Jewish Comedy Read online

  Jewish

  Comedy

  A SERIOUS HISTORY

  Jeremy Dauber

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  LONDON NEW YORK

  For Ezra

  Whose laughter—like everything else about him—is a delight.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: A Joke, Two Definitions, Seven Themes, Four Warnings, and Another Joke

  1. What’s So Funny About Anti-Semitism?

  2. Not-So-Nice Jewish Doctors

  3. The Wit of the Jews

  4. A View from the Bottom

  5. The Divine Comedy

  6. The Tale of the Folk

  7. Jewish Comedy—Hold the Jewishness

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  A Joke, Two Definitions, Seven Themes, Four Warnings, and Another Joke

  YOU CAN’T START A BOOK ON JEWISH HUMOR WITHOUT A JOKE. So here’s one:

  “You want to hear a joke? I’ll tell you a joke. What’s green, is nailed to the wall, and whistles?”

  “ . . . I give up.”

  “A herring.”

  “A herring’s not green!”

  “Nu, you can paint it green.”

  “But it’s not nailed to the wall!”

  “You could nail it to the wall. If you wanted to.”

  “ . . . But a herring doesn’t whistle!”

  “All right, fine, so it doesn’t whistle.”

  Or: “I just threw in that part to confuse you.”

  Or: “All right, all right, so it’s not a herring.”

  Or: “What am I, some kind of herring expert?” And on and on.

  Is this joke, with its multiplicity of potential punch lines, a Jewish joke? And if so, why? Is it the syntax, with its faint Yiddish overtones? The slightly smart-ass sensibility? The comfort with its meta-jokiness, or, put another way, the subversive, near-parodic jab at the joke’s very form? Is it the particular refusal to provide the closure of a punch line, which could be taken, by an overzealous interpreter, as a metaphor for a Jewish historical consciousness ever in wait for messianic redemption? Or is it just a joke about herring?

  While you think about that, here’s a story about telling Jewish jokes. It’s an old story, a tale of the Preacher of Dubno, an eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi famous for his apt and witty parables. Asked by an admirer how he always managed to find such an appropriate parable for each and every sermon, he answered, not uncharacteristically, with another parable. He told the story of a general visiting his troops who was struck by the results of their target practice: while most of the chalk circles drawn as makeshift targets on the wall revealed your regular variety of hit or miss results, one showed nothing but bullseyes—dead center, every shot. Gasping, the general demanded to see this marksman; he was even more surprised to discover the shooter was a Jew, a conscript forced to serve in the Tsar’s army. He asked the Jew the secret of his success at arms. The Jew looked at the general as if he were cockeyed and responded: “Well, it’s very easy. First you fire the gun, and then, once you see where the bullet hole is, you draw a circle around it.” This had always been his technique, the Maggid concluded: find a good joke or story, then figure out the larger point to draw from it.

  A joke, a story: a statement of the problem, an approach to solving it. The problem, of course, is how to define and describe Jewish humor as it’s appeared in all its vast and variegated forms, from antiquity to yesterday. It’s hardly a new enterprise: there have been previous efforts, especially over the last few decades, and especially in America, where for a while it seemed like Jewish humor was American humor, or at least a pretty central part of it. Steve Allen, who should know, referred to American comedy in 1981 as “a sort of Jewish cottage industry,” putting Jewish participation in the field at approaching 80 percent. Some, though by no means all, of the approaches advanced in those efforts—arguments focusing on language, on sensibility, on history—are hinted at above.

  But Jewish comedy tends to resist any single explanation. For every argument that’s been advanced as to what it really is, a bit of thought immediately reveals all sorts of exceptions and counterexamples—so much so that other equally perspicacious critics have thrown up their hands and suggested any attempt to define a specifically Jewish humor is doomed to futility. What’s more, the counterexamples themselves aren’t just indicative: they’re almost as vast and numerous as Jewish history itself, which covers a lot of ground, of both the actual and metaphorical variety. Writing a book that tries to touch on all of it, even representatively, as well as offer some explanatory power, is a pretty tall order.

