READ: The 10 Best Jewish Jokes in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

But Jewish humor can be difficult to define. As William Novak and Moshe Waldoks write in The Big Book of Jewish Humor, it is easier to describe Jewish humor in terms of what it is not, than what it is.

It is not, for example, escapist. It is not slapstick. It is not physical. It is generally not cruel and does not attack the weak or the infirm. At the same time, it is also not polite or gentle.

Below are examples of some Jewish jokes.

The Top Hat

Schwartz is sitting in his room, wearing only a top hat, when Steinberg strolls in.
“Why are you sitting here naked?”
“It’s all right,” says Schwartz. “Nobody comes to visit.”
“But why the hat?”
“Maybe somebody will come.”

You Don’t Look Jewish

A woman on a train walked up to a man across the table. “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you Jewish?”
“No,” replied the man.
A few minutes later the woman returned. “Excuse me,” she said again, “are you sure you’re not Jewish?”
“I’m sure,” said the man.
But the woman was not convinced, and a few minutes later she approached him a third time. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?” she asked.
“All right, all right,” the man said. “You win. I’m Jewish.”
“That’s funny,” said the woman.” You don’t look Jewish.”

Rain in Chelm

Two men of Chelm went out for a walk, when suddenly it began to rain.
“Quick,” said one. “Open your umbrella.”
“It won’t help,” said his friend. “My umbrella is full of holes.”
“Then why did you bring it?”
“I didn’t think it would rain!”

The Riddle

A man in Chelm once thought up a riddle that nobody could answer: “What’s purple, hangs on the wall and whistles?”
When everybody gave up, he announced the answer: a white fish.
“A white fish?” people said. “A white fish isn’t purple.”
“Nu,” replied the jokester, “this white fish was painted purple.”
“But hanging on a wall? Who ever heard of a white fish that hung on a wall?”
“Aha! But this white fish was hung on the wall.”
“But a white fish doesn’t whistle,” somebody shouted.
“Nu, so it doesn’t whistle.”

Our Luck

Two Jews sat in a coffeehouse, discussing the fate of their people.
“How miserable is our history,” said one. “Pogroms, plagues, discrimination, Hitler, Neo-Nazis…Sometimes I think we’d be better off if we’d never been born.”
“Sure,” said his friend. “But who has that much luck — maybe one in 50,000?”

Hoodlums

Two Jews are walking through a neighborhood one evening when they notice they are being followed by a pair of hoodlums.
“David,” say his friend, “we better get out of here. There are two of them, and we’re alone!”

The Terrifying Rumor

In a small village in Poland, a terrifying rumor was spreading: A Christian girl had been found murdered.
Fearing retaliation, the Jewish community gathered in the shul to plan whatever defensive actions were possible under the circumstances.
Just as the emergency meeting was being called to order, in ran the president of the synagogue, out of breath and all excited. “Brothers,” he cried out, “I have wonderful news! The murdered girl is Jewish!”

The Census

The census taker comes to the Goldman house.
“Does Louis Goldman live here?” he asks.
“No,” replies Goldman.
“Well, then, what is your name?”
“Louis Goldman.”
“Wait a minute–didn’t you just tell me that Goldman doesn’t live here?”
“Aha,” says Goldman. “You call this living?”

The Converts

Three Jews who had recently converted to Christianity were having a drink together in a posh restaurant. They started talking about the reasons for their conversions.
“I converted out of love,” said the first. “Not for Christianity, but for a Christian girl. As you both know, my wife insisted that I convert.”
“And I,” said the second, “I converted in order to rise in the legal system. You probably know that my recent appointment as a federal judge may have had something to do with my new religion.”
The third man spoke up: “I converted because I think that the teachings of Christianity are superior to those of Judaism.”
“Are you kidding?” said the first man, spitting out his drink.
“What do you take us for, a couple of goyim?”

Manure

Schwartz, an elderly man, is resting peacefully on the porch of his small hotel outside Boca when he sees a cloud of dust up the road. He walks out to see who could be approaching: It is a Southern farmer with a wagon.
“Good afternoon,” says Schwartz.
“Afternoon,” says the farmer.
“Where you headed?” asks Schwartz.
“Town.”
“What do you have in the wagon?”
“Manure.”
“Manure, eh? What do you do with it?”
“I spread it over the fruit.”
“Well,” says Bernstein, “you should come over here for lunch someday. We use sour cream.”

Lightbulbs

How many Zionists does it take to replace a light bulb?
Four: One to stay home and convince others to do it, a second to donate the bulb, a third to screw it in and  a fourth to proclaim that the entire Jewish people stands behind their actions.

Richest Man in Town

At the funeral of the richest man in town, a stranger saw a woman crying very loudly.  The stranger said, “Are you a relative of the deceased?”
“No.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“That’s why!”

Showing Up Late

Bernstein walks into work one day at 9. He is very late The boss is furious. “You should have been here at 8:30!” he shouts.
“Why?” says Shapiro. “What happened at 8:30?”

Public Toilets

Bloomberg, on a business trip, found himself using a public toilet. He had just made himself comfortable when he noticed that the toilet paper roll was empty.  He called out to the next stall, “Excuse me, friend, but do you have any toilet paper in there?”
“No, I’m afraid there doesn’t seem to be any here, either.”
Bloomberg paused for a moment. “Listen, he said, do you happen to have a newspaper or a magazine with you?”
“Sorry, I don’t.”
Bloomberg paused again, and then said, “How about two fives for a ten?”

Charity

The rabbi was angry about the amount of money his congregants were giving to charity. He prayed that the rich should give more charity to the poor.
“And has your prayer been answered?” asked his wife.
“Half of it was,” replied the rabbi. “The poor are willing to accept the money.”

Divorce

My wife divorced me for religious reasons. She worshipped money and I didn’t have any!

34 Years

I’ve been married for 34 years, and I’m still in love with the same woman. If my wife ever finds out, I’ll be in big trouble!

Cheating

Feinstein returned home from a business trip to discover that his wife had cheated on him
“Who was it?” he roared. “That bastard Wolf?”
“No,” replied his wife. “It wasn’t Wolf.”
“Was it Green, that creep?”
“No, it wasn’t him.”
“I know — it must have been that idiot Sherman.”
“No, it wasn’t Sherman, either.”
Feinstein was furious. “Whatsa matter?” he cried. “None of my friends is good enough for you?”

The Hospital Visit

An old man is struck by a car and brought to the hospital. A nurse enters his room and says, “Sir, are you comfortable?”
The old man replies, “I make a nice living.”

The Million-Dollar Question for God

A poor man walking in the forest feels close enough to God to ask, “God, what is a million years to you?”
God replies, “My son, a million years to you is like a second to me.”
The man asks, “God, what is a million dollars to you?”
God replies, “My son, a million dollars to you is less than a penny to me. It means almost nothing to me.”
The man asks, “So God, can I have a million dollars?”
And God replies, “In a second.”

The post Jewish Jokes appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

History

Jewish humor as a genre got its start in 19th-century Eastern Europe, where Yiddish folk tales found the humor in the often-difficult everyday life of the shtetl (village). The great Jewish novelists and playwrights–like Sholem Aleichem, whose stories were the basis for the musical hit Fiddler on the Roof — infused their writing with this humor, enshrining it for posterity and ensuring that humor would become one of the hallmarks of Yiddish literature.

READ: The 10 Best Jewish Jokes in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

With the steady growth of the American Jewish community and the Jews’ acceptance into mainstream American society in the 20th century, Jewish humor likewise found a welcoming home. Beginning with Yiddish publications and plays and gradually moving to English, Jewish comedians poked fun at the immigrant experience and the foibles and frustrations of Jewish-American life.

But a funny thing happened on the Jews’ way to acculturation in their new home: As the immigrant experience faded and the old jokes began losing their audience, Jewish humor expanded beyond the borders of the Jewish-American neighborhoods and Catskills hotels (known as the Borscht Belt) and was embraced by America at large. Jewish humor in the second half of the 20th century became virtually synonymous with American humor in general. From Sid Caesar and Lenny Bruce to Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman and Jon Stewart, the great American comedians, comic actors, and humor writers were by and large Jewish — and often infused their humor with a decidedly Jewish sensibility.

What Is Jewish Humor?

So what makes humor Jewish? Defining it is no easy task, but there are some characteristics that stand out as common to much of Jewish humor. Jewish humor, for instance, laughs at authority and blurs boundaries, such as those between sacred and secular or Jew and non-Jew. It also displays a fascination with language and (often twisted) reasoning. And, not surprisingly, Jewish humor often played the role of coping mechanism. With the anti-Semitism, poverty, and uncertainties Jews faced throughout so much of their history, there often seemed little to do but laugh. So they did. And we are still reaping the benefits of the humor they produced.

While there’s a lot to learn about Jewish humor, there’s even more to laugh about. Humor is one of those thing you probably need to experience to truly understand. Of course, what’s funny to one person is not funny, or even offensive, to the next person — though the world of Jewish humor is broad enough to encompass virtually any taste or opinion. So, smile and enjoy!

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Myron Cohen, Buddy Hackett, and David Steinberg, still seem to think of Jewish humor as belonging to the world of Eastern Europe and to the early stages of acculturation in America–more or less like Yiddish itself. It is true that not all the material of these contemporary humorists can properly be called Jewish, but even by the strictest measures, there is much that can.

Taking Jewish Humor Seriously

Gentiles have little difficulty in recognizing the Jewish slant of Lenny Bruce’s hipsters, or Woody Allen’s schlemiels, or Philip Roth’s compulsive intellectuals. Why is the Jewish audience more equivocal? Part of the reason may be the reluctance of these humorists to see themselves as part of Jewish America. But if this is true of the performers and writers, it is perhaps no less true of their audiences; American Jews in general have been reluctant to take seriously their own Jewishness.

According to this prejudice (and here is a compelling case of self-deprecation), Eastern Europe represents an idealized and “authentic” Judaism, and not incidentally, a Yiddish-speaking culture, next to which Judaism in America seems artificial, watered-down, and decidedly second best. For some aspects of Jewish culture, this bias is valid, although less so with each passing year. But in no area has it been less true than for Jewish humor.

Adding to the confusion is that while the themes of Jewish humor have not changed dramatically since Eastern Europe, America has made available (and Jews have helped to create) a host of new forms which make 20th-century Jewish humor appear to have little in common with its 19th century origins.

Modernizing Jewish Humor

Whereas traditional Jewish humor emerged anonymously from a collective consciousness, America has provided a multitude of new conduits for its transmission: public meetings and lectures, vaudeville, the Borscht Belt, Broadway, nightclubs, radio, record albums, movies, and most especially television, as well as widely circulating books, newspapers, and magazines.

America has made available a popular culture that has been not only open to Jews but positively inviting to Jewish performers and Jewish themes to a degree that was unimaginable in Eastern Europe. There has been, of course, a price to pay for accepting this invitation, which has resulted in the parevezation, or neutering, of much of the material.

Then there is the language difference. Yiddish has frequently been celebrated for being so rich in comic possibilities that even those who don’t understand it are apt to chuckle at many of its terms; F. Scott Fitzgerald, so the story goes, used to wander into a Jewish delicatessen just to hear the word “knish.” While the immigrant generation of American Jews retained Yiddish–and there was even a weekly humor magazine called Groyser Kundes (“Big Stick”), published between 1909 and 1927–it soon became clear that Jewish life in America would be conducted in English.

It happened that English, too, was rich in comic possibilities–at least the English spoken by Jews of immigrant background, who took the new language and enriched it not only with Yiddish phrases but also with Jewish rhythms, much as blacks had done with American music. The result was a kind of verbal equivalent to jazz that is best exemplified in the sphritzes (spontaneous monologues) of Jewish comedians and novelists.

