still lives at home with his mother until her passing during season eight (due to the death of Carol Ann Susi in 2014, the actress who portrayed her). This type of negative portrayal of the Jewish man is not uncommon in the United States (Grinberg). Even though the presence of Jewish characters on television in the United States, including in leading roles, has increased since the 1980s (Rockler), they are still often portrayed stereotypically and negatively. According to Samantha Baskind: Jews in American popular entertainment convey Otherness in one of three ways: by the discrimination they experienced, through flagrant stereotypes, or by concealing or merely implying their Jewishness. Since the advent of the motion picture and later television, there was little inherently positive about Jews in general pop culture.(4)While some Jews, like Jerry Seinfeld (Seinfeld, 1989-98), are still widely known in popular culture, their Jewishness is almost, if not

Uso y distribución de las alusiones científicas en la serie de ficción. El caso de The Big Bang Theory

“…The Big Bang Theory has been analysed from different perspectives and disciplines. Thus, among others, there have been numerous studies related to the following: linguistics (Bednarek, 2012;Lasekan, 2021;Lv, Wang and Gao, 2015;Van Zyl and Botha, 2016;Wu and Wang, 2015;Zhang, Wang and Gao, 2018); gender issues (McIntosh, 2014;Rubin, 2021;Weitekamp, 2015;White and White, 2018); the religious field (Lewis and Molloy, 2015); cultural and social analyses (McWan and Cramer, n. f.; Rourke and McGloin, 2019;Wang, 2021); economic points of view (Stratton, 2016); and coinciding partially with the focus of the present study, from the point of view of science dissemination (Brodesco, 2018;Li and Orthia, 2016;Martin, 2019).…”