TORONTO — The video begins with a stereotype of a religious Jew – payot, black hat and all – sitting next his bored, eye-rolling, nail-filing daughter, swiping through the eligible bachelors on Religious Tinder, trying to find a mensch, or “bubbie’s wet dream” to marry his daughter.
“Rabbi? Lawyer? Butcher? Another rabbi?” the father enthusiastically offers.
“At Religious Tinder, we’ve simplified the arranged marriage process without losing the essentials,” an actor explains in the parody video of the highly popular smartphone dating app Tinder.
“That’s how we make wedding your child fit in the palm of your firm, but fair, hand.”
The video, which is available on YouTube and has been viewed more than 13,000 times in about a week, is the brainchild of four Toronto-based Jewish friends, Adam Cohen, Nir Zahavi, Jeff Topol and Jon Corbin.
“The natural dichotomy between Tinder, the pre-eminent hook-up app on the market, and the restrictive world of modern Jewish Orthodoxy, was something I felt would make for a hilarious and creative endeavour,” said Cohen, a 30-year-old comedy writer and producer.
Corbin who managed the post-production process through his production company, Corbin Visual, said, “I’ve seen a lot of parody videos online these days and knew that if we were going to throw our hat into the mix, it had to be a standout piece.”
Cohen said he and Zahavi had been brainstorming ideas about the concept of videos that parody popular apps for a while. “We were looking for a twist we found interesting and engaging, and entertaining to people.”
While Cohen and Topol wrote the piece, Zahavi funded it and Corbin handled post-production. This is the first video parody the four friends have worked on together, but Cohen said in the 2-½ years since he left his law career behind and dove head first into the comedy scene – much to the disappointment of his parents – he’s worked on similar projects.
“I did a piece called Mother Russia, which was a musical parody of Russian homophobia right before Russia hosted the Olympics, and it got about 200,000 hits on YouTube and we got interviewed by the Global News morning show,” Cohen said.
Cohen and his friends hope to use Religious Tinder as a springboard to create a comedy brand. “We came up with a whole bunch of different ideas,” Cohen said, adding he hopes to produce other parodies that match apps with outdated traditions, such as, an Uber-like app for a private taxi service run by the Amish, and eBay for slave traders.
“We’re thinking of branding it as modern apps but with a kind of sarcastic edge to it… edgier for sure, like an Instagram account devoted entirely to cannibalism. It’s weird, kind of twisted stuff,” he said.
“Religious Tinder is our initial foray into whether this concept can breathe and survive… We have these ideas, and we have an idea of where we want them to go, but at this point, we want to wait a little while longer to see what the response is to this piece.”
So far, Cohen said the response has been largely positive, and he hasn’t heard from people who were offended.“Personally I don’t think it really crosses a line. I’ve done edgier stuff like Mother Russia and that got a whole lot of negative responses with the positive, and we continue to today. That was very controversial subject matter, whereas this is safer, more family-friendly.”