As the vehicles of humor have changed, so have the modes of its circulation. “A new joke,” Freud wrote in 1905, “is passed from one person to another like the news of the latest victory.” Freud’s analogy is not altogether obsolete; a wave of jokes about changing light bulbs swept across North America as this book was being completed. But one of the casualties of a mass society is that jokes are more likely to gain instant exposure on the Tonight show than to be passed along from one individual to another. “Today,” observes a veteran of Jewish organization life, “the only time I hear Jewish jokes is during conventions, usually while standing at urinals in the men’s room.”

Humor as a Common Bond Between Jews

But while the telling of jokes may be on the decline, Jewish humor is now more popular than ever. It is even possible to argue that Jewish humor, which once represented a secular corner of many otherwise religious Jewish lives, has now come full circle to fulfill a kind of religious need in the lives of many non-practicing Jews. “Of all the Jewish holidays,” goes one contrary witticism, “I observe only the Jascha Heifetz concerts.”

A similar phenomenon may be true for Jewish jokes. In an age when the great classical and religious texts of Judaism speak only to a minority, it is Jewish jokes that are known, enjoyed, and treasured by Jews of all shades of identification and religious observance, and it is surely significant that traditional Jewish jokes are told and read more often in America than they were in their country of origin. Jewish humor, in other words, has in some ways come to replace the standard sacred texts as a touchstone for the entire Jewish community. Not all Jews can read and understand a page of Talmud, but even the most assimilated tend to have a special affection for Jewish jokes.

At the same time, Jewish humor continues to occupy a special place in American popular culture, and the contributions of 20th century Jews to American humor can hardly be overstated. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what would remain of American humor in the 20th century without its Jewish component. This has been especially true since World War II, and today even Gentile comedians like Robin Williams and Danny Thomas have found it advantageous to include some Jewish material in their repertoires. Johnny Carson often mentions his tax accountants, H. & R. Goniff [using the Yiddish for “thief”], and his stockbroker, E. F. Schnorrer [whose last name means “beggar”]. Steve Allen’s material is so Jewish that audiences are often surprised to learn that he isn’t.

Reprinted with permission from The Big Book of Jewish Humor (HarperCollins Publishers).

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Jewish performers in the ’70s and ’80s who had been largely relegated to supporting roles now emerged as the leads in popular TV sitcoms such as Seinfeld and Friends. So, too, some of the principal characters had Jewish identities, such as Grace Adler in Will and Grace and Kyle Broflovski in South Park — a stark contrast to the ’70s, when Jewish characters, such as Archie Bunker‘s Jewish niece Stephanie, had only supporting roles. The public’s acceptance of this phenomenon affirmed that “Jewishness” had finally become an integral part of America’s pop culture landscape.

Much Ado About “Nothing”

“If I’m the best man, why is she marrying him?” — Jerry Seinfeld

In November 1988, comedian Jerry Seinfeld (a frequent Tonight Show guest) sat across from his longtime friend Larry David (a former writer for Saturday Night Live) at the Westway Diner in midtown Manhattan and bemoaned his inability to create a sitcom vehicle that reflected the “Seinfeld brand of humor” — astute observational comedy. They conceived of a sitcom which would recall classic television: Jerry Seinfeld, like fellow Jewish comedian Jack Benny before him, would play himself, a comedian beset by life’s trials and trivialities.

Spearheaded by Jewish head writer Larry David (the inspiration for Jerry’s friend George Costanza, portrayed by Jason Alexander), assisted by Jewish writers Tom Leopold, Carol Leifer (the model for the character of Jerry’s friend Elaine Benes, portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Dave Mandel, Seinfeld soon emerged as the hippest sitcom in America.

Seinfeld’s character reflected the ambitious Jewish man of the ’90s who is unable to make a commitment to a woman, breaking up with girlfriends for trivial reasons; in one episode he dropped a woman for wearing the same dress every day. Lawrence J. Epstein, author of The Haunted Smile, sees Seinfeld’s indecisiveness in matters of love as a metaphor for the inability of many American Jews to affirm their Jewishness. “The longstanding tension between Jewish and American identities is partially overcome in Seinfeld,” Epstein writes, “by having the characters not choose at all, by refusing to be grown up enough to have to choose.”

Seinfeld‘s brand of humor was “a neurotic Jewish craziness and narcissism that just captured America,” comments comedy legend Carl Reiner (Your Show of Shows, Oh, God!).

In one episode, Jerry’s friend Kramer (Michael Richards) meets Jerry’s Jewish girlfriend, who keeps kosher (“Wow! You’re so pious… when you die, you’re going to get some special attention”). Later on, Kramer stops her as she is about to succumb to the temptation of eating lobster. “You saved me,” she says. “I knew you’d regret it for the rest of your life,” he replies. In the end, however, George (Jason Alexander) tricks her into eating the forbidden food. This twist reveals the essence of Seinfeld: comedic interplay between kindness and cruelty.

Seinfeld‘s writers, however, did not condone heartless behavior. In the final episode, Jerry and his friends land in prison for standing idly by as a man is robbed of his car. The show’s closing message: Even in Seinfeld‘s amoral universe, one cannot escape ethical responsibility. With its openly Jewish leading man and Jewish themes, Seinfeld, the most successful sitcom of the ’90s, was a watershed in the portrayal of Jews on TV.

A Family Of Friends

“Um, because if Santa and the Holiday Armadillo are even in the same room for too long, the universe will implode!” — Santa Claus (Matthew Perry), when Ben (Cole Sprouse) asks why the Holiday Armadillo (David Schwimmer) has to go away, on Friends

In 1994, a new sitcom focused on six single New Yorkers, two of them Jewish. Created by Jewish comedy writer Marta Kauffman and her writing partner David Crane, Friends explored the lives of these 20- and 30-something platonic friends, lovers, roommates, and siblings who form an extended family.

In a classic episode, Ross Geller, a single Jewish father (played by David Schwimmer), tries to teach his young son Ben (Cole Sprouse) about the meaning of Hanukkah. Ben, who’s been celebrating Christmas (Ross’s ex-wife is Christian), can’t imagine not having a visit from Santa. To please him, Ross sets out to buy a Santa suit, but can only find an Armadillo costume.

Dressed as the “Holiday Armadillo,” he wishes Ben a “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hanukkah.” Ben then asks, “Are you for Hanukkah too? Because I’m part Jewish!” Elated by his son’s reaction, Ross tells his friends: “I’m finally getting him excited about Hanukkah!” The episode’s message: With so much intermarriage, divorce and assimilation, it isn’t easy for a young Jewish single in a state of limbo to raise a child with his Jewish identity intact.

Interfaith TV Couples

Interfaith couples became commonplace in ’90s sitcoms. In The Nanny, an outspoken, self-spoofing Jewish nanny (played by Jewish actress Fran Drescher) eventually married her proper English employer. Dharma and Greg explored the comedic contrasts between a new-age Jewish hippie and her button-down WASP businessman husband. Mad About You delved into the lives of Jewish filmmaker Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser) and his beautiful non-Jewish wife Jamie (Helen Hunt).

In stark contrast, a generation earlier, the 1972 series Bridget Loves Bernie (about the relationship between a Jewish man and his Irish Catholic wife) had to be cancelled because of protests from both the Jewish and Catholic communities.

Jewish, Female & Proud

Grace: “Well, what makes you think that you have the better candidate?”
Will: “Grace, he’s gay.”
Grace: “Well, mine’s a woman and Jewish. That makes two victims to your one.”
–Will (Eric McCormack) and Grace (Debra Messing) arguing about political candidates, Will and Grace

Will and Grace, a comedy series featuring a gay male lead, broke new ground when it premiered on network TV in fall 1998. Created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick (both Jewish), the show explores the platonic relationship between Will Truman (Eric McCormack), a gay WASP lawyer, and Grace Adler (Debra Messing), a heterosexual Jewish interior designer.

In addition to its honest portrayal of homosexuals, the series is trailblazing in its depiction of a beautiful, proudly Jewish female lead who is refreshingly free of negative stereotyping.

In the “Cheaters” episode, for example, Grace discovers that Will’s married father George (Sydney Pollack) has taken a mistress, Tina (Lesley Ann Warren). Grace informs a disbelieving Will, who then invites his father and Tina to dinner. Frustrated by the triviality of the conversation, Grace takes Will aside and explains that, in her Jewish family, a matter of such gravity would have been put on the table before the appetizer. Will counters by saying that, in his family, that’s not the way things happen. Finally, as a result of Grace’s prodding, Will and his father engage in a long-overdue heart-to-heart.

The show’s portrayal of a Jewish woman as emotionally forthright and honest contrasts sharply with Woody Allen‘s depiction of Alvy Singer’s loud and outlandish Jewish family in Annie Hall.

Adapted with permission from Reform Judaism  magazine.

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“Can we talk?” In the minds of millions of Americans, this common phrase conjures up the image of Joan Rivers, the woman who realized in the mid-1960s that “the country was ready for something new–a woman comedian talking about life from a woman’s point of view” (Enter Talking).

In revues, nightclub acts, and concert halls (in the early 1960s), and to a vast new audience via television in the 1970s and 1980s, Joan Rivers popularized and perfected a genre of comedy that challenged reigning social conventions. Her willingness to “say what is really on everyone’s mind” was coupled with an ingénue quality. This made her a less-than-threatening figure and enabled her to popularize the type of monologue that had previously been the domain of male comedians: Their acts combined social criticism with sharp wit, and Rivers was soon to join them.

She paid homage to these pioneers in her 1986 autobiography, Enter Talking. Hearing Lenny Bruce perform in the village was for her “an event that forever changed my comedy life…. Boom! there he was, an obscenity among the pleasant routines of the Establishment” (Enter Talking).

Influenced by Bruce, Rivers worked assiduously on her own routines and became a skillful crafter of comedic scripts for herself and others. Among her early writing credits are routines for the Phyllis Diller Show, episodes of Candid Camera, and material for Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

It was on the Tonight Show, in 1965, that Rivers got her big national break. Introduced as one of the writers for the show, she and Carson engaged in a hilariously funny dialogue. As Rivers remembered it, “At the end of the show he was wiping his eyes. He said, right on the air, ‘God you’re funny. You’re going to be a star'” (Enter Talking).

Parental Background

Born in Brooklyn, New York, as Joan Alexandra Molinsky on June 8, 1933, Rivers was the youngest daughter of Beatrice (Grushman) and Meyer Molinsky, a doctor. Both of her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants from the Odessa area. Despite the geographical proximity of their origins, Rivers’s parents came from vastly different socioeconomic circumstances.

Meyer Molinsky’s family had been poverty-stricken in Russia, and they remained poor in their early years in America. Molinsky’s entry into the medical profession propelled the family into the emergent Jewish middle class of Brooklyn.

Beatrice Molinsky’s family had been very wealthy merchants in Odessa but left everything behind in the Old Country. That loss of status forever haunted Beatrice Molinsky, and she continually pushed her husband—a struggling general practitioner in the heavily Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn—to earn more money.

The conflict between her parents (“My mother wanted M.D. to stand for Make Dollars”) was the inspiration for many of Rivers’s early routines. The constant arguments in the family about money left her with a permanent sense of insecurity that she mined for its comedic value. The epilogue to Enter Talking concludes in this way: “She lives the life her mother longed to have—but still believes that next week everything will disappear.”

Education

From earliest childhood, Rivers wanted to be an actor. Her mother wanted her youngest daughter to prepare herself for marriage and entry into polite society. The tension between these aspirations deeply influenced the young woman’s life and craft.

