DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

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They Used ‘Schmucks’ in a Movie Title? (What Chutzpah!)

By Gary Sussman

I have mixed feelings about Dinner for Schmucks. Not the movie, just the title. Not the whole title, just that last word.

As an assimilated Jew of Eastern European extraction, I’m proud that the Yiddish my ancestors spoke when they arrived at Ellis Island more than a century ago has now so thoroughly permeated everyday American English that Hollywood can feel comfortable putting a Yiddish word like ‘Schmucks’ in a movie title and assume everyone will know what it means. On the other hand, everyone obviously does not know what it means, including perhaps the filmmakers and the DreamWorks studio marketers, or they might have thought twice about using a word that’s actually a vulgar slang term for a part of a man’s body.

At least the word “schmucks” is funny. It has that “sh-” beginning that’s common to a lot of insulting Yiddish words, it ends with that hard “k” sound (words with “k” sounds are always funnier than words without them), and it rhymes with a couple of popular and crude English words. Still, why use a word like that on the marquee, especially when it doesn’t even appear in the film’s dialogue? Other Yiddish words, like “schlemiels” (awkward, clumsy people), “shlimazls” (unlucky people), or “shmendriks” (stupid people), would have been just as accurate, though they are not as common in American speech.

One reason the English language is so expressive is that it’s a magpie tongue that’s happy to absorb expressive words from other languages. Nonetheless, there are plenty of older, cleaner English words the filmmakers could have used that are just as colorful — morons, fools, dolts, oafs, halfwits, dimwits, dunderheads, fatheads, blockheads, birdbrains, ninnies, nincompoops, numbskulls, cretins, ignoramuses, imbeciles, lummoxes, stooges, simpletons, dunces, suckers and saps. To name a few.

Did the filmmakers think they were putting one over on the vast majority of ticketbuyers who don’t realize that “schmucks” has a filthy meaning beyond just “idiots” and “jerks”?

Sure, I get that they needed a word that was stronger than just “idiots,” but would anyone be able to get away with calling a movie ‘Dinner for Dickheads’?

Source: This is an excerpt from…Full article by Gary Sussman