I am forty years old and I still don’t remember a time I haven’t seen Short Circuit, my favorite movie. The big emotional climax is where Number 5 and his programmer are trying to prove that he’s “alive”. And after several psychological tests, Newton Crosby (Ph.D.) gets the idea to see if he laughs spontaneously at a joke. It’s a beautiful moment with swelling music and epic victory.
Except I don’t understand the joke. I never have.
It seems to be something to do with Jewish humor. It’s either anti-semitic or poking gentle fun at Judaism. Does it have something to do with the fact Jews believe God is more involved with humans than Christians think (as demonstrated in Fiddler on the Roof)?
Best I can figure, either “whatever God wants, He keeps” means Jews believe God is so real He can scoop coins out from the sky. Or that Jews are greedy so they count on the fact that God won’t intervene, so they get to keep all the money.
Mark Twain said that examining humor is like dissecting a frog. You may learn something, but the frog is dead.
Can anyone explain this to me?
10 Comments
random person
I just watched this movie for the first time. It’s an anti semitic joke implying that the Rabbi wants to keep all the money (because all the money will fall to the ground). Truly baffling that that was the pivotal joke to prove Johnny 5 was sentient.
Eric J. Juneau
I thought of that as a possibility, but another part of my mind can’t believe that such a family-friendly part of my childhood relied on a piece of bigoted writing for its climax. I always interpreted it as the Rabbi believes in God so much that He will reach out and take the money He wants to use (kind of like Fiddler on the Roof). But that could be my childlike thinking.
same random person
It’s definitely an anti-semitic joke though I would say only mildly so. These sorts of Protestantism vs Catholicism vs Judaism jokes used to be really prevalent. It was just so bizarre that it was the pivotal joke at the most wholesome/family friendly part of the movie.
The movie also features a man in brown face who says something like “I am getting a major boner right now” when the scientist dude talks about meeting up with the heroine. The 80s were weird.
Eric J. Juneau
That’s a good point. Fisher Stevens playing Benjamin Jabituya was my first exposure to someone of Indian descent. I think all I understood what was that he was foreign, but that funny generic kind of foreign like Bronson Pinchot’s Balki from Perfect Strangers. The eighties weren’t kind to non-white Americans. (And actually I think he says “I am sporting a tremendous woody right now”)
Matthew M Eisenbraun
Youre proving the point. I guess you aren’t sentient and alive after all.
Anon
You are morons. The point of the joke was god doesn’t want your money . You greedy ‘#$/. Of course you would make it racist or anti sematic. Do you not understand you become what you fear. Your fear makes you lash out at things , you can’t grasp. Try yoga , model boats get a hobby instead of trying to spread hate and fear.
Kingston
If that was even remotely point (it wasn’t) then the priest and the minister would have suggested along with the rabbi. It’s the rabbi’s response, not the others.
Good Lord, get a clue and stop whitewashing hate for nostalgia’s sake.
Daniel, the bewildered Jew
Glad this thread exists. I just saw the movie tonight, and the joke completely bewildered me—both as a joke and in terms of its relevance to the scene. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and here’s what I came up with:
The joke wasn’t anti-Semitic. In fact, it was the opposite (philo-Semitic) and deliberately played with the expectation of anti-Semitism.
The writers clearly knew the audience would anticipate an anti-Semitic punchline. The setup—a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar debating how much money to give to charity—leans into the stereotype of Jews being greedy. So, naturally, the expectation is that the joke will land in that territory.
But instead, it subverts that expectation. The priest suggests throwing money in the air and donating whatever lands inside a circle, implying an ethical, selfless, ego-free way to decide. But the rabbi one-ups him by saying: throw the money in the air, and whatever God wants, He’ll keep. Of course, God isn’t going to grab the money midair—meaning all of it will go to charity. The punchline actually makes the rabbi appear more charitable and spiritually enlightened than the priest, flipping the expected dynamic.
(As an aside, all three leads in the movie—Stevens, Guttenberg, and Sheedy—are Jewish (not Johnny 5, though, but he did have Groucho eyebrows), and the producer, Lawrence Turman, was Jewish too, which might explain why this non-anti-Semitic, philo-Semitic, Jewish joke would appear at all.)
The real issue is how jarring this joke felt within the scene, even though, in hindsight, it actually works thematically. And not just in a surface way—this is some pretty damn clever 4D chess screenwriting.
Sheedy’s character believes Johnny 5 is sentient and has a moral sense, but Guttenberg, his programmer, is skeptical. In this scene, Sheedy, Guttenberg, and Johnny 5 are on the run together. Johnny 5 tells Sheedy he’s overriding his kill function because killing is wrong. She reaffirms to Guttenberg that Johnny 5 isn’t just a machine—he’s a person. Then, in the very next moment, Johnny 5 reveals he’s crafted a butterfly out of a soup can—demonstrating artistic creativity, non-utilitarian behaviour, and appreciation for beauty and fragility, things most humans wouldn’t even stop to consider.