Educated in Brooklyn’s Ethical Culture School and Adelphi Academy, Rivers was an enthusiastic participant in the school drama and writing programs. At Adelphi, she founded the school newspaper. At Connecticut College and later at Barnard, she read widely in the classics and took courses in the history of the theater. Though she was later to project a scatterbrain image, the key to her craft lies in her classical education and her ability to turn out witty monologues and dialogues.

In 1954, Rivers graduated from Barnard College with a degree in English literature and was awarded membership in Phi Beta Kappa. After college, she took an entry-level job at a firm in the New York fashion industry. She soon gave it up for a short-lived (and disastrous) marriage to the boss’s son. “Our marriage license turned out to be a learner’s permit” (Enter Talking).

Early Ventures in Entertainment

Determined to succeed in the theater, Rivers did temporary office work while auditioning for roles in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway plays. In 1960, she developed comedy routines that gained some attention and in 1961 got her first big break when she joined the Second City Comedy troupe of Chicago. Her improvisational and writing skills shone at Second City.

Within a few years, she was a regular at New York City comedy clubs, foremost among them the Duplex and the Bitter End. In her act, she joked about sex in a way that was both shocking and endearing. Female comedians had not spoken with such frankness before. “I knew nothing about sex. All my mother told me was that the man gets on top and the woman gets on the bottom. I bought bunk beds” (Still Talking).

It was from these clubs that Rivers was catapulted to fame by her appearances on national television. Throughout the first decade of her career she continued to write, perform in clubs, and appear on television.

The 1970s saw Rivers venture into other entertainment media. While her Broadway play Fun City was greeted with a mixed reaction, her comic 1973 TV movie, The Girl Most Likely To, was the most successful made-for-TV movie of its time. Its theme—the revenge of a woman jilted for her looks—was the harbinger of a new direction in writing about women’s issues. Two of her books, Having a Baby Can Be a Scream (1975) and The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abramowitz, were also great successes—as were her 1986 autobiography, Enter Talking, and its sequel, Still Talking (1991).

Starting a Family

During her rise from stand-up comic to television personality, Rivers married producer Edgar Rosenberg. He became her de facto manager, and together they embarked on a number of entertainment ventures, including the ill-fated The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. Their marriage, described in some detail in Still Talking, was inextricably linked to both of their careers. They had one child, Melissa Rosenberg, born January 20, 1968.

In 1987, Edgar Rosenberg committed suicide. Rivers’s reaction was feisty and characteristic: “The best therapy for me would have been to go right from the mortuary to the stage, but my advisers agreed it would have been unseemly.”

Seven years later, in 1994, Rivers dealt with this tragedy and its aftermath in her NBC movie Tears and Laughter. In this film, Rivers and her daughter Melissa play themselves and demonstrate, as Gina Bellafante noted in Time magazine, “the sunny conviction that the saga of their cruel lives will serve as a morality tale…. It also manages to convey a message about the capacity for survival.”

In that same year, Rivers wrote and produced a Broadway play, Sally Marr and Her Escorts. Based on the life of Lenny Bruce’s mother, it too deals with the cruel price that celebrity and talent exact from those blessed and cursed with its gifts.

Since 1995, Joan Rivers had been a host for the E! Entertainment television network, where she and her daughter broadcast their “Joan and Melissa’s E! Fashion Reviews” from the scene of the annual Golden Globe, Emmy and Academy Award ceremonies. Rivers herself won the 1990 Emmy award for best daytime talk show host.

Jewish Identity

Joan Rivers was supportive of Jewish philanthropic and social causes and was a former Hadassah Woman of the Year. In her books, she made reference to Jewish holidays and rituals, as well as very trenchant and witty remarks about American Jewish social phenomena—including the Catskill Mountains Borscht Belt, where she performed early in her career.

In Enter Talking, there is a particularly moving account of her first Yom Kippur away from the warmth–and fury–of her family. Her portrayal of her own family’s Jewish life provides us with confirmation of Jenna Weissman Joselit’s observation in The Wonders of America (1994) that, for American Jews, “the Jewish home was now placed at the core of Jewish identity, often becoming indistinguishable from Jewishness itself.”

Reprinted from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia with permission of the author and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

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Tales of the wise men of Chelm have entertained Jewish readers for generations and are among the best-known folk tales of Eastern European Jewry. Below are a sampling of some well-known Chelm stories.

Looking for more Chelm stories? We recommend the following collections:

• When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories
• Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories
• The Wise Men of Helm and Their Merry Tales

It’s the Pits

A group of citizens in the town of Chelm were busily engaged in digging a foundation for the new synagogue, when a disturbing thought occurred to one of the laborers.

“What are we going to do with all this earth we’re digging up?” he asked. “We certainly can’t just leave it here where our temple will be built.”

There was a hubbub of excitement as the men rested on their spades and pondered the question. Suggestions were made and just as quickly rejected.

Suddenly one of the Chelmites smiled and held his hand up for silence. “I have the solution,” he proclaimed. “We will make a deep pit, and into it we’ll shovel all this earth we’re digging up for the synagogue!”

A round of applause greeted this proposal, until another Chelmite raised his voice in protest. “That won’t work at all! What will we do with the earth from the pit?”

There was a stunned silence as the men tried to cope with this new problem, but the first Chelmite soon provided the answer.

“It is all very simple,” he said. “We’ll dig another pit, and into that one we’ll shovel all the earth we’re digging now, and all the earth we take out of the first pit. The only thing we must be careful about is to make the second pit twice as large as the first one.”

There was no arguing with this example of Chelmic wisdom, and the workers returned to their digging.

Just Out Of Reach

Everyone in Chelm was scandalized: A thief had broken into the synagogue and made off with the poorbox. The Council of Seven immediately convened, and after some deliberation they arrived at a unanimous decision: A new poorbox would be installed, but suspended close to the ceiling so that no thief would ever be able to reach it.

But the moment the shammes [synagogue caretaker] heard about the decision he raised a new problem. “It is true that the box will be safe from thieves,” he declared, “but it will also be out of reach of the charitable.”

The Council of Seven held another hurried meeting, and once again the wisdom of Chelm prevailed. It was decreed that a stairway be built to the poorbox so that the charitable might easily reach it.

The Ox Ate My Sermon

The maggid [preacher] of Chelm was returning home from a neighboring village where he had just preached a sermon. On the way he was overtaken by a farmer whose wagon was piled high with hay.

“May I offer you a ride?” asked the peasant courteously.

“Thank you,” replied the maggid, climbing aboard the wagon. It was a warm, sunny day and soon the preacher fell fast asleep. But when he arrived in Chelm he could not find his notebook, in which he kept his themes and parables.

“I must have lost it in the hay!” cried the maggid, greatly distressed. “Now some cow or goat or ass will eat it and become familiar with all my best sermons!”

The next evening, at the synagogue, he strode to the bimah [pulpit] and glared at the congregation.

“Fellow citizens of Chelm,” he proclaimed, “I have lost my notebook in a load of fodder. I want you to know that if some dumb ox or ass ever comes to this town to preach, the sermon will be mine, not his!”

Legally Friendly

The rabbi was deeply worried. For weeks no one had come to him to judge a case and, being a poor man, he was desperately in need of the fees usually paid for his services.

One day, as he was standing at his window, wondering when he would get his next case, he saw Itzig the butcher and Shloime the baker in what appeared to be a sharp dispute. As they passed by they were waving their arms in emphatic gestures, and talking loudly and excitedly.

“Aha! A couple of litigants!” He threw open the window and called to them, “Let me adjudicate your dispute.”

“Dispute? Who’s having a dispute?” answered Itzig.

“We were just having a friendly discussion,” agreed Shloime.

“Fine!” replied the quick-thinking rabbi. “Just step right into the house and, for a very small charge, I’ll make out a certificate that you have nothing against each other!”

Credit Where Credit Is Due

The melamed [schoolteacher] and the rabbi of Chelm were in a coffee house where they were discussing the economy of the town and how to improve it.

“There is one thing that depresses me,” sighed the melamed, “and that is the injustice accorded to the poor. The rich, who have more money than they need, can buy on credit. But the poor, who haven’t two coins to knock together, have to pay cash for everything. Do you call that fair?”

“I don’t see how it could be any other way,” answered the rabbi.

“But it’s only common sense that it should be the other way around,” insisted the melamed. “The rich, who have money, should pay cash and the poor should be able to buy on credit.”

“I admire your idealistic nature,” said the rabbi, “but a merchant who extends credit to the poor instead of the rich will soon become a poor man himself.”

“So what?” retorted the melamed. “Then he’d be able to buy on credit, too!”

The Fire

A fire broke out one night in the city of Chelm and all the inhabitants rushed to the fiercely burning building to extinguish the blaze. When the conflagration had been put out, the rabbi mounted a table and addressed the citizens:

“My friends, this fire was a miracle sent from heaven above.”

There were murmurs of surprise in the crowd, and the rabbi hastened to explain.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “If it were not for the bright flames, how would we have been able to see how to put the fire out on such a dark night?”

Reprinted with permission from The Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor, compiled and edited by Henry D. Spalding (Jonathan David Publishers).

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What makes a joke, or story, or television episode qualify as Jewish humor is not — cannot be — just that it was created by a Jew. (If that were the case, some enormous percentage of all comedic American TV shows and movies would qualify.) There must be something inherently Jewish about Jewish humor. And so, while there is no single infallible determinant of the Jewishness of a joke, we can perhaps describe the tendencies, stylistics, even poetics of Jewish humor.

Jewish Humor Laughs in the Face of Power

First and foremost, Jewish humor snickers in the face of authority. This tendency dates back to the first recorded laughter in the scriptural tradition, in Genesis 18:12, when the mother of the Jewish people, Sarah, laughs at the notion, delivered by divine messenger, that she will conceive a child in her dotage. Sarah’s laughter is, in effect, a minor rebellion against God, who proceeds to chew her out: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” And so, the subversive tradition of Jewish humor began.

A few thousand years later, in the 19th and especially 20th centuries, Jewish humor perpetuated this trend by tittering across all sacred boundaries. Practitioners of such transgressive Jewish humor include Franz Kafka, whose darkly comic stories ridicule the all-powerful bureaucracies of the modern state; Lenny Bruce, whose obscenities and profanities irked 1960s censors and landed him in jail; and, more recently, Jon Stewart, the former Daily Show host who spent a half hour each weeknight cutting up politics and politicians.

Some linguists have gone so far as to suggest that the vernacular inventiveness of the entire Yiddish language can be regarded as a beautiful satire on the formality of German — a comic power that carries over into what Yiddish maven Leo Rosten has called “Yinglish.” As we all know, if you want to take a highfalutin word down a peg, you can simply add the typical Yiddish prefix “shm-” as an alte kocker — roughly translated as “old fart” — might: “Seriousness, shmeriousness!”

Navel-Gazing and Philosophizing

And yet, while it’s often about subversion, Jewish humor also tends to navel-gaze, philosophize, ponder. As Moshe Waldoks and Bill Novak suggest in their Big Book of Jewish Humor, Jews are most often funny about something, and it’s usually something they know quite a bit about. In this mood, Jewish humor takes on many forms, ranging from extreme exaggerations of the logical acrobatics of a Talmudic scholar, to Saul Bellow’s riffs on philosophy, to Seinfeld-ian analyses of social etiquette.

In each of these examples, humor performs a social function, drawing together people who share similar cultures: If you haven’t studied the Talmudic tractate Masekhet Beitzah, struggled through Heidegger or visited New York City, you may not end up laughing. Whenever a joke is about something — whether that something is as general as an ethnic stereotype, or as specific as one rabbi’s bad breath — who laughs and how much they laugh depend on how familiar they are with the target. As the philosopher Ted Cohen suggests, humor divides the world into “us” (we who get the joke) and “them” (those humorless jerks who don’t).

