JEWISH WRY
Essays on Jewish Humor
Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987
244 pp., $27.50
America's Jews, who comprise less than 3 percent of the general population, make up over three-quarters of America's stand-up comedians, the vast majority of comedy writers employed by television and Hollywood, and a majority of the nation's most prominent laughmakers. Think for a moment what American humor would have been without, to mention just a few, Woody Allen, Belle Barth, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Herb Block (Herblock), Victor Borge, David Brenner, Fanny Brice, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Art Buchwald, Red Buttons, George Burns, Sid Caesar, Eddie Cantor, Al Capp, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Dreyfuss, Al Feldstein and William Gaines of Mad magazine, Jules Feiffer, Rube Goldberg, Goldie Hawn, Buddy Hackett, Judy Holliday, Madeline Kahn, Danny Kaye, Alan King, Marvin Kitman, Bert Lahr, David Levine, Sam Levinson, Jerry Lewis, the Marx Brothers, Walter Matthau, Bette Midler, Mike Nichols, S.J. Perelman, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mort Sahl, Neil Simon, the Three Stooges, Sophie Tucker, and Gene Wilder. All in the Family, the most important television comedy of the 1970s, was produced by Norman Lear.
It is thus not surprising that, despite the denial of Sid Caesar that there is anything distinctive about Jewish humor ("I get my humor from people. The way I think and feel is that people are funny in general, whether you're Jewish or Protestant or Catholic. Funny is funny.") the question "what makes Sammy joke?" has interested historians, psychologists, sociologists, and popular pundits ever since modern Jewish humor made its appearance approximately two centuries ago.
The affinity between Jews and comedy is a recent development. The Talmud states that "All that is not Torah is levity," and "it is forbidden to make fun of anything except idolatry." Rabbi Akiba contended that "jesting and levity lead a person to lewdness." Humor was restricted to special occasions such as weddings and the holiday of Purim, and even then it had to take place within a religious context. Jews viewed the merriment of the Christian world, particularly that during Lent, as paganism. The ethical earnestness and ritual strictness of Jewish life left little room for humor. Life was too serious and religion too important to be mocked by comedy. It was not until two hundred years ago when the wholeness of traditional Jewish religious culture was disrupted by the emergence of competing ideologies that Jews became identified with humor. The first and greatest of the Jewish humorists were Yiddish writers such as Sholom Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Seforim, and Isaac Leib Peretz who used humor as a weapon against orthodox religion.
There is a long list of efforts, of which Jewish Wry is the latest and most comprehensive, to explain the emergence, excellence, and distinctive character of Jewish humor. The thirteen essays in Jewish Wry were written by such luminaries as Irving Howe, Robert Alter, and Albert Goldman, and their scope is broad, covering, among other things, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, Jewish comediennes, and modern Israeli humor. One name that keeps popping up in the book is Sigmund Freud. Freud was fascinated by Jewish humor, and many of the examples in his own book Jokes and
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