No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  How do we think this joke would fare in mixed company? The enormous differences in culture and politics between 1908 Austrian Vienna and Cambridge, Massachusetts, a century later make it all the more curious that sympathetic listeners in both—Georg there and Samantha here—should point alike to injurious strains in this favored Jewish pastime. The laughter invoked to offset anti-Jewish hostility concedes enough of that hostility to be mistaken for the thing itself. What Jews make fun of in their own character reflects to a perilous degree what others object to. Just as inoculations can make you ill if they are too powerful, self-deprecation that is too clever, too constant, too “deep,” may highlight the deformity it is trying to overcome.

  Many of us experience ourselves successively or simultaneously as insiders and outsiders. That morning in the main office of Harvard’s Semitic Museum—originally erected in tribute to the common origins of the three “Abrahamic” religions—telling a joke was a way of creating and enjoying camaraderie among Jews. Its unforeseen consequence was the momentary separation of us in the department along lines other than those of function (academic and nonacademic staff) and gender (males and females). Thanks to Sam’s initiative, the momentary separation between Jew and Gentile was overcome. She may someday shrink it further by marrying the student she is dating. But for the moment, let us note that the discomfort to Sam is also how we know that it was a Jewish joke. You know it is vinegar when you see it separating from oil.

  What to Expect

  Jewish humor rolls cheerfully off the tongue, like French cuisine and Turkish baths. “Jewish humor is one of the wonders of the world,” declares the London Daily Telegraph. “No other community can compete with the range and subtlety of Jewish jokes.”8 Estimates of the proportion of Jewish professionals in U.S. comedy sometimes ran as high as 80 percent. “Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what would remain of American humor in the twentieth century without its Jewish component.”9 The same has been said of Berlin in the 1920s and Russia during the seventy-five years of Bolshevik rule.

  Almost as daunting as the corpus of Jewish humor is the supply of scholarship and commentary that threatens to overwhelm it. In the late 1960s BSE (before search engines), when I wrote my dissertation on the comic figure of the schlemiel as hero of modern Jewish literature, some Jewish psychoanalysts—Freud, Reik, and Martin Grotjahn—seemed the only ones apart from Yiddish literary critics who had thought deeply about the subject. Today, organizations like the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, founded in 1987, and the International Society for Humor Studies, founded in 1989—there is also a (fictitious) Canadian Association for Therapeutic Humour—sit atop an ever-expanding field of scholarship interested in Jewish humor. A bibliography on a subject like the schlemiel would by now fill its own book.

  This burgeoning field of study puts every general claim about Jewish humor to the test. Freud’s observation, cited above, that there are few other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character, has been modified by Christie Davies’s comparison of Jews to Scots, who appear to have a higher proportion of self-deprecating jokes, although not in the same absolute numbers or of the same quality.10 Elliott Oring takes exception to the assumption that Jews are “the people of the joke,” pointing out that as late as 1893, the chief rabbi of London, Hermann Adler, found it necessary to defend Jews against the charge that they were a humorless people.11 Oring argues that Jewish humor as we know it is a late invention. In turn, the conference volume Jews and Humor, which traces the subject from the Bible through Talmud and midrash to modern times, though with an admitted emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, challenges Oring’s contention.12 Hillel Halkin finds the beginnings of modern Jewish humor in the Hebrew geniuses of medieval Iberia.13 Some believe that it starts with the rise of the wedding jester, or badkhen.14

  I cheerfully confess that theories about humor interest me less than the evidence they offer of folk creativity—jokes being the only surviving form of “folklore” that is not protectable by copyright. From the late eighteenth century onward, we have some record of the Jewish humor that bubbled up from below as well as whatever came from writers and intellectuals. Of all the arts, humor depends the most on its immediate context, which makes it hard to generalize about this body of wit shaped variously by different surroundings and circumstances. Getting jokes is usually the hardest stage of acculturation, and the languages in which they joked separated as much as they united Jews in modern times.

  In place of a general theory, I therefore intend to offer a descriptive map of some of the centers where Jewish humor thrived and where it still prospers, drawing examples from literature and mass culture that acted on one another. These comparative instances of Jewish humor in various languages should caution against overly facile generalizations about its provenance and nature. Laughter may be universal, but we will benefit from looking at some of the market conditions governing its production and consumption.

  Since books have to begin somewhere, my point of departure will be Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose impact on Jewish humor was stronger than anyone’s until Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich, 1859–1916), born three years after Heine died. It was Heine who set the tone for Yiddish humor magazines on the Lower East Side of New York in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than did Sholem Aleichem, who shared the language of those magazines. No image of the Jew has exerted stronger influence than Heine’s of the Jewish people as a bewitched prince:

  Hund mit hündischen Gedanken,

  Kötert er die ganze Woche

  Durch des Lebens Kot und Kehricht,

  Gassenbuben zum Gespötte.