For Jews, throughout history, various lines between “us” and “them” have been crucial, imposed internally as well as externally –think Jewish/Goyish, to use the Yiddish for non-Jews, offensive today but part of the vernacular in Yiddish culture past. There’s also Orthodox/Reform, Israel/Diaspora, Ashkenazic/Sephardic, et cetera. Humor has always been, and continues to be, one way to draw such fundamental lines.

Attentive readers might now be scratching their heads: Jewish humor (1) crosses boundaries and (2) draws lines? Isn’t that a bit, well, hypocritical? It is. And that’s part of the beauty of humor, and Jewish humor in particular: it doesn’t have to make sense, be consistent, or tell the truth.

Comedy doesn’t have to do anything, in fact, except make people laugh — and often enough in Jewish history, a bit of laughter has provided solace when nothing else could. Joking has served as a coping mechanism for all the worst afflictions faced by the Jewish people, from persecution in Czarist Russia to ongoing trauma in the Middle East to the threat of assimilation all over the world. Dark Jewish joking has even, in some controversial examples, responded to the Holocaust.

Some may decry jokes about Hitler, pogroms, or intermarriage as tasteless, but humor by its nature breaks every rule. And this is the power of Jewish humor. Comedy grants an unlimited license to experiment, to invent, to create. And Jewish humor — in all its contradictions, subversions, and possibilities –i s one of the ways that Jews, through the ages, have created an idea of themselves.

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Jewish humor is too rich and too diverse to be adequately described by a single generalization. Jewish theologians used to say that it is easier to describe God in terms of what He is not; the same process may be useful in understanding Jewish humor. It is not, for example, escapist. It is not slapstick. It is not physical. It is generally not cruel and does not attack the weak or the infirm. At the same time, it is also not polite or gentle.

But individual humorists come to mind immediately to negate each of these tendencies: The Marx Brothers are slapstick performers; Jerry Lewis and Sid Caesar are physical; Don Rickles is cruel; Sam Levenson is polite and Danny Kaye is playful. So much for generalizations.

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What Jewish humor is may be even more difficult to deter­mine, and we offer the following broad statements in full awareness of the possible futility of the exercise:

1. Jewish humor is usually substantive.

It is about something. It is especially fond of certain specific topics, such as food (noshing is sacred), family, business, anti-Semitism, wealth and its absence, health, and survival. Jewish humor is also fascinated by the intricacies of the mind and by logic, and the short if elliptical path separating the rational from the absurd.

As social or religious commentary, Jewish humor can be sar­castic, complaining, resigned, or descriptive. Sometimes the “point” of the humor is more powerful than the laugh it deliv­ers, and for some of the jokes, the appropriate response is not laughter, but rather a bitter nod or a commiserating sigh of recognition. This didactic quality precludes laughing “for free,” as in slapstick humor, which derives its laughter from other people’s misfortunes.

2. Jewish humor tends to be anti-authoritarian.

It ridicules grandiosity and self-indulgence, exposes hypocrisy, and kicks pomposity in the pants. It is strongly democratic, stressing the dignity and worth of common folk.

3. Jewish humor frequently has a critical edge.

This edge creates discomfort in making its point. Often its thrust is political–aimed at leaders and other authorities who cannot be criticized more directly. This applies to prominent figures in the general society, as well as to those in the Jewish world, such as rabbis, cantors, sages, intellectuals, teachers, doctors, businessmen, philanthropists, and community functionaries. A special fea­ture of Jewish humor is the interaction of prominent figures with simple folk and the disadvantaged, with the latter often emerging triumphant. In general, Jewish humor characteris­tically deals with the conflict between the people and the power structure, whether that be the individual Jew within his community, the Jew facing the Gentile world, or the Jewish com­munity in relation to the rest of humanity.

4. Jewish humor mocks everyone — including God.

It frequently satirizes religious personalities and institutions, as well as ritu­als and dogma. At the same time, it affirms religious traditions and practices, seeking a new understanding of the differences between the holy and the mundane.

Reprinted with permission from The Big Book of Jewish Humor (HarperCollins Publishers)

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In many ways, the 2000s were the long tail to Seinfeld’s revolution, with television series of the early 21st century underscoring, and occasionally critiquing, the mainstreaming of Jewish culture onscreen. Television had become about the particular, not the universal, and Judaism was one of its primary markers of the idiosyncratic array of American mores.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Sarah Silverman

Other Jewish TV protagonists took David’s lead, their offensiveness tempered by the humorous charm of their salvos.  The Sarah Silverman Program was like a younger, sprightlier version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, more dedicated to the potty humor so beloved of its Comedy Central audience.

Much of Silverman’s act — on the show as well as in her stand-up — was predicated on the disjunction between her Jewish-girl-next-door looks and the panoply of jokes about (among other things) the Holocaust and date rape. Silverman’s intent was to shock, but in a complicated bit of rhetorical jujitsu, her comedy saluted her viewers for being in on the joke. Anyone who was offended was, by definition, a humorless prig.

Entourage

Entourage

’s Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) was, in his own way, another Jewish stereotype: brassy, egotistical, self-absorbed, crude. The Hollywood super-agent on this genial Tinseltown comedy was cutting deals in synagogue on the High Holidays, scuttling between executives from pew to pew and sneaking calls on his cellphone. He was a huckster on the make, grandson to the protagonist from Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?

And yet, Ari was gradually domesticated and tamed, surrounded as he was by the warm, familial atmosphere of superstar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his circle of friends. Ari (based on real-life agent Ari Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff, Rahm) was a bully and a pig, but he was our bully and our pig, and Entourage, taking the lead from its viewers, drew Ari into an ever-closer embrace as the show progressed, until we had forgotten why we had ever loved to hate him in the first place.

Sabotaging Stereotypes

Some dramatic series had Jewish regulars who fit the pattern of the ugly Jewish smears from the past: The amoral shyster of The Wire and the callous record company executive and quasi-mobster of The Sopranos. But these characters were also surprisingly complex, with The Sopranos’ Hesh Rabkin (Jerry Adler) a sweet, jovial father figure to Tony Soprano at the same time that he was a ruthless businessman, ripping off an entire generation of African-American recording artists. The same went for The Wire’s mobbed-up lawyer Maury Levy (Michael Kostroff), who fit every pattern of oily Jewish criminality while subtly eroding it from within.

Mad Men, AMC’s exercise in discomfiting nostalgia, revisited the casual anti-Semitism of the early 1960s, with Jewish department-store owner Rachel Menken turning to the golden-haired WASPs of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency for advice on how to attract a less Jewish clientele to her store. Harry Goldenblatt, the pit-bull divorce lawyer to, and later husband of, Kristin Davis’ Charlotte on later seasons of HBO’s Sex and the City, was introduced as a risible walking cliché before steadily revealing himself to be more than a sweaty, bald, hirsute paragon of Jewish crassness.

Other characters’ Judaism was a matter of some secrecy, only belatedly explored, like The Simpsons’ Krusty the Clown (nee Herschel Krustofsky), or the Griffin family of Family Guy, briefly putting on kippot and saying blessings over the Passover candles.

There were also unlikely Jews, like Grey’s Anatomy’s Korean-Jewish intern, played by Sandra Oh. Television series were intent on subduing the stereotypes, and proving that anyone could be Jewish–and that Jews could be anyone. Now that television had splintered into a myriad of niche audiences (dog lovers, foodies, HBO fans), propelled by the profusion of new cable channels and the slow-motion implosion of the networks, its interest in the unexplored corners of American culture grew exponentially. Jews were part of the texture of contemporary American life, their mystery–their difference–now crucial to their TV allure.

Lovable TV Jews

Not all stereotypes were necessarily disturbing ones. Sandy Cohen, from the short-lived but intensely followed Fox primetime teen soap opera The O.C., was a bleeding-heart liberal public-interest attorney with a heart of gold, taking in troubled teen Ryan Atwood and adopting him into his warm, loving family.

And his son Seth was the inventor of Chrismukkah, the hybrid Jewish-Christian holiday celebration that made a brief splash in the world beyond the television screen. The O.C. was only intermittently Jewish, being more interested in the glamorous lives of the Orange County wealthy, but its Jewish heart was in the right place, pondering issues of class and poverty that had become invisible on American television.  Or at least it tried to do so between its regularly scheduled fistfights and steamy romantic interludes.

The West Wing’s Jewish political operatives Toby Ziegler and Josh Lyman (Richard Schiff and Bradley Whitford) were among the ablest of the show’s fantasy-world of agile, savvy White House aides. And Ross and Monica Geller and Rachel Green of Friends (David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, and Jennifer Aniston) were inoffensively playful Jews, like Seinfeld’s quartet stripped of their power to shock.

Jews, Jews Everywhere

Jews were everywhere, though, and often in the most surprising guises: as a Mohawk-wearing, football-playing, cheerleader-impregnating choir singer in the Fox musical comedy series Glee; as math-loving FBI agents of CBS’ Numbers; as an Israeli Mossad operative turned special agent on CBS’ NCIS; and as the non-Jewish, pot-dealing widow of a Jew on Showtime’s Weeds (created by Jewish writer Jenji Kohan).

Others were engaged in more typical pursuits: producing television programs on Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived NBC series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; working as an aerospace engineer on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory; obsessively worrying over the fate of the Jewish people on Comedy Central’s South Park.

In short, they were doing anything and everything, freed of their responsibility to stick to the script. After Seinfeld, Jews were everywhere–and everyone.

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Two Brothers

Once upon a time there were two brothers, Zelig and Leo. Zelig was a clever and alert young fellow, but Leo was a dolt — a first class schnook [Yiddish for simpleton]! Zelig, as might be expected, was welcomed wherever he went. He could tell witty stories and fascinating parables with intelligence and high humor. But poor Leo was never invited anywhere, for obvious reasons.

Now the boys’ mother was very unhappy about Leo’s plight, so she pleaded with Zelig to teach him how to become popular.

“Tell him some of the riddles, the stories and funny anecdotes you know so well. Teach him something, so that people will at least listen to him and maybe even pay him a compliment.”

“All right, Mama, I’ll teach him,” sighed Zelig. So he took his brother aside and said, “Listen to me carefully, Leo. I am going to teach you a riddle. Tomorrow night at the meeting house you are to stand up and say ‘What am I?’ Some will answer ‘You are a fool!’ Others will reply ‘You are an idiot!’ To each one you are to answer ‘Wrong — guess again!’ Finally, when they have all given up, you are to answer the riddle by saying ‘I am hungry!’ Isn’t that clever, Leo?”

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” enthused Leo, doubling up with laughter.

All that day and the next he practiced the riddle, rehearsing every word Zelig had taught him. In the evening he went to the meeting house which was packed with the townspeople. He stood up and called loudly for silence. When the hubbub subsided, he shouted, “A riddle! What am I?”

As Zelig had foretold, everybody laughed. “A fool!” cried the tailor.

“Wrong! Guess again!” answered Leo gleefully.

“An idiot!” yelled the grocer.

“Wrong! Guess again!”

“All right, we give up,” they acknowledged. “Tell us, what are you?”

“Let’s eat!” hollered Leo proudly.

The Weary Traveler

A farmer was driving along the road one torrid summer day when he came upon an undersized old peddler with a heavy load of merchandise on his back. The poor little man appeared to be utterly exhausted as he trudged on.

The kindhearted farmer pulled his horse to a halt and offered the weary traveler a ride to the city.

They had been riding together for several minutes when the farmer noticed that his new companion was still holding the heavy burden on his back.

