'A Mode of Defense and Consolation'

We learned the sound of comedy, the accent and delivery, from the variety shows of the 1960’s. Most of the funniest comics were Jewish. Like Groucho Marx, they could make so-so lines amusing with some version of the greenhorn accent. They were wise guys, tricky, hip and raffish. Think of Myron Cohen, Ben Blue (né Benjamin Bernstein), Jack E. Leonard (né Leonard Lebitsky) and Jackie Mason (né Yacov Moshe Maz). We had Jack Benny, Zero Mostel, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Alan King, Shecky Greene and Robert Klein, not to mention the writers: Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman. On LP we had Lenny Bruce. We grew up with a flattering (and sadly inaccurate) stereotype: all Jews are funny. One of the rare funny non-Jews was Jonathan Winters.

Last year, in a review of Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, Joseph Epstein noted that “the heart of being Jewish, in the minds of a preponderant number of American Jews [and non-Jews], is comedy. How did this minority people produce so much humor, so many jokey jakeys?” And doing it for so long. I’ve been reading The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal (Indiana University Press, 2018). The book is edited by Elliott Oring and translated by Michaela Lang, and includes a collection of “witty notions from Jews” published in 1812 by Lippmann Moses Büschenthal, an Alsace-born enlightened rabbi and former newspaper editor. There’s also a translation of an 1810 collection of “anecdotes, pranks, and notions of the Children of Israel,” published under the pseudonym “Judas Ascher,” and a lengthy introduction by Oring about the origins of Jewish jokes and what it is that makes them “Jewish.” He is carefully pedantic about the latter question:

“In general, what has been assumed is exactly that which remains to be proved: that the Jewish joke is something distinctive in the jokelore of Europe; that it is an outgrowth of an ancient tradition of Jewish humor in the Talmud, the rabbinic literature, and even the Bible; that it first crystallizes in the villages of eastern Europe; and that it is a mode of defense and consolation. All of these assumptions might prove true but all remain to be convincingly demonstrated. To date, the Jewish joke as a concept has been largely celebratory rather than scholarly.”

I should hope so. Oring is a scholar, not a comedian. He keeps things pretty dry and his task is daunting. The exegesis of humor kills it. Think of it as a variation on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. As soon as you perform vivisection on a joke, whatever humor it once possessed is dead. Even writing down jokes, reducing them to mere words, dooms them – the reason why helpless laughter sparked by the written word is so rare. Jokes need voice. Here’s one collected by Büschenthal that has the ring of Jewishness about it, a logic-twisting defiance, though it was recorded more than two centuries ago:

“’You Jews are all damned,’ said a Christian to a Jew. ‘Why?’ asked the Jew. ‘Because you crucified our Lord.’ ‘Tell you what,’ said the Jew, ‘When you find ours, crucify him too.’”

And this:

“A baby with six fingers on his right hand was born to a Jew. The father, as well as the mother and the rest of the relatives, was very brokenhearted.

“An acquaintance visited the family, and when the mother complained about her bad luck, their Jewish friend responded, ‘Hey, what’s there to fear? I congratulate you. Your son is a born piano player.’”

Leave it to Epstein, who, when contemplating the future of Jewish humor, throws in an allusion to that great comedian Immanuel Kant, who wasn’t Jewish: “My own view is that Jewish humor will continue as long as the reigning note behind Jewish jokes continues to be the belief, everywhere confirmed, that out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing entirely straight can be made, that human nature in all its nuttiness does not change, and that the greatest fool of all—he could be mayor of Chelm, that legendary Jewish town of fools—is he who thinks it can.”