  Still, someone ought to do it.

  The first time I walked into a Columbia University classroom to teach a course on Jewish comedy, Seinfeld had just gone off the air and Lena Dunham was entering high school. Judd Apatow was a respected television producer who no one outside the industry had ever heard of; and The Producers was still a movie, though there was talk of taking it to Broadway. I was a little nervous—a wet behind the ears twenty-seven-year-old assistant professor, lecturing to the largest class I’d ever had (apparently this was the kind of course that could attract a crowd), and I looked down at my notes to focus myself.

  Jewish comedy is serious business, I’d typed across the top. And so it is.

  Over the last fifteen years or so of teaching the subject, lots of things have changed—although, thanks to the magic of syndication, Seinfeld never really did go off the air—and my syllabus has changed with it; but the top line hasn’t, along with the two central realizations that accompanied it.

  First: The story of Jewish comedy was almost as massive in scope, as meaningful in substance, as Jewish history itself. In fact, I realized as I refined and developed the class, I was looking at a tradition. One with a history that could, and should, be studied. The story of Jewish comedy—what Jewish humor did and meant for the Jews at different times and places as well as how, and why, it was so entertaining—is, if you tell it the right way, the story of American popular culture; it’s the story of Jewish civilization; it’s a guide to an essential aspect of human behavior. The fact that it also happens to be immensely entertaining to read, talk, and teach about is something of a bonus.

  But second: You can’t include everything. Or even close. And so what you did include, I realized, had to work not just as a catalog of Jewish comedic production, but as an argument about what precisely Jewish comedy consists of. But even before you get to the cataloging and taxonomizing, there has to be some defining. Some inclusion and exclusion. Is the raw stuff of Jewish humor so capacious that it includes anything written by a Jew that might raise the faintest scintilla of a smile? Well, no. That would be, if not entirely ridiculous, at least ridiculously unhelpful. And literature is littered with brilliant comic thinkers who have warned against trying to define comedy too precisely: Samuel Johnson’s “Comedy has been unpropitious to definers” is the most famous, though I kind of prefer Swift’s rhyming couplet that “What Humour is, not all the tribe/ Of logic-mongers can describe.” But this logic-monger would like to set two conditions nonetheless.

  First: Jewish humor has to be produced by Jews. Maybe this is obvious, maybe it isn’t, but it’s part of our ground rules. How someone defines their Jewishness is a notoriously tricky subject—and, counter to some people’s thinking, has been since the beginning of Jewish history—but anyone who defines themselves as Jewish in any way is potentially part of our subject; others, even if sometimes mistaken for Jews (Charlie Chaplin, looking at you), are out. This said, comedy—especially in performance media—is of course often collaborative, and oftentimes a great work
of Jewish comedy is crafted in concert with non-Jews; this material is very much included.

  The second, trickier condition: Jewish humor must have something to do with either contemporary Jewish living or historical Jewish existence. Jewish history is very long, and Jewish life extraordinarily diverse, both geographically and culturally. It would be surprising if all examples of Jewish comedy looked the same—and they certainly don’t. But all those different times and places featured Jews commenting on what it meant to be a Jew in that culture. Usually, since most of Jewish history is diasporic history, as some kind of cultural outsider; but even if not, almost inevitably with that sidelong, half-immersed half-alienated glance so crucial to comedy. And frequently, they used those comic instincts to participate in long-running discussions that crossed centuries and continents about the meaning of Jewish history, theology, and destiny. Some of the examples we’ll treat in this book are explicit about those discussions; some assign them to the spheres of subtext or allegory; some are snapshots of a lived present whose movement into the past render them part of the discussion despite their apparent intent. But they’re all grist for the mill: as opposed to, say, a killer knock-knock joke written by a Silverstein or a Schwartz. (Unless, I suppose, there’s some fairly potent allegorical or metaphorical component within.)