“My friend,” he said, “why not set your pack down in the wagon and make yourself comfortable?”

“Sir, you are a kind man and I don’t want to take advantage of your goodness,” answered the humble peddler. “It is enough that you are taking me to the city, and for that I thank you — but you don’t have to carry my pack too!”

Remember Your Name!

Seymour Kaplan, a pants-maker in New York, saved up enough money to justify a visit to the town of his birth in Russia. Having no passport, and ignorant of the procedure necessary to obtain one, he bought a passport for $15 from a local ganeff [Yiddish for thief]who specialized in such matters.

“All you need to remember is that your name is now Isaac Leibovitch,” cautioned the thief. “Just forget your own name and you won’t get into trouble.”

Seymour repeated the new name over and over again, committing it to memory so that he would not be found out. When he arrived at the Russian border, his passport was taken from him and the imperious customs official examined the picture on the document and then scrutinized Seymour’s face. There was a slight resemblance, but the officer wanted to make sure. He snapped several questions at the trembling little man who was beginning to sweat. Finally he asked, “What is your name?”

By this time, Seymour was so flustered and frightened that his mind was a blank. “My name — my name is — well, I–I…”

“Come, come!” rapped out the official curtly. “Surely you know your own name!”

“Look, mister,” he pleaded, “call me anything you want, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t call me Seymour Kaplan!”

The Clandestine Roommate

A salesman who was traveling to Petrograd was unable to continue his journey because of a severe snowstorm. The stationmaster told him that the trains would surely be running again at six o’clock the next morning, as the tracks would be cleared by that hour. The traveler had no alternative but to go to the local hotel.

By the time he arrived at the small-town hostelry all the rooms had been taken by the other passengers of the delayed train. However the desk clerk was a kindly soul who could not bear to put a weary stranger out in such a blizzard, and he hit upon an idea.

“Listen, my friend, all of the rooms here have a single bed each, so I can’t very well ask the occupants to put you up for the night. But there is one room here with two beds in it.”

“Thank God!” breathed the salesman. “I was afraid I might have to sleep out in the cold tonight.”

“Wait a minute, I must tell you something,” said the clerk hurriedly. “The guest in that room is a general in the czar’s army. But I’ll ask him if he will share his room with you.”

“Don’t bother,” sighed the other resignedly. “A general would never share his room with a Jew.” He thought about it for a moment and then his face brightened. “Look, I have an idea!” he said excitedly. “Maybe I can sleep in that extra bed after all. It is very late now, so the general must be fast asleep. Tomorrow I must rise early to catch the six o’clock train. At that hour of the morning he’ll still be sound asleep, and he’ll never know that I was in the other bed. Just be sure to wake me up on time.”

The hotel clerk agreed. Quietly the traveler tiptoed into the room of the czarist officer, and without a sound — almost afraid to breathe — the intruder undressed and went to sleep. In the morning the clerk awakened the general’s clandestine roommate at the appointed hour.

But in the predawn darkness the Jewish guest unwittingly donned the general’s uniform and hurried off to meet his train. On the way, he could not help but notice that everyone he met bowed and greeted him in a most respectful manner.

“How do they know that I shared the same room with a general?” he wondered.

He met a captain and then a major, and both saluted him smartly. At the ticket office the agent handed him a first-class ticket and assigned him to a private compartment.

“How is it that a Jew is treated so magnificently?” he asked himself, bewildered by the unaccustomed courtesy.

Inside the compartment he speculated on the probability that his single night’s association with a great czarist officer might have given him a kind of aristocratic aura — one of reflected glory. He stood before a mirror and stared at his reflection and examined his features for any possible change in his appearance, and as he did, a look of utter shock spread over his face as he recognized the general’s uniform.

“Oy vay!” he groaned. “That schlemiel of a desk clerk! I ask him to wake me up and instead he wakes up the general. Now, how will I ever catch this six o’clock train when I’m still sleeping back at the hotel?”

Reprinted with permission from the Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor, compiled and edited by Henry D. Spalding (Jonathan David Publishers).

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“Ten Commandments” from History of the World: Part I
“Moyle” from Robin Hood: Men in Tights
“Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers
“I’m Hysterical!” from The Producers
“Spanish Inquisition” from History of the World: Part I
“The Schwartz” from Spaceballs

“Ten Commandments” from History of the World: Part I

“Moyle” from Robin Hood: Men in Tights

“Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers

“I’m Hysterical!” from The Producers

“Spanish Inquisition” from History of the World: Part I

“The Schwartz” from Spaceballs

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With the exception of Burns and Seinfeld, the majority of successful American Jewish comedians attained popularity by fulfilling widely accepted ethnic Jewish stereotypes, or by employing a manic, burlesque style of humor. In the first half of the 20th century, these expectations were almost impossible for Jewish comics to escape. No career illustrates the limits and possibilities of being a Jewish comedian better than that of Fanny Brice.

Born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1891, the third of four children of saloon-owning immigrant parents, Fania Borach chose a performer’s career early in life. Historian Barbara Grossman notes that, in an era that typically based entertainment on ethnic stereotypes such as the drunken Irishman, the ignorant Pole or the Yiddish-accented greenhorn, Brice’s “Semitic looks” slotted her into Jewish roles. Despite her efforts to succeed as a serious actress and singer, Brice — who spoke no Yiddish — rose to stardom performing comedy with a Yiddish accent. Just as Al Jolson donned blackface to make his mark in show business, Brice affected a Yiddish background she did not possess.

In 1908, dropping out of school after the eighth grade, the gangly, strong-voiced Fanny Borach worked as a chorus girl in a burlesque revue. By the end of that year, she changed her last name to Brice. Grossman speculates that Fanny probably changed her name to escape limited Jewish stage roles. Ironically, a year later, she would make her first Broadway mark in a musical comedy, The College Girls, singing Irving Berlin‘s “Sadie Salome, Go Home” with a put-on Yiddish accent while dancing a parody of the seductive veil dance in Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. Her act brought down the house. Despite her desire for universality, Brice found her niche as a “Jewish” entertainer.

When Brice stuck to broad farce and Yiddish-accented parodies of other female stars, the critics loved her. When she tried playing non-ethnic roles in Broadway plays, they panned her. Brice starred in the Ziegfield Follies in the 1920s and ’30s and became known for her beautiful voice and limber grace, which she always used in the service of humor. She tried dramatic Broadway roles, but the critics thought her plays unsuccessful.

As Brice’s fame increased, so did her notoriety. In 1918, she married Jules “Nicky” Arnstein, a handsome, urbane, but somewhat inept con man and thief she had lived with for six years. Despite Arnstein’s infidelity and a stretch in Sing Sing Prison for illegal wiretapping, the devoted Brice stayed married to him, had two children and supported him by working on stage almost constantly, almost to the very end of each pregnancy. Brice’s tumultuous relationship with the ne’er-do-well Arnstein gave her material for a rare non-ethnic success: appearing the Ziegfield Follies of 1921 the usually manic comedienne stood nearly motionless on the stage and, singing in a beautiful, unaccented voice, moved audiences to tears with her rendition of “My Man,” with its now-classic lyrics, “But whatever my man is, I am his forever.”

In 1924, Arnstein was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence and funded his legal defense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Released in 1927, the ungrateful and unfaithful Arnstein disappeared from Brice’s life and that of his two children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him.

Brice had some of her greatest success during her years as Mrs. Arnstein, including her famous song “Second Hand Rose.” Yet, in 1923, as biographer Grossman puts it, Brice “tired of being a sight gag” and had her nose surgically straightened. Still, acceptance eluded her when she tried to her hand at “American” drama, while she continued to draw raves for her work in comedic dancing and song.

Finally, after a failed marriage to Broadway impresario Billy Rose and starring roles in Hollywood films, Brice found a medium, “broadcast radio,” that made her comfortable. In 1938, she launched her own weekly radio show. A wonderful mimic and impersonator with a great ear for dialect, Brice chose instead to limit herself to one character, Baby Snooks, a precocious, bratty toddler. Her enormously successful run on radio lasted until her death in 1951, just as television was beginning to capture the radio audience.

Barbra Streisand paid tribute to Brice in her loosely biographical film production Funny Girl, in which Streisand was both star and producer. Lily Tomlin popularized a Baby Snooks-like character on television, Edith Ann, who sits in a rocking chair and makes ironic observations on the adult world. Both stars possess a freedom to choose roles that eluded Brice once she was slotted as Sadie Salome. Just as significant, the acceptance of Jerry Seinfeld’s matter-of-fact Jewishness by a national television audience illustrates the great liberation that American Jewry, male or female, has gained in the world of entertainment. Fanny Brice would have approved.

Chapters in American Jewish History are provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, collecting, preserving, fostering scholarship and providing access to the continuity of Jewish life in America for more than 350 years (and counting). Visit www.ajhs.org.

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“I can’t remember a single coherent sentence Paul Sills said. But as it often happens with talented directors… somehow he got his message across.” –Alan Arkin

In the late ’50s, after helping to create television sketch comedy, the modern humor magazine, and the stand-up routine, Jewish writers invented yet another comedic institution: contemporary improv theater. Founded in 1959 and named for an article about Chicago in The New Yorker by A. J. Liebling, Second City attracted the University of Chicago’s best and brightest. Second City would, over the next decade, launch the careers of numerous Jewish celebrities, including Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Robert Klein, George Segal, Ed Asner, and David Steinberg.

In 1963, continuing in the politically aware, satirical tradition of The Realist and Second City, The Committee emerged in San Francisco as the comedy troupe for the hippie counterculture. Appearing frequently on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and in its own self-titled concert film, both in 1968, The Committee included such future Jewish comedic lights as Rob Reiner, Gary Goodrow (a Beat poet and future co-author of the first two Honey I Shrunk The Kids movies), and Carl Gottlieb (screenwriter of Jaws and The Jerk, among other films).

Fumbling & Filmmaking

“I’m nine, going on 69!” –Jerry Lewis

While Jewish comedians were breaking new ground in the world of improvisation, Jerry Lewis was staking out a middle ground between crowd-pleasing clown and social commentator. Film historian Leonard Maltin notes in his book The Great Movie Comedians that Lewis almost single-handedly carried the banner of film comedy throughout the ’60s, as most of his colleagues migrated to television.

As writer, producer, and director of his own movies, Lewis wanted to make a statement about the plight of the “little guy.” While his comedy had nowhere near the sting of Lenny Bruce, it was more critical of society than the antics of Sid Caesar.

Jerry Lewis’s role as socially conscious comedian is perhaps delivered most poignantly in his directorial debut, The Bellboy (1960). Lewis’s character, Stanley, a lovable loser in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, is an absurdly overworked bellhop at a luxury hotel. However, there is something different about this “loser.” With his frizzy, unkempt hair and pervasive sense of melancholy, he elicits a strong hint of the ethnic “other.”

Lewis paints Stanley in broad slapstick strokes, but, in the final scene, the audience discovers another dimension of the bellboy. The hotel’s owner, Mr. Novak, has been yelling at Stanley, who has not said a word throughout the entire picture. Taking Stanley’s silence as a sign of insolence, Novak screams: “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you talk?”

Stanley ponders this question for a moment, leaving the audience spellbound: WILL HE TALK? He does, and is well-spoken: “Well, certainly I can talk. I suspect that I can talk as well as any other man, Mr. Novak.” Calmed by his employee’s respectful tone, Novak asks, “Well, in that case, how is it we never heard you talk before?” Stanley thinks a moment, and then it dawns on him: “Because no one ever asked me!” And with that, he resumes whistling his trademark tune and putters onto his next menial task, leaving the audience to ponder the subtext: “Because no one ever asked a lower-class Jew like me.”

