Serious look at humor

PAT JOHNSON

We are warned to not judge a book by its cover, so what to do with the new book by Yiddish and Jewish literature scholar Ruth Wisse? The cover evokes Groucho Marx but bears the title No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton University Press).

The title, No Joke, is no lie. This is not a funny book. Wisse analyzes the major streams of Jewish humor, including the German tradition, humor in the Yiddish heartland, the Anglosphere, under Hitler and Stalin (which are considered together) and, finally, in Israel and the Hebrew language. The juxtaposition of the Groucho face with the seriousness of the title reflects the double-sidedness of Jewish humor itself. There are “jokes” here that tingle the spine more than the funny bone.

The book takes in a huge scope of time and geography, the association of Jews with humor beginning at the time of the Enlightenment, according to Wisse. By 1975, she notes, an estimated three-quarters of comedy professionals in the United States, “from Woody Allen to Henny Youngman, were Jewish. Moreover, much (though not all) of their comedy was itself perceptibly Jewish in its references and style.”

One of the ways in which Jewish humor becomes universalized is when the Jewish experience is visited upon the broader community. When everyone is oppressed, the humor of the oppressed becomes accessible to all.

Jokes are often recyclable, as well, adapting to geography and conditions. In an old joke, a shtetl Jew being paid to keep watch for the Messiah is asked about his paltry salary and replies, “Yes, but it’s permanent work.” The Yiddish joke was translated to Russian, and the poorly paid watchman is transported to a Kremlin tower, keeping an eye out for the dawn of the world revolution.

While the Stalin and Hitler eras are conflated in the book to demonstrate the darkness of humor appropriate to their times, the Soviet jokes may stand the test of time better than the Nazi ones.

“Humor was never the main strategy of Jewish survival, but only a chronic habit of mind,” Wisse writes. “When rumors began circulating in late 1942 about the uses the Germans were making of the human fat of their victims, people said to one another, ‘Here’s hoping we meet up on the same shelf,’ or ‘Don’t worry so much about not eating. So the Germans will have a little less soap!’”

Perhaps surprisingly, the prevalence of Jewish comedians in the Soviet Union was almost as dense as in the United States, to the extent that, at a national convention of Soviet humorists, Jewish delegates were asked to start making jokes about nationalities other than their own. One of them improvised: “Two Chinese are walking along the shores of the Yangtze River and one says to the other, ‘Listen, Haim....’”

Commentary on the Soviet political situation could carry a laugh with nostalgia for the bad old days: “Haim is walking down the street when someone calls him a Jew bastard. He mutters: ‘Ay, if only there were meat in the shops, it would be like czarist times.’”

Tracing Jewish humor back to the Enlightenment, Wisse theorizes about what it was about the changed status of European Jews that allowed this trait to flourish. That Jews were suddenly legally, but perhaps not socially, equal created a tension that humor helped alleviate – just as it would centuries later in the United States.

“Already targets of mockery and adept at self-mockery, Jews had only to forge a new combination of the two for the titillation of a general audience that could, perhaps nervously, laugh along with those whom it did not yet fully trust,” Wisse writes. “The process then proceeded apace: once liberal culture began ascribing a positive value to a sense of humor and comedy became king, the toleration of humor was overtaken by the expectation of humor, and Jews rushed in where they could earn their bread.”

In the earliest epoch of Jewish humor, many of the sharpest Jewish barbs were aimed at “defectors from the tribe.” The Enlightenment was a time when Jews in parts of Europe were converting to Christianity for expedient reasons. One scholar claimed that his conversion was authentic. “Of course, I converted out of conviction,” he says. “The conviction that it is better to be professor of Oriental languages at the University of St. Petersburg than a heder teacher in Berchev.”

The Jewish domination of American comedy has direct lines back to the Yiddish theatre. While some point to the Purimspiel as a genesis of Jewish comedy, in a statement of historical specificity that seems unintentionally funny, Wisse reports that theatre historians “date the birth of the professional Yiddish stage from the evening in 1876 when Goldfaden performed comic sketches in a beer garden in Jassy, Romania.” But, in 1883, the czarist regime placed a ban on Yiddish productions, forcing some of the leading performers to alight for London and New York, as their audiences were doing likewise by the shtetlful.

Then, there’s Israel – and a whole new language of comedy. Theodor Herzl expressed what was a general presumption when, writing more than a half-century before Israel’s establishment, he foresaw a time when the defensiveness of self-deprecating humor would no longer be necessary once the Zionist ideal was reached. Alas, writes Wisse, “political and social satire, censored or self-censored when Jews lived under hostile regimes, acquired a thousand new targets once Jews began running a country of their own.”

After waiting in an Israeli bank lineup for an hour, a man shouts to his wife, “I’m leaving. I’m going to kill [Israel’s first Prime Minister, David] Ben-Gurion.” An hour later he returns to the bank. “What happened?” asks his wife, still waiting in line. “Nothing,” says the husband. “Over there the line was longer.”

More recently, in the 1990s, when Jewish teenagers were participating en masse in tours of Europe’s concentration camps and also when the Second Intifada was beginning, a joke tells of Sara, in Jerusalem, hearing on the news about a bombing in a café near the home of relatives in Tel Aviv. She calls in a panic and reaches her cousin, who assures her that, thankfully, the family is safe.

“And Anat?” Sara asks after the teenager whose hangout it had been. “Oh, Anat,” says her mother, reassuringly, “Anat’s fine. She’s at Auschwitz!”

Wisse says the joke skewers both sides of the political spectrum, “liberals who deny the ferocity of Arab aggression, and patriots who cannot acknowledge that Zionism does not fully safeguard the Jews.”

This book is serious not only in analysis, but in thesis. Although Wisse obviously enjoys a good one, too much joking can have dangerous, perhaps fatal, impacts, she implies. Sholem Aleichem repeated the familiar mantra “laughter is good for you. Doctors prescribe laughter.” Wisse worries: “This tagline, on its own, would come to serve as a plug for the palliative benefits of Jewish humor,” she writes. “But ... prescribing doctors must constantly be mindful of the dangers of overdose.”

Indeed, just as American Jews were yukking it up in the Borsht Belt, Jews in Europe and Palestine were becoming threatened by Nazism and an increasingly violent Arab opposition to Jewish settlement. Wisse asks: “What, then, are we to make of the fantastic spurt of Jewish laughter in the very years when American Jews ought, perhaps, to have been laughing less and doing more?”

Wisse’s final paragraph is a warning: “If the Jewish kind of laughter is truly wholesome, it ought to become universal fare. Until such time, Jews would do well to reexamine their brand and appreciate what it portends. One side laughing is not as harmless as one side clapping.”

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.

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