  That’s it. Certain subthemes will emerge again and again across the varying strands, of course—a particular playfulness with language, especially befitting the changing linguistic (and frequently multilingual) circumstances in which Jews lived; a contemplation of power and the lack of it; the relation of those two themes to questions of masculinity, along with the presence and absence of female voices. But those are more provocative preoccupations rather than essential parts of the definition. That still leaves a tremendous amount to wrangle, though, and the solution I’ve come up with, the one that serves as the organizing structural principle of this book, follows the Maggid’s approach: Take a look at the long history of Jewish literature and culture, suss out the funny stuff that meets our definition, and then draw a defining circle around it—or, as I’m going to suggest, draw seven of them. Because, as it turns out, when you canvass the material—the entire breadth of the history of Jewish comedy, from the Bible to @crazyjewishmom’s Instagram account and look for commonalities, seven major conceptual rubrics—seven strands—suggest themselves.

  Immediately, I hear the cry: “Why not eight? Why not six? Your seventh is really a modified version of number four!” Look, this isn’t a precise science; the writers and performers who produce this stuff aren’t theoretical constructs, they’re working artists trying to get a laugh and use multiple techniques at once; and comedy tends to blur boundaries anyway. So these are guidelines, ideal types.

  And here they are, without further ado:

  1. Jewish comedy is a response to persecution and anti-Semitism.

  2. Jewish comedy is a satirical gaze at Jewish social and communal norms.

  3. Jewish comedy is bookish, witty, intellectual allusive play.

  4. Jewish comedy is vulgar, raunchy, and body-obsessed.

  5. Jewish comedy is mordant, ironic, and metaphysically oriented.

  6. Jewish comedy is focused on the folksy, everyday, quotidian Jew.

  7. Jewish comedy is about the blurred and ambiguous nature of Jewishness itself.

  So one strand of Jewish humor, for example, is its bookish, intellectual, witty side, appropriate for the self-proclaimed People of the Book, and bookish intellectual wits from Talmudic rabbis to Woody Allen can help trace our way through that aspect of the story. But Jewish humor can be vulgar as well—as raunchy and body-obsessed as any other group’s comedy—and figures as varied as medieval scatologists and Mel Brooks can help show the way there.

  Tracing the history of these seven strands—one per chapter—allows us to cover a lot of the history of Jewish comedy in an intellectually responsible way that also doesn’t require the reader to wait hundreds of pages to get to the Marx Brothers. What it does mean is that I’ll be returning to different periods of Jewish history and their culture—biblical antiquity, or the medieval period, or the age of Enlightenment, or postwar America, among others—several times over various chapters. I hope that’s a feature, not a bug; with each successive essay, I hope you’ll be introduced to yet another facet of Jewish history and culture, along with its comedy, and see each time period in a different light. Over the last half century, scholarship in Jewish studies has unlocked a dazzling variety of perspectives on how to think about the Jews: and comedy shows off those perspectives as well as anything else. Telling the story of each particular strand of Jewish humor through history not only makes an argument about what Jewish comedy is and how it works in different forms and venues, but also offers suggestions about how we understand Jewish history itself.

  Drawing a circle, or seven circles, around the bullet hole, as the Maggid’s marksman did, has its dangers along with its rewards. It creates an artificial sense of order where ragged chaos has bloomed; it runs the risk of being exposed as fallacious, as unfair or against the rules. On the other hand, doing it managed to impress both a Hasidic rebbe and a Russian general, bringing them together in shared admiration of an artist. So that’s something.

  WE HAVE A LOT of ground to cover, and we should be off. But four warnings before we do: ones important to any history of humor, and this one in particular.