Are Ernie and Bert Jewish?

“I’ll sing you a tale of Wernher Von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience,
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down,
‘That’s not my department,’ says Wernher Von Braun.”
—Tom Lehrer, “Wernher Von Braun”

The political culture of the late 1960s found its way into children’s programming with the creation of Sesame Street, a show that reflected progressive themes such as ecology and multiculturalism. The show’s Jewish writers included musical satirist Tom Lehrer, former Caesar’s Hour scribe Gary Belkin, and future National Lampoon writer (and son of humorist Bennett Cerf) Christopher Cerf.

And, as Moshe Waldoks and William Novak relate in The Big Book of Jewish Humor, some of the show’s Ernie and Bert sketches were reworkings of traditional Jewish jokes, such as the following:

Reb Isaac and Reb Jacob were fundraisers for competing yeshivas. Finding themselves having tea together at the home of a wealthy benefactor, they soon became involved in an intricate discussion of talmudic law, and were interrupted only by the arrival of the hostess, who brought their tea. A moment later she returned with a platter containing two cookies. Both cookies were substantial, but one was considerably larger than the other.

Observing the rules of etiquette, both men continued talking, and did their best to ignore the cookies. But before long Reb Isaac reached over and grabbed the larger cookie, devouring it in three swift bites.

Reb Jacob looked on in astonishment. “I can’t understand this,” he said. “How can a great scholar like you be so ignorant of table manners?”

Reb Isaac looked surprised. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What would you have done in my place?”

“What any gentleman would have done,” replied Reb Jacob. “I would have taken the smaller cookie.”

“So what are you getting excited about?” replied Reb Isaac with a grin. “Isn’t that what you got?”

The End of an Era

“If only God would give me a clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.” –Woody Allen

At the end of the 1960s, a startling transformation occurred in the comedy world. One of the new comics of the nightclub circuit became a movie star without having to submit to the “de-Jewification” of his Borscht Belt predecessors. In Woody Allen’s directorial debut, Take The Money And Run (1969), a faux “documentary” about inept bank robber Virgil Starkwell, audiences finally saw a Jewish film protagonist who shed the vaudeville “tummler” (clown) persona of a Danny Kaye or Jerry Lewis, while remaining the outcast.

Allen’s character embraced the neurotic, analytic, intellectual model carved out by his peers in the stand-up and short-form improv world (such as the team of Nichols and May, and Lenny Bruce) and melded it into a believable, sustainable Jewish screen persona that was both contemporary and old-world. In the words of Paul Peter Porges, his “verbally nimble nebbish” character is “built on a kind of talmudic wisdom that argues points.”

By the end of the ’60s, the presence of Jews in comedy had evolved from the road-trip vaudevillian acts of yesteryear to the open world of the late 1940s and 1950s to the forefront of radical, turbulent social change. Jewish perspectives on life would have a profound effect on the American psyche, even as America continued to be, ironically, a breeding ground for anti-Semitism — a point well illustrated in this traditional Jewish joke of the period:

During World War II, one day, a sergeant at an army base in the Deep South gets a call from a woman. She says, “Sergeant, for Thanksgiving, we’d like to entertain five soldiers at our house.”

He says, “Fine, we’ll send them over, and thank you for your hospitality.” And she says at the end, “And Sergeant, just please don’t send any Jews.” He says, “I understand, ma’am.”

Thanksgiving day comes, there’s a knock on her door, and the woman opens up the door–this is the Deep South–to her utter shock, there are five black soldiers there.

And she says, “What are you doing here?” And they say, “We understand that you invited us for Thanksgiving.” She says, “What are you talking about? This is a terrible mistake.”
And one of the soldiers says, “No, Sergeant Goldberg never makes a mistake.” (Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews)

“In the past, when we felt politically powerless, humor was a tool,” explains Rabbi Telushkin. But by the late ’60s, the Jews’ status in comedy changed. As Paul Peter Porges says: “We created a very unique American Jewish humor style, which now, in our day and age, is no longer Jewish humor, it’s American humor!”

Adapted with permission from Reform Judaism magazine.

The post American Jewish Humor in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Note: This article was published in 2007. For up-to-date information about Sarah Silverman and other contemporary Jewish comedians, visit our partner site JTA.

Edgy or Racist?

“Is that an edgy joke, or a racist joke?,” Silverman muses during her 2005 concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic after one particular barrage of anti-Asian humor. Her standup pokes and prods us to think of it as the former, but too often, it edges dangerously close to the latter. Her television show, The Sarah Silverman Program, which debuted on Comedy Central on February 1, 2007, meanwhile, softens Silverman. This isn’t a “sellout” move; rather, it renders her more palatable to an audience turned off by her insistence on shopworn stereotypes. The stereotypes have not vanished, but they have been stripped of their intent to insult.

With The Sarah Silverman Program, Silverman has returned once more to the limelight. Comedy Central’s seal of approval and the embrace of viewers who made the show’s debut episode the most-watched new program on the channel in years has crowned Silverman the female comic of the moment, and a worthy colleague to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle, and the other luminaries of the Comedy Central universe.

Silverman, born in New Hampshire in 1970, got her start as a writer, penning sketches for Saturday Night Live and HBO’s Mr. Show before moving from writing to acting, taking small roles in films like Bulworth and The Bachelor while touring the country with her standup. Much like Stewart, Silverman bills herself as a self-consciously Jewish performer in her stand-up, making constant reference to her own religious background in her work. But those references are often tiresomely similar, harping on Jews’ penny-pinching ways, their unattractive looks, and their control of the American media. Does dressing up a stereotype with a smile make it less of a stereotype?

There is a certain kind of shtetl-via-San Fernando Valley Jewish humor that Silverman (whose sister is a rabbi) enjoys: Jesus imagines Jewish women in porn (the Yiddish word “tuchus” makes a prominent appearance) and Silverman hops around the stage like Chelm‘s village idiot, shouting “Yeidel deidel deidel deidel” to prove that Jewish women can be sexy too.

Holocaust Humor

As if to emphasize how transgressive a Jew she can be, Silverman makes repeated use of the Holocaust as a punch line, referring to Jesus is Magic as “about the Holocaust, and AIDS, but it’s funny, and it’s a musical” (actually a fairly accurate description of the film). She mentions her recently deceased grandmother having been a Holocaust survivor, but helpfully points out that she had been in a better type of concentration camp, receiving a vanity tattoo that read “BEDAZZLED.”

Silverman is going for the sharp intake of breath followed by shocked laughter, her act seeking to extract chuckles from the unlikeliest of places. But coming some forty years after the heyday of Lenny Bruce, shock is not quite as shocking as it once was, and what Silverman sees as transgressive sometimes comes off as secondhand.

In fact, the only thing that truly seems to incense Silverman is that Jews are willing to buy German luxury cars, even after knowing of those companies’ involvement in the Holocaust. The subject comes up in her standup routine during Jesus is Magic and in one of the film’s left-field musical numbers. She lectures Mercedes for their bad business practices, helping kill off the people who would one day serve as their best customers. The specificity of this joke–which requires more than a copy of “101 Ethnic Jokes” to pull off–is what makes it successful, and the absence of such careful observation makes couplets like “I love you more than bears love honey/I love you more than Jews love money” fall flat.

The Self-Aware Bigot

Silverman’s stand-up act plays on the hall-of-mirrors effect she creates. She plays a bigot, but a self-aware one, conscious of the effect each of her jokes will have on her presumably liberal, tolerant, mostly white audience.

By casting herself as simultaneously trotting out hoary ethnic jokes and assailing that same humor’s viciousness via the vacuity of her persona, Silverman seeks to render herself immune from prosecution. Her edge is in her racist veneer, and by parading the same tired array of stereotypes, she is reveling in having moved beyond prejudice, congratulating her audiences on being tolerant enough to laugh freely at jokes about unwashed Mexicans. While not to everyone’s taste, Silverman has attracted a dedicated following through her unorthodox material and zest for confrontation–attributes that brought Comedy Central calling.

For Silverman, it is all in the delivery–a point she makes with a single throwaway joke tucked into the credits of Jesus is Magic, where her nerdy, socially maladjusted understudy comes out onstage, tells the same jokes in a monotone, and is met with nothing but strained silence. The crudeness of Silverman’s approach is benefited by her clean-cut good looks. “Can you believe someone who looks like this just said that?,” the twinkle in her eye reads. Silverman is like the  21st century feminine version of that old chestnut of Hollywood comedies–the raunchy child whose job it is to shock the audience with his familiarity with all the gory details of sex.

Now on TV

The Sarah Silverman Program

succeeds where Jesus is Magic fails because of its grounding in character. Here, Silverman plays an unemployed slob, entirely dependent on her sister Laura, and constantly threatened by the presence of Laura’s new boyfriend, whom she fears will steal her place in her sister’s affections. Sarah and Laura are joined by their friends Brian and Steve, a constantly bickering gay couple who nearly match Sarah in their quest for eternal slackerdom.

Silverman plays a role not entirely dissimilar from her stand-up’s narcissistic, clueless Jewish princess who carelessly offends, but surrounded as she is by a recognizable milieu (upper-middle-class L.A.) and a cast of other characters competing for our attention, she feels less of a need to shock. The comedy emerges from the show’s personalities, not from Silverman’s desire to push buttons.

Silverman’s show files off some of her sharper edges, rendering her dopier, and sillier, than her stand-up persona allows her to be. The Sarah Silverman Program presents its protagonist as a slacker Everywoman: “I’m just like you: I live in Valley Village, I don’t have a job, and my sister pays my rent.” Silverman dials down the Jewish content a notch from Jesus is Magic, although she and her sister are still named Silverman, and a mock-serious announcement at the beginning of the first episode warns that “tonight’s episode of The Sarah Silverman Program contains full-frontal Jew-dity.”

Being Jewish means having other people say they’re sorry: as Laura’s newfound love interest Officer Jay flirtatiously tells her, “I believe the Holocaust was totally uncalled for.” The Holocaust is still Silverman’s ultimate punch-line (it comes up again in the second episode, when Sarah compares interrupting a Jewish person while she’s urinating to saying the Holocaust never happened), but at least here it emerges from the socially awkward character of Officer Jay, perennially at a loss as to what to say.

The Sarah Silverman Program is the most effective presentation yet of the comic’s work, in large part because of its kinder, gentler mood. Absent her claws-out, take-no-prisoners brand of comedy, Silverman is set free to be shallower and funnier. There are still a plethora of jokes about Jews, the wisdom of elderly African-American women, and homeless people, but the humor emerges from careful observation, and not a rejiggering of old ethnic jokes. Sarah Silverman gone polite? Not exactly. But the new Sarah is most distinctly an improved comic, and her promising new show offers an opportunity for reinvention, absent the full-frontal hatefulness.

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A man brings some very fine material to a tailor and asks him to make a pair of pants. When he comes back a week later, the pants are not ready. Two weeks later, they still are not ready. Finally, after six weeks, the pants are ready. The man tries them on. They fit perfectly. Nonetheless, when it comes time to pay, he can’t resist a jibe at the tailor.

“You know,” he says, “it took God only six days to make the world. And it took you six weeks to make just one pair of pants.”

“Ah,” the tailor says. “But look at this pair of pants, and  look at the world!”

Jokes aimed at God tend to be the gentlest in the Jewish tradi­tion — ironic digs, rather than belly laughs. More than any other contemporary comedian, Woody Allen is the master of this genre: “If only God would give me a clear sign of His existence. Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank ac­count.”

In Allen’s film Love and Death, the character of Boris Grushenko mines the same vein: “If I could just see a miracle. Just one miracle. If I could see a burning bush, or the seas part, or my Uncle Sasha pick up a check.” Elsewhere, Allen makes a simple commonsense appeal to God: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it by not dying.”

