If you’re British and hear the name Ashley Blaker, you’ll probably start to giggle. Blaker, one of the funniest men in the British entertainment industry who today wears a black hat and has peyos behind his ears, talks about becoming religious in a heavily atheistic medium, and how a Torah life doesn’t have to be humorless.

I’m not sure what an internationally recognized comedy writer and producer is supposed to look like. Long gone are the days when jesters wore motley hats and pointy shoes. But I’m pretty sure the average comedy professional does not look like the slight man with the dark-brown beard and thick peyos tucked behind his ears who shows up to meet me at a Manhattan restaurant wearing a white shirt and a black suit. For a guy who earns his living making people laugh he seems awfully serious.

Ashley Blaker an independent producer for the BBC and other media outlets is here in town for a professional meeting. In fact he’s become a real fan of BoroPark’s 13th Avenue always making time to get there to stock up on kosher nuts and candies baked goods and seforim. But he’s a native ofLondon where he and his wife Gemma are living and raising their five children.

If you’re a frum Jew like Blaker his name probably won’t mean anything to you. Yet in England Blaker is considered king of comedy in the mainstream media first earning renown through a show he created called Little Britain and more recently as creator writer and producer of the side-splitting The Matt Lucas Awards.

All entertainers have their challenges but being religious in the decidedly secular entertainment world has its own unique set of hurdles. Blaker says he’s determined to succeed in both worlds and where his unaffiliated Jewish compatriots are concerned (and the entertainment world has many) he’s determined to try to bridge the gap.

He’s also exquisitely aware of the responsibility he carries being the only frum Jew most of his colleagues have ever met — “and the only chareidi Jew in comedy” he notes. Blaker says he’s careful never to swear or raise his voice no matter how high the pressure and tries to stay out of conversations that veer into lashon hara.

“I’m passionate about making a kiddush Hashem” he says.

Who’s the Real Ashley Blaker?

Blaker grew up in a Jewishly identified traditional home.

“In England, almost everyone who isn’t frum is still part of the United Synagogues. The leadership is Orthodox, even if 70 percent of the people aren’t,” he explains.

His parents kept kashrus, and attended synagogue every week, although they were not Shabbos-observant; and they made sure to send their two sons to an after-school cheder. After his bar mitzvah, Blaker was capable of leining.

Still, how did a traditional Jewish boy end up with such a “Hollywood” name like Ashley Blaker? “My mother loved Gone With the Wind, and the name of one of the lead characters was Ashley. When I first met my rav, Rabbi Schneebalg, he asked me, ‘Mr. Blaker, what’s your name?’ I told him, ‘Ashley.’ He responded, “But what is your name?’ We circled around this a few times until I realized he was asking for my Hebrew name. Well, it’s Chanan, and in shul that’s what they call me now.”

As for the surname, he says his family, who arrived in England from Russia in the 1880s, came from seven generations of metalworkers, or blechers. The name Blecher was Anglicized to Blaker. “I guess I’m the end of the line for the metalworkers,” he says cheerfully.

The young Blaker had no intention of going public, or even dabbling in the entertainment industry — he was actually an intellectual, drawn to the hallowed halls of Britain’s prestigious universities. He was admitted to Oxford for his undergraduate work and went on to Cambridge for graduate study in history, specializing in 17th century Christian theology. Blaker grins a bit sheepishly. “Yeah, I learned to read all those Church manuscripts in the old script,” he says, hastening to affirm, “but I was never drawn to any belief in Christianity.” Like any good scholar, he had simply found an academic niche.

Obscure academic pursuits aren’t noted for their brilliance where supporting a family is concerned, however, and Ashley and Gemma had already married. He began casting about for places that might have openings for a hapless doctoral dropout whose only expertise was 17th century history. Fortunately, he finally found a job in such an auspicious manner you might well have called it pennies from Heaven.

“There was an unbelievable hashgachah pratis in the way things worked out,” Blaker recounts. “One of my friends suggested I pick up a copy of the Media Guardian to look for a job. I’d never even heard of it; my friend said, ‘I think it comes out on Mondays.’ It was Thursday, so I waited till Monday and bought it, and there I saw this advert that said, ‘Do you have funny bones? The BBC needs comedy producers!’ ”

Blaker applied for the job, having no experience beyond his childhood pastime of making up little bits he called “Rude News,” and performing schoolboy routines where he “mostly bashed the teachers.” But the BBC chose him and three others for a six-month trial run.

