Abstract You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008) mixes broad slapstick, satirical caricature, and cultural commentary within a Hollywood-studio comedy vehicle led by Adam Sandler. This paper examines the film’s narrative strategies, comedic registers, representations of ethnicity and conflict, and its negotiation of post-9/11 American anxieties through parody and fantasy. I argue that while the film perpetuates reductive stereotypes, it also stages a fantasy of cross-cultural reconciliation and personal reinvention that reveals tensions in popular American multiculturalism of the late 2000s.
Introduction You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (directed by Dennis Dugan, written by Sandler, Robert Smigel, and Judd Apatow among others) centers on an Israeli counterterrorist operative, Zohan Dvir, who fakes his death to pursue a dream of becoming a hairdresser in New York City. The film situates extreme physical comedy and outrageous fantasy against an axis of Israeli–Palestinian tension, New York multiculturalism, and Hollywood’s appetite for identity-based humor. This paper reads the film as both symptomatic and constitutive of its moment: a mainstream attempt to process geopolitical trauma through farce, while simultaneously commodifying difference for laughs.