God’s Seeming Indifference

The disparity between God’s perfection and the imperfec­tion of the world He created inspires much of the humor about God. Indeed, the complaining spirit that runs through many anti-God jokes and witticisms is, in part, rooted in the Bible and other Jewish holy writings. Although the Bible contains little humor, it has plenty of complaints, and it’s only a short step from a kvetch to a joke. “Awake, why do you sleep, O Lord?” the Psalmist cries out (Psalms 44:23-25), in protest at God’s seeming indifference to the Jews’ sufferings and oppression.

Hundreds of years later, in a passage of unparalleled bitterness, the Talmud records the reaction of the School of Rabbi Ishmael to God’s silence during the Roman destruction of Jerusalem: ‘Who is like You among the dumb?” (Gittin 56b). The question “God, why do You permit the righteous to suffer and the wicked to prosper?” seems to lie at the root of almost all the biblical and rabbinic complaints.

No Jewish text has ever answered this question satisfactorily, although the prophets repeatedly insist that because God is good, justice will one day triumph. Contemporary Jews, most of whom lack the prophets’ religious faith, do not usually find this response consoling. Countering the comforting cliché that good people have at least one advantage over the wicked, they sleep better at night, Woody Allen notes: “But the wicked seem to enjoy their waking hours more.”

God the Liar?

A statement made by a Hasidic rebbe in Auschwitz is as bitter as the Talmud, and more biting than Woody Allen: “There is a possibility that the Master of the Universe is a liar,” he told his followers. Shocked at this heresy, the rebbe’s listeners asked: “How can that be?”

“Because,” the rebbe answered, “when God looks down from heaven at what is going on here, He says, ‘I am not responsible.’ And that is a lie.” In other words, because God gave man free will, He bears responsibility for mankind’s terrible misuse of it.

(To contend, as the rebbe does, that God bears responsibility for human evil, is to come perilously close to adopting the reasoning of Dr. Robert Ser­vatius, Adolf Eichmann’s defense lawyer. Aware that there was not much to be said on behalf of a man who supervised the murder of six million people, Servatius opted for a theological defense. The Jews, he argued before the Israeli court trying Eichmann, are God’s chosen people. Does not the fact that God allowed so many of them to be killed mean that the Holocaust must have been His will? Why therefore punish Eichmann for carrying out what God wanted? Needless to say, the Israeli court was not convinced. While few Jews were impressed with Servatius’s argument on behalf of Eichmann, few are unmoved by the rebbe’s bitter charge against God.)

While there is an obvious, and logical, response to the rebbe’s accusation of God–human beings have free will; there­fore, if they act evilly, it is their fault, not God’s–a question persists: Why did God create many human beings who are drawn to sadistic violence? Certainly, He could have endowed man with free will without making such horrible traits so ap­pealing to some people. Nazis, in other words, might be wholly guilty of their actions, but that does not mean that God is totally free of responsibility.

As Woody Allen has put it (in Love and Death): “If it turns out there is a God, I don’t think He is evil. I think that the worst thing that you can say about Him is that He is an underachiever.”

This Is a Chosen People?

A reporter, interviewing Rabbi Seligman after a bolt of lightning had struck the synagogue roof and sent it crashing down into ruins, asked, “Rabbi, what was your reaction when you saw this terrible devastation?”

‘My first reaction?” The rabbi chuckled. “I thought, thank goodness, we took out insurance against acts of God.”

The belief in chosenness causes most Jews to assume that God has a warm spot for them in His heart. On this planet, however, the existence of this warm spot, for Jews or anyone else, is far less apparent.

Indeed, a series of Yiddish sayings suggests that God can be capricious. Mann trakht und Gott lakht, runs the most famous: “Man makes plans [literally thinks] and God laughs.” And Woody Allen has cynically defined Yom Kippur as the “sacred holiday commemorating God’s reneging on every promise.”

God the Joker?

In the guise of pious wonder stories, one even finds Talmu­dic folktales poking fun at God’s capriciousness. In one of these tales, set in the first century B.C.E., a terrible drought has befallen Israel, and “the people sent a message to Honi the Circle Drawer [a well-known saint and miracle-worker]: ‘Pray that rain may fall.’ [Honi] prayed and no rain fell. He thereupon drew a circle and stood within it…. He exclaimed [before God]: ‘Mas­ter of the Universe, Your children have turned to me because [they believe] me to be a member of Your house. I swear by Your great name that I will not move from here until You have mercy upon your children.”

God’s response?

“Rain began to drip down and [Honi’s] disciples said to him: ‘We look to you to save us from death’ [i.e., such a drizzle won’t help us at all]…. Thereupon, he exclaimed: ‘It is not for this that I have prayed, but for rain [to fill] cisterns, ditches, and caves.”

Now that Honi has made it clear to God what is needed, does the Lord send an appropriate response? No.

“The rain then began to come down with great force, every drop being as big as the opening of a barrel, and the sages estimated that no drop was less than [the equivalent of the con­tents of six eggs]. His disciples then said to him: ‘Master, we look to you to save us from death, we believe that the rain [now falling] came down to destroy the world.’

“Thereupon, he exclaimed before [God], ‘It is not for this that I have prayed, but for rains of benevolence, blessing and bounty.’ Then rain fell normally” (Ta’anit 23a).

Does not this Talmudic tale suggest that God is the primordial joker? Only when He has “used up his tricks,” a drizzle and then a deluge, does God send the kind of rain that He knows the Jews needed all along.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews (William Morrow).

The post God and Jewish Humor appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Many Jewish jokes and anecdotes have made a definite impact on the mind and character of the Jewish people, because they are inspired by a profound wisdom. Though not always anticipated at first, it becomes manifest as soon as we reflect upon them.

A classic Yiddish story makes the following observation:

When you tell an am ho-oretz(peasant) a joke, he laughs three times: once, when you tell it, once, when you explain it and once when he understands it.

When you tell a landowner a joke, he laughs twice: once when you tell it and once when you explain it — he will never understand it.

When you tell a military officer a joke, he laughs only once, when you tell it, because he won’t let you explain it, and of course, he doesn’t understand it.

But when you tell a Jew a joke, he tells you that he has heard it be­fore, and that you are telling it all wrong, anyway.

Turning Lament Into Laughter

Humor is one of the most effective ways of confronting adversity and coping with difficult situations, especially when we have little control over them, or none at all. “By laughing at our fate, it is as if we were stepping out of a situation and looking at it from a distance, as if we were outside observers, so to speak,” writes Rabbi Reuven Bulka.

By so doing, we gain the ability to transcend the circumstances, which may be the cause of our anguish. Theodor Reik, a disciple of Sigmund Freud who settled in New York in the 1920s, remarked that life is often tragic and sad. By joking about it, we succeed in transcending the tragic character of an event and bringing it under our control. “By using humor, the lament often turns into laughter,” remarked Reik (Jewish Wit, New York, 1962).

What do you suppose makes Jews joke so much about adversity? “It is the instinct for self-preservation” says Ausubel. “By laughing at the absur­dities and cruelties of life, we draw much of the sting from them. The jester’s bells make an honest tinkle, and his comic capers conceal his inner gravity. His satire and irony have one virtue: you never for a moment suspect that his barbs are directed at you. And so you laugh boisterously, feeling supe­rior to the poor shmiggege, while all the time, it is you who are the target!”

In Jewish humor, comedy and tragedy are intertwined and it is often what you might call “laughter through tears,” or as we say in Yiddish, “a bitterer gelekhter!”

Jewish humor is unique, not only because it pokes fun at our short­comings and weaknesses, but because it reflects upon the history of our people. Let us consider, for example, some of the anecdotes and jokes that express our determination to stay alive in spite of everything and our res­olution to overcome the threatening situations in which we find ourselves.

A classic story, illustrating the instinct of survival, is an anecdote quoted by Reuven Bulka:

A Jew in Russia falls into a lake, and, not knowing how to swim, he frantically screams, “Help, save me!” But his calls are totally ignored by all present, including a number of soldiers standing nearby. In des­peration, the Jew yells out, “Down with the czar!” At that moment, the soldiers immediately jump in, yank the Jew out of the water, and haul him off to prison.

Staying Alive

To stay alive, in spite of all forms of oppression, has been one of the major concerns of the Jewish people through the centuries, and their jesters found many ways to convey this message in humorous terms.

In France, during World War II, a funny anecdote circulated among Jews:

A Jew manages to hide in a psychiatric asylum during the war. He is acting like the other demented patients. One day, the director of the institution informs the residents that the Führer, Adolf Hitler, is plan­ning to visit the asylum. When he enters the main hall, they are told, they are to stand up and greet him with the words “Heil Hitler!”

The day comes, and they all welcome the Führer with the words they had so carefully rehearsed, except for the Jewish man, who re­mains seated in the back of the hall.

“You,” says Hitler, “why didn’t you greet me like everybody else?”

“My Führer,” says the Jew, “they are all meshuge [insane]. I am not!”

Hope, Always

Even in the face of impending doom there may still be some hope, as the following story will tell us:

Prominent scientists have just announced that, as a result of the global warming phenomenon, an uncontrollable flood would soon devastate Planet Earth and bring death to every living being. There were only three days left before doomsday.

The Chief Rabbi of Israel goes on international radio and says: “Fel­low Jews, we must all accept the will of God with humility. We must prepare ourselves to meet our Maker and pray that God may receive us with love and compassion.”

The leaders of the Hasidim address their communities and say, “Yidn (fellow Jews), let us do teshuvah and repent from our sins, and let us be prepared for the great Day of Judgment, at which time we will appear in the presence of the Court on High.”

The science and biology students of the universities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Negev, together with the leading scientists of the Haifa Technion and the Weizmann Institute, immediately go on the air and say, “Fellow Jews, everywhere, we have heard the terrible news, and we must not waste any time, for we just have three days to learn how to live under water.”

The lesson of the story is quite significant: Jews wish the world to know that they are determined to survive even the worst hell, says Bulka. They will mobilize all their energies and abilities to stay alive, even in the midst of severe persecutions. The victims of discrimination and injustice have no other way than to rely upon their wit and intelligence in order to overcome the hatred of their enemies.

Responding With Dignity and Wit

Because they faced discrimination and anti-Semitism so many times in the past, Jews had to find ways of responding with dignity — but often also, with a certain amount of biting wit — to these unwarranted attacks on their personalities. One of these stories brings a Jew and an anti-Semite face to face:

An altercation takes place at a royal reception at Buckingham Palace, between the Jewish philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiore, and an un­friendly Russian Grand Duke.

Shocked that a Jew should have been invited to an aristocratic gath­ering, the Grand Duke slyly remarks to Sir Moses Montefiore that he had just returned from Japan, and he had been intrigued to learn that in Japan, there were neither Jews nor pigs. Sir Moses calmly responds to the Grand Duke, “This is indeed quite interesting. Now, suppose you and I were to go to Japan, it would then have one of each!”

In the battle of wits, unlike other battles, a Jew could win an argument by exposing the absurdity of the prejudice. This approach often became the only way that enabled the Jew to retain his sanity and survive the in­human conditions that were imposed upon him:

An anti-Semite declares without shame, “All our troubles come from the Jews!” The Jew responds: “Absolutely! From the Jews — and the bicycle riders!”

“Bicycle riders? Why the bicycle riders?” asks the anti-Semite. “Why the Jews?” asks the Jew.

This series originally appeared as a single article in Midstream magazine, which was anthologized in Best Jewish Writing 2003

. It is reprinted with permission.