  Aber jeden Freitagabend,

  In der Dämmrungstunde, plötzlich

  Weicht der Zauber, und der Hund

  Wird aufs neu ein menschlich Wesen.

  Mensch mit menschlichen Gefühlen,

  Mit erhobnem Haupt und Herzen,

  Festlich, reinlich schier gekleidet,

  Tritt er in des Vaters Halle.

  [As a dog, thinking doggy thoughts,

  he curs it all week long

  through the filth and rubbish of this world,

  while street urchins mock him.

  But every Friday night,

  as dusk falls, suddenly

  the spell is lifted, and the dog

  turns, once again, into a human being.

  As a man, with a man’s thoughts,

  head and heart proudly uplifted,

  dressed festively, cleanly and neatly,

  he enters his father’s house.]15

  The once-sovereign Jew who is now schnorring leftovers in other people’s lands appears in the poem, “Princess Sabbath,” which spans the heights and depths of Jewish experience in a tragi-comic mix. Without ever naming the wizardry that has cast its evil spell on the Jews, Heine deplores what he pictures as their everyday degradation in Europe, except for the interval of dignity they assume once a week in the privacy of their homes. This representation of the Jew fallen from ancient glory and exiled from ancient homeland came from deeper in the Jewish psyche than the competing Christian and anti-Jewish image of the Wandering Ahasuerus who has been doomed for the sin of denying Christ. Many laughed with Heine at his incongruous portrait—laughed ruefully, “with lizards,” as the Yiddish expression had it.

  If the first chapter showcases Heine in the German sphere of Jewish humor, Sholem Aleichem follows as the central figure in the formation of Yiddish humor, drawing from intersecting streams of folk humor that converged wherever Jews lived, exploiting the wordplay of traditional sources and dialectical differences among speakers from various regions.

  Once spoken by more Jews than have ever shared the same language at any time in Jewish history, Yiddish was treated by some as the mongrel of Heine’s sabbath poem and charged with having stolen scraps from other languages. But the vernacular delighted in its hybridity. With little reputation to protect, Yiddish enjoyed flaunting what other
s considered its flaw—its mixtures and fusions—along with the tension between sabbath and weekday, or sacred and profane, that was implicit in the interplay between Hebrew and Yiddish. Yiddish, the subject of my second chapter, gave Heine’s crossbreed the means to speak for itself—even to the point of mocking the culture of Heine. As if to illustrate that Yiddish allowed Jews to escape their caricature, the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Mendele Mocher Sforim (acknowledged by Sholem Aleichem as his literary progenitor) wrote a Yiddish novel in which Heine’s bewitched Jew, in the form of a mare rather than a dog, shames the reformer who tries to “civilize” her.16 According to this version of the fable, Yiddish set the Jewish tongue free, and by allowing Jews to speak for themselves, restored them to human form.

  “Now let us leave the princess and look in on the prince” is how Sholem Aleichem might have spoofed the transition from a chapter on Yiddish to one on humor in English. There was no need for Aesopian language in the lands and language of the free, because in Britain or the United States there was no political censorship of the kind that existed under the Russian czars. Discrimination against Jews abated to the point that Madison Avenue advised, “Dress British, think Yiddish.” Without obscuring the differences between England and its former colony, the chapter on Jewish humor in the English language traces its phenomenal rise and spread from the Borscht Belt to the comedy clubs, from Whitechapel to the Web.

  Jewish comedy must go where the Jews go, into the concentration camps of Adolf Hitler and gulags of Joseph Stalin. The witticism that stands at the heart of this book was recorded in Yiddish in the Warsaw Ghetto: “God forbid that this war should last as long as we are able to endure it.” This saying pits the monomaniac obduracy of the “Final Solution” against the even greater stubbornness of Jewish survival, recognizing, however, that no such plucky stubbornness should ever have been required. By treating fascism and communism in tandem, chapter 4 shows how freely humor under oppression passed from one sphere to the other even as the humorists themselves remained trapped. Russian humor is much more abundant than German humor, but the repressive tactics of the two brutal regimes that are the targets of such jokes induced comparable and often identical humor among their Jews. One might say that modern Jews are known best through their humor and the Holocaust; while this book follows many others in celebrating the virtues of the former, it also explores correlations between it and the latter.

  Finally, I approach what may prove the most lasting topic: emerging Jewish humor in the Land of Israel, where it was least expected to flourish, yet where it is by now as entrepreneurial as technology. Heine’s mutt turned up early on, in unlikely form, in a novel, Only Yesterday, by S. Y. (Shai) Agnon (1888–1970), so far the greatest of Hebrew novelists, and there the dog runs amok—like the humor of which it forms an element. I will not trace the long and troubled path of the book’s hero, Yitzhak Kumer, who arrives as a young settler in Palestine during the pioneering days, except to recall that by way of a joke, Kumer paints the words “mad dog” on the fur of a stray. Jokes have their consequences, and the dog Balak turns mad indeed and fatally bites the man who dubs him mad. That the dog also bears the name of a biblical enemy of the children