His very first week on the job, Blaker bumped into an old childhood friend he hadn’t seen in several years: Matt Lucas. When they were kids, they shared a love of comedy routines. “So we went out and ended up spending three hours talking, and in the end he agreed to do a show with me.”

The show, Little Britain, would make Lucas into a star, and Blaker into a star producer. The public ate up their comedy sketches featuring a regular group of oddball characters. Lucas, the front man, now does his own The Matt Lucas Awards, also cocreated, cowritten, and produced by Blaker. For Blaker, comedy wasn’t just a job. He admits, “I was seduced by the work,” finding that it drew on his creativity and talent in ways with which 17th century theology just couldn’t compete.

Scene Changes

Not that religion didn’t retain a kind of latent pull for the Blakers. Among unaffiliated Jews, there are always a few who can be pointed to as “baalei teshuvah just waiting to happen” — people whose spiritual inclinations drive them to delve below the shallow surface of life. Just over ten years ago, Ashley and Gemma Blaker were two people who fit neatly into that category.

The Blakers’ transition from mainstream British Jews into Torah-observant ones came about gradually.

“I went once to the local shul for Shabbos,” Blaker says. “Then the rabbi asked me, ‘Could you come back again on Monday? The minyan’s a bit shvach.’ Then it was, ‘Could you come Tuesday?’ and ‘Could you come again Shabbos afternoon?’ ”

Before long, he became a regular. He and Gemma saw people they admired as role models, and had already been thinking about how they would want to raise their children.

“It was a pretty slow, organic kind of growth,” Blaker says. “Of course, our parents thought we were crazy. In British Jewish society, anybody who does anything more than you do is automatically ‘meshugeneh frum.’ ”

There are certain practices his parents still have a hard time swallowing, like his pre-Shacharis dunks in the mikveh, or giving 10 percent of his earnings to tzedakah. (“They can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that it’s not my money.”)

The Blakers’ connection to Torah and the frum community has given them the spiritual wherewithal to deal with some unexpected life curveballs. When their oldest son, now eight, was diagnosed as autistic, they squared their shoulders and went about giving him the best care they could. For most people, that might be enough challenge for a lifetime, but about four years ago, they decided to adopt a baby with Down syndrome.

“We saw an advert about a Jewish family that didn’t feel able to care for this child,” Blaker says without fanfare. “We looked at each other and said, ‘We could do this.’ ”

But since his wife was also expecting, they had to wait until after she gave birth to apply for custody, a yearlong process at the least. In the meantime, no other suitable family had been found for the child, and the little girl was being fostered in their very neighborhood and was even placed in the same nursery as their own son.

By the time their daughter came into their home she was already two years old, and “it really felt predestined,” Blaker says. Soroh is now four, just beginning to walk and talk; between her and their other kids, life in the Blaker home is challenging, but loving and accepting.

Does This Mean You Believe?

As Blaker began adopting more Jewish styles of dress, he was actually surprised at the silent nonresponse from his non-Jewish colleagues.

“London is quite cosmopolitan, and people are accustomed to seeing everything from turbans to saris to dreadlocks,” he says. “I started off by wearing a koppel — what you people call a yarmulke — and found the non-Jews didn’t react because they had no idea what it meant. I had this black leather one for a while with a red Liverpool soccer insignia on it, and I got more flack for the Liverpool logo than I did for the yarmulke.”

He began wearing tzitzis, first tucked in and then out, and eventually took to keeping a spare black hat in his office. About a year or two ago, somebody at the BBC finally put the pieces together and asked him incredulously, “You don’t believe in G-d, do you?” Blaker laughs and says, “I thought to myself, Does he really think I’m wearing peyos and a yarmulke and tzitzis just to make a fashion statement?

“The prevailing ethos in the entertainment world is completely atheistic — people are extremely liberal, but for them the oddest thing in the world is to believe in G-d. The closest thing they have to an idol is [atheist evolutionary biologist] Richard Dawkins.”

Even his Jewish colleagues — and he’s run into many famous Jewish comedians through his work — were clueless. They tried to compare him to other Jewish comics from a similar background, like Sacha Baron Cohen, who also attended the same school. They’d ask, “Who’s frummer, you or Sacha?”

“I had to try to explain to them that it’s not a competition,” he says. But it’s the nonreligious Jews who are the most likely to react negatively to his obviously religious appearance.

“It pricks their neshamah,” Blaker says.

What’s So Funny?