The post Laughing Through the Tears appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Jews have been seeing the humor in their lives for a very long time. The Bible itself recounts how Sarah laughed when told she’d have a child, and our forefather Isaac is named for that laughter. The Talmud, particularly in the aggadic (narrative) sections, is replete with witty asides and repartees, and in one famous account, the Talmud speaks of even God laughing. (Consider the theological implications of a God with sense of humor!) During the medieval period, the valuation of humor was institutionalized in Jewish communal customs, perhaps most famously in Purim shpiels, comic plays based on the Book of Esther, which continue today in Jewish communities across the globe.

But Jewish humor as a distinctive cultural phenomenon first lights up in 19th century Eastern Europe. There, in the marketplace, the synagogue, and in the home, the Jewish joke developed into its own recognizable species. The shtetl (village) became home for the new Jewish-humor folk tradition–stories of the fools inhabiting the town of Chelm but one example. Sustaining and enriching this street humor were new Jewish texts. Jewish writers — including Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz, along with playwrights such as Abraham Goldfaden — mined the bittersweet grumbling of the Jewish ethos and produced lasting classics of Jewish humor, which in turn fed the comic banter of Jewish daily exchange.

What was the genesis of this turn to the humorous? Theorists in the next century offered a parade of hypotheses. Jewish humor, insists one standard view, is all about coping: Jews were miserable, and laughter kept them going. Jewish psychologists further deconstructed Jewish humor as introjections of this external hostility–in other words, self-mockery. Freud writes, “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.” Other commentators suggested the Jewish jest is a survival tactic: By altering one’s perspective, the Jew can accept the unsympathetic world for what it was. “Want to alleviate your big-time worries? Put on a tighter shoe,” advises the Yiddish proverb.

The destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust did not bring an end to the comic Jewish spirit, but it did change both its content and style. In pre-war European Jewry, humor was predominantly an internal affair — the Jewish joke was an inside joke. The comic lines were in Yiddish, the religious allusions were familiar to all, the fears and frustrations shared across classes, and the context of the storyline shared histories.

Then came the 20th century, where the story of American Jewish humor since World War II is largely the story the American humor since World War II. As Jews increasingly entered the American mainstream, they were not telling “insider jokes” but shaping the sense of humor of an entire country, depicting America to America.

In the early part of this Jewish humor explosion, “Yiddishisms” were essential to the repertoire, but this faded along with the European memories. The mid-20th century Borsht Belt shtick–acts that thrived in New York’s Catskills region, where Jews flocked for vacations–thrived on shared immigrant histories and traditions. But by century’s end many of these Jewish references were wearing thin. The majority of American Jews are now more comfortable eating sushi than gefilte fish. Jews are not outsiders, they generally don’t cope daily with anti-Semitism, and the average Jewish income is among the highest.

And yet, from Joey Adams to Jon Stewart, with hundreds of comedians in between, Jews continually dominated the comedy business in every area of media, from stand-up to television to literature to film. Jews cultivated the mainstream forms of cultural satire (think Lenny Bruce and Jon Stewart), self-flagellation (think Woody Allen), and audience flagellation (Jackie Mason, Don Rickles); nurtured American literary humor (Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer); invented and sustained television comedy (Milton Berle, Roseanne Barr, Larry David); dominated stand-up comedy (Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Seinfeld), and on and on.

Some wonder whether Jewish humor will continue to flourish in the years ahead: Will the Jewish funny bone calcify with assimilation? Will the old Jewish comic themes–biting social commentary discomfiting satire, the undermining of the high and mighty, arguments with everyone, including God, the sheer cleverness–continue to drive the Jewish jest?

The traditional answer to all these questions is, “Who knows?” Better we should go directly to the business at hand: Two Jews walk into a shul…. ah, but you heard that one already, no?

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Kate: “What would you tell your father if he came home and I was dead on the kitchen floor?”
Eugene: “I’d say, ‘Don’t go in the kitchen, Pa!'”

–From Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs

Perhaps in a reaction to the raucous teen film comedies of the late 1970s, gentle, “old-fashioned” family comedies made a comeback in the ’80s, many of them nostalgic coming-of-age stories told from a Jewish vantage point. In My Favorite Year (1982), produced by Mel Brooks and written by Blazing Saddles co-author Norman Steinberg, Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker), a young writer on a popular live TV show in the ’50s, is asked to keep a watchful eye on the show’s unpredictable, alcoholic guest star Alan Swan (Peter O’Toole).

Here, Jewish identity is equated with family and ethnicity. In the scene in which Benjy brings Swan home for dinner, the entire apartment house turns out to see the big-shot movie star. Benjy is embarrassed, but Swan longs for the close familial ties of Benjy’s Jewish family, recognizing that despite his fame and riches, he’s spiritually the poorest one at the table.

In Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), the widowed Aunt Blanche (Judith Ivey) of aspiring young writer Eugene Morris Jerome (Jonathan Silverman) wants to date Frank Murphy (James Handy), the nice Irishman across the street, but Kate (Blythe Danner), Blanche’s traditional sister, disapproves: “I know their kind. Remember what Momma used to say to us: ‘Stay on your own side of the street. That’s what they have gutters for.'”

Ignoring her sister, Blanche becomes involved with Frank, who is hospitalized following a drunk-driving accident. When Kate refers to “these people” (i.e. the Irish) as a nation of drunkards, Blanche voices a sentiment not expressed in the Jewish cinema of an earlier age: “Who are you to talk? Are we any better? Are we something so special? We’re all poor around here! The least we can be is charitable!”

Brighton Beach Memoirs‘ message is clear: we Jews, still a struggling people ourselves, must not shun other “outsider Americans.”

TV and the “Me” Decade

“You want to go where people know, people are all the same,
You want to go where ev’rybody knows your name.”
–Theme from Cheers

In the “Me decade,” ’80s TV audiences lost interest in “message” shows like M*A*S*H and All In The Family and tilted toward sitcoms like Silver Spoons and Diff’rent Strokes. “I think as politics became unimportant, people became very self-absorbed and narcissistic, and most humor came right out of that,” said screenwriter Nora Ephron.

One new sitcom countered the trend, remaining relentlessly political. Family Ties, created by Gary David Goldberg, examined the relationship between ex-hippie parents Steven and Elyse Keaton (Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) and their Republican son Alex (Michael J. Fox). The clash between liberal parent and conservative child — the reverse of the All In The Family formula — resonated deeply with many baby boomers who had “Alex P. Keatons” of their own.

Though the Keaton family was ostensibly gentile, the writers of Family Ties (who included Jewish Blazing Saddles co-screenwriter Alan Uger) often addressed Jewish themes, such as racial and religious discrimination. In the pilot episode, for example, Elyse scolds Alex for going to a club that discriminates against “Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, or any other group that didn’t come over on the Mayflower.” The show ends with Alex not joining the club and emerging a more enlightened character as a result.

Another seminal ’80s television show, Cheers (1982-93), was bolstered by its Jewish director, James Burrows, son of legendary comedy writer/director Abe Burrows (Duffy’s Tavern, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Broadway’s Guys and Dolls) and a largely Jewish writing staff, including Tom Leopold, Ken Estin, and Earl Pomerantz. “Cheers took a big step,” says Robert Smigel, “in allowing sex in sitcoms. The Sam and Diane thing was new and interesting–actual characters who really were interested in each other and having sex made it compelling. And it gave other shows permission to take off and explore sexuality.”

Cheers also broke new ground in portraying an interfaith couple raising a Jewish child: The show’s sole recurring Jewish character, Dr. Lilith Sternin Crane (Bebe Neuwirth), and her gentile atheist husband, Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), raise their son, Frederick, as a Jew.

A funny and touching episode late in the show’s run, “For Real Men Only” (1989), deals with the issue of circumcision. Perceiving the ritual as alien and unwanted, Frasier attempts to kidnap Frederick. Eventually, Frasier calms down and, as the couple prepares for Frederick’s bris, announces to his friends, “As you all know, I was raised without a religious tradition, and I’m determined my son shall not be similarly deprived. I’m so grateful to Lilith and her Jewish faith for providing Frederick a heritage of spirituality.” The fact that the cynical, scientific-to-a-fault Frasier Crane was exultant about Judaism underscored the message: spirituality matters.

Quintessentially Jewish & American

“Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens, you never meet anybody, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths that nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts into the hallway.” –Harry Burns to Sally Albright, When Harry Met Sally

Billy Crystal’s portrayal of Harry Burns in the acclaimed film When Harry Met Sally (1989), written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner, reinvented the Jewish protagonist as witty, sensitive, cute, sexy, and testy — a significant departure from Woody Allen (nebbishy) and Jerry Lewis (comically pathetic). Crystal appeared a normal guy, the archetypal American “everyman,” and “everyman” started to look more Jewish.

Interestingly, Nora Ephron did not originally conceive of Harry as a Jew, and his religion never comes up in the film. “Harry was originally conceived, in my mind anyway, as a Christian and Sally as a Jew,” Ephron says. “Not that this was ever explicit. When Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan got involved, that was obviously not going to work, so everyone’s last names were changed. And Billy made the character more like himself, more like a standup comic.”

Despite the Crystal factor, Ephron did not label the film — or her work in general — as Jewish. “What happened to [my generation] didn’t seem to me particularly ‘Jewish’ in any way. Urban, yes. New York, even. But Jewish, no.”

Writer/cartoonist Paul Peter Porges (MAD, The New Yorker, You Can’t Do Business Or Most Anything Else Without Yiddish) believes such distinctions do not change the fact that the film is replete with traditional Jewish humor. “One of the greatest scenes,” Porges says, “is Harry and Sally’s first trip from Chicago to New York. They’re talking and he’s throwing at her all this typical Jewish dialogue, a ‘Crazy Uncle Max’ type of humor. It’s like Crystal’s standup routine about his uncle, who is always asking questions: ‘Nu, when you going to get married? Gonna make a living?’ In this case [after Sally tells Harry that nothing’s happened to her yet and that’s why she’s going to New York], Harry pesters Sally with all kinds of questions about her life”:

Harry: “So something’ll happen to you?”
Sally: “Yes.”
Harry: “Like what?”
Sally: “Like I’m going to journalism school to become a reporter.”
Harry: “So you can write about things that happen to other people?”

This is typical Jewish humor, Porges says, “because it’s visual, it’s davka [meaning ‘just because’], and in your face!” Similarly, he explains, when Harry spits grape seeds at the windowpane and it sticks to the glass, thereby annoying Sally — a Billy Crystal innovation — the gag has a typically visual, “in your face” Jewish flavor.

Billy Crystal has succeeded in synthesizing old-world Jewish values with a contemporary attitude. As a writer/ performer on SNL in 1984-85, he created the washed-up Borscht Belt comic Buddy Young, Jr., a character inspired by his childhood heroes Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, and Jackie Mason.

Crystal was also renowned for his on-the-mark impression of Sammy Davis, Jr. (In one SNL episode, host Reverend Jesse Jackson comments to “Sammy”: “You’re black… you’re Jewish… you’re the whole Rainbow Coalition!”) His blend of Jewish “in your face” comedy and mainstream likeability has paved the way for Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, and other “cute” leading men who are confident, self-assured, and comfortable in their Jewish skins.

Compared to the previous two decades, when most Jewish comedy writers went mainstream (throwing in Jewish references with a “wink” to those in the know), the post Vietnam and “Me” decades of the ’70s and ’80s brought Jewish characters completely out of the closet. These characters evolved from the paranoid Jewish cabbie “Bernie X” in National Lampoon and neurotic Alvy in Annie Hall to the cuddly Billy Crystal. By 1989, the wacky outsider had given way to the witty insider.

Adapted with permission from Reform Judaism magazine.

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