This echoes an earlier scene where Johnny 5 mourns the grasshopper he accidentally crushed, shocking Sheedy with his emotional sensitivity. And, of course, the facsimile butterfly he just made mirrors his own existential ambiguity—he’s a machine, but also something more, something deserving of dignity and consideration.
This is the context in which Guttenberg, still unsure of Johnny 5’s sentience, tells the joke as a test. Johnny 5 pauses, appears thoughtful, then laughs and says he gets it. Guttenberg then remarks:
“And the joke wasn’t even that funny. And I figured I screwed up the punchline. Whatever God wants, He keeps. Well, you look kinda shook up. [Looks at Sheedy] Yeah, it’s really true. Spontaneous emotional response.”
And he’s right—the joke wasn’t that funny. It was more about spirituality than yuks. The joke’s setup (priest and rabbi walk into a bar, teasing a crude anti-Semitic punchline ahead) also parallels Johnny 5’s own theme: something that appears shallow or predictable at first glance turns out to be much deeper.
Even more than that, the joke plays on prejudice, just as Johnny 5 himself does. The assumption behind the joke is that it’ll have a greedy, anti-Semitic punchline, just as the assumption about Johnny 5 is that he’s a cold, utilitarian, emotionless machine. But both defy expectation: the joke’s rabbi turns out to be the most spiritually enlightened, and Johnny 5, despite being a robot, turns out to be the most emotionally and morally aware character in the film.
You could even argue that Johnny 5 is, metaphorically, the Jew in this story—an outsider, an “other,” whose very existence is tangled up in prejudice. The whole movie revolves around the expectation that a robot should be unfeeling, coldly rational, and possibly dangerous (you know, like a Jew!). But when you actually observe him, he’s not just technically superior (again, like a Jew!), but he’s also more spiritually and morally evolved than the people judging him (like a Jew!!).
(NOTE: Yes, I’m leaning into some arrogant Jewish supremacist ethnocentricity here for comedic effect. Sue me.)
And I do think Guttenberg messed up the punchline—it should have been clearer that whatever doesn’t land, or whatever God “takes,” won’t go to charity. The phrasing “Whatever God wants, He keeps” is ambiguous since God owns everything to begin with, making the punchline muddy. A clearer version might be “Whatever stays up in the air belongs to God,” but that would mess up the comedic timing and flow.
And so there you have it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
And now, here I am, asynchronously communicating with strangers about a comment from 2021 on some dude’s personal website, dissecting a weirdly placed joke in a mostly-forgotten ’80s movie about a wisecracking robot. This whole discussion—about faith, humor, and sentience—is happening not in a warm, candlelit salon among friends, but on a digital platform where our words exist as cold, weightless data, stripped of all the messy, human things like tone, breath, or shared laughter.
And—because the movie we’re discussing is literally about a computer gaining sentience—I should also admit that ChatGPT helped me refine it. Meaning, in a full-circle moment of existential absurdity, I, a human, just asked a non-sentient machine to help me analyze whether a different non-sentient machine in a fictional story truly understood a joke about God.
I’ve now spent 45 minutes writing this. A piece of my finite existence, traded away to this bizarrely niche conversation. So, in an effort to reclaim some dignity, I’m going to step away from this glowing screen, walk into the real world, and hug my dog.
Anonymous Appreciative Admirer
Can we be friends?
I just read the last three paragraphs of that comment to my wife literally laughing out loud after resonating deeply with your comment, after reading the entire novel and wondering why I continued to keep on reading, after sifting through way too much commentary on a joke told on a 39 year old movie, after having downloaded and watched said movie randomly, and knowing all the while that because we live in the time we do that I would absolutely find the exact “input” I was looking for. No endless set of encyclopedias or cable television necessary.
At least Duracell batteries and Kettle brand chips look exactly the same today. A couple of Easter eggs (‘tis the season) to keep a glimmer of hope alive in the shared consciousness.
Life… For better or worse, we’re livin’ it!
Kevin
I always thought the joke really is just that the rabbi wants to keep all the money to himself, but also that he knows God won’t interfere cause he never does. There’s a trend I’ve noticed with Jewish jokes (the kind told by Jews, not just about them) where the first layer conforms to stereotypes, and the second layer subverts them or asks something profound like “where was God when He was needed?”
Another one of my favorites is where an old Jewish man turns up at heaven, and gets to chat with God. And if course, he tells God this long horribly vulgar and offensive Holocaust joke, and then breaks down with laughter.
God goes, “I don’t really see how that’s funny.”
And the old man goes, “ahhh, you had to be there.”
I love this one, cause when I tell it (only among close friends ofc), they’re always expecting to cringe from bigotry and instead cringe from emotional damage.
Btw I love the rest of your write-up, it’s great to see someone else appreciate that movie. My family loved it growing up, cause my dad is basically Ben, albeit in physics instead of robotics, and he too plays up his foreignness to mess with his white coworkers, despite having lived in Canada for 40 years now (“Oh, them! Pittsburgh.”).
Admittedly there was some love lost when we found out literally decades later than he wasn’t a brown guy like us, but a British guy doing an outrageously racist accent, but, uh, let’s just ignore that part.