What is it that makes something funny? Blaker frowns in concentration. “I suppose part of it is the unexpected,” he says, “like when you put together two dissimilar things — like Taliban guys dancing a ballet. In the British comic tradition, we like to make fun of authority — like politicians, or the royal family, or policemen. We like to take them down a peg.” Then there’s the humor that makes fun of the yetzer hara, in the bawdy tradition of comics like Benny Hill.

As a baal teshuvah, Blaker often finds himself stranded in a sort of cultural no-man’s-land in between his secular past and his religious present, with few people able to share his two-sided frame of reference. For example, he recounts that he did a Purim shpiel in his shul some years back, then realized “only one other person got the jokes — the yeshivish people didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.”

Sometimes he gets ideas that would be highly entertaining for the frum crowd, but completely opaque to the wider market, such as a sketch about a group of Jews in a kollel or outreach center somewhere in the middle of nowhere. He also thought of a sketch in which, instead of people one-upping each other about all the bells and whistles and apps they’ve added on their new phones, two frum people could one-up each other about all the features they took away in the name of holiness: “My phone can’t connect to the Internet anymore!” “My phone can’t even send a text anymore!” and finally, “My phone can’t even make calls anymore!”

It’s obviously a delicate balancing act, straddling the frivolous secular entertainment world and the more sober, sensitive Jewish world. As Blaker became more religious, he became more attuned to avoiding the kind of crass or vicious material so common to mainstream comedy.

“Today, I won’t do anything I wouldn’t be happy for my rav to see,” he says. “I edit out all the tumah.”

He also tries to avoid humor that puts others down. A popular routine for British comics is to make jokes about the appearance of certain politicians’ wives, but he says today he’d never stoop to that. “But I will make a joke about somebody’s policies,” he says. “Criticizing policy is just part of the process when you’re living in a democratic country, as opposed to a place like Syria or Iran. There are no jokes over there.”

At one point in his evolution, Blaker found himself plagued by doubts about the appropriateness of his career path. “I was reading through the viduy hagadol in the ArtScroll Yom Kippur machzor, going through the confessions about how we’ve made fun of people, how we’ve mocked, how we’ve engaged in leitzanus. I thought, Oh, no, that’s my job!”

But he felt more reassured after coming across the Gemara in Taanis (22a), in which Eliyahu HaNavi, walking with Rav Beroka through the marketplace, identified two people and stated they would be going to Olam HaBa. Rav Beroka approached the two men and asked, “What do you do?” They answered, “We’re comedians; we cheer up people who are depressed, and when two people are fighting we make peace.”

The Funny Thing About Kiruv

More recently, Blaker was invited to do a stand-up performance in an unusual venue: the annual Rabbinical Conference of England (there’s one evening in between the two days of lectures in which some entertainment is typically scheduled).

“One of the rabbis later told me that when he saw me get up in my black suit, he thought I was another rabbi, and prepared himself to be bored,” Blaker relates. But then Blaker launched into an entertaining discourse about his path to Judaism and his life in the comedy world, and when he finished, “all the rabbis were queuing up to take my card.”

Since then, he’s become a popular speaker all over England (and adds that he’s open to speaking anywhere). The UK’s Aish HaTorah has been sending him around to universities, where his status as an entertainment figure is a sure draw. “There’s quite a subliminal impact when people suddenly see a frum person who isn’t at all what they expected,” he says.

Recently, following an appearance at the university in Manchester, a young woman approached him. “I’ve been doing coursework in media production,” she told him, “but yesterday my mother told me, ‘Look, if you’re becoming more frum, you should just forget about that coursework in media. You’ll never make it there if you’re religious.’ But now I see it’s possible.”

Blaker feels it’s crucial for Jews — both unaffiliated and religious — to see that it’s possible to be a religious Jew and be successful even in an unusual profession. “I show them you can still keep your values, still dress as you like,” he says. And he says he’s a living example that it’s never too late to change. “Look, I myself became shomer Shabbos at age 28,” he says.

These days, Blaker likes to use that Talmudic story about the two heaven-bound comedians as an opening. In a yeshivish singsong, he’ll start off saying, “In the Talmud, in tractate Taanis, it says …” Then, as the audience sighs and begins looking at their watches, he quickly changes the subject and launches into a lively discourse about his life and work, letting them know that a Torah life, rather than being limiting and humorless, can actually be joyous, professionally successful, and deeply meaningful. “At the end, I finish up with that story from the Gemara. I tell them that what I do can even be considered a mitzvah.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 441)