  1. It’s a history. I’ll be including things that, thanks to the vicissitudes of time, history, and critical fashion, may not necessarily be thought of as comedy anymore. Interpretive traditions become encrusted; literary traditions fall into inscrutability. Understanding the history of Jewish comedy, rather than simply celebrating it, or merely being entertained by it, means taking things as they were, not as they seem to us now. Put simply: Humor is cultural and context-dependent, and Jewish humor is no exception to that rule. There will even be times—going back early enough—when it’s my best guess that something had comic intent, but neither I, nor the extant scholarship, are absolutely certain. Research and instinct can get you far, but not everywhere.

  2. Humor isn’t always funn-ee. That “comic intent” in the last warning covers a lot of ground. One of the things constantly perplexing aestheticians and philosophers of comedy is the nature of its link with the physical phenomenon of laughter. Why, they wonder, do we smile or laugh at apparently unfunny things, like (for example) things that make us nervous? This isn’t the book to answer that question (though we’ll have occasion to encounter a number of theorists of comedy, particularly in the modern era, as our story becomes intertwined with the creation of a self-conscious category of “Jewish humor”). But it does bring up a related point: that we often don’t laugh at things that are, unquestionably, comedy. I’m not saying this book uses “comedy” in the Elizabethan sense of the term, but we’ll certainly be talking about areas of comic creation that go less for the laugh than the wry nod, the gentle smile, or even the horrified gasp. And that last leads to:

  3. Humor isn’t always pretty, or polite. Even a passing acquaintance with humor shows that we, as a species, like laughing at things society deems inappropriate for polite company or discussion. (In fact, some theories of comedy are pretty much dedicated to some form of that proposition.) This book has a lot of material in it some might find inappropriate; even deeply so. Some of that is the inevitable result of encountering works from periods with vastly different social norms than our own—humor we find almost unbearably racist, for example, was family fare far less than a century ago. And sometimes we’ll find uncomfortable commonalities: fat jokes have been in common currency from the beginning of recorded history, and they’re doing pretty well right now, too. We’re going to take certain kinds of moral considerations into account in our history—usually, the history of those kind of considerations themselves and the way artists dealt with, worked around, accommodated to, or shattered those taboos—but we won’t shy away from including humor because it’s mi
sogynist, or homophobic, or obscene, or blasphemous, or xenophobic, or myriad other offensive characteristics that apply to different aspects of Jewish humor—as they do to any group’s. You’ve been warned. Finally:

  4. Analyzing comedy runs the risk of killing it. Probably the biggest danger of them all; as Lenny Bruce learned, it was far more dangerous to his career to be boring than to be dirty. What we enjoy about the great works of Jewish comedy—of all comedy—isn’t how they work, it’s that they work; and getting under the hood and seeing why a particular story or routine is, for example, a powerful expression of the anxieties and ambitions of postwar American suburban Jewry is certainly less entertaining than just listening to or reading it. But my job’s to tell a story—seven stories in one, actually—and I can’t do that without explaining. You want a joke book, buy a joke book.

  That said, I don’t want to end this introduction on that adversarial a note, so here’s another joke. Befitting our warnings, it has no history (or, I’m sure it does, but I haven’t yet been able to track down its provenance); you may not find it funny; it’s not pretty or polite (the people I’ve told it to tend to split fifty-fifty between finding it terrible and hilarious); and I’m not going to explain it, at least for now. But it is, to me, one of the great Jewish jokes, maybe even the second-greatest ever (for the one that takes the top slot, you’ll have to read on).

  Two old men settle onto a park bench in Tel Aviv; after a moment, they recognize each other as long-lost friends. “Reuven!” says the first, “Reuven, how are you? It’s been decades! Since we were young men from the same small town! How are you? How are your parents?”

  “Oh,” said the second man. “Oh, they died decades ago. We’re old men now, Shimon.”

  “Yes, well, of course,” Reuven replies. “To be expected, I suppose. My condolences. But your siblings—I loved spending time with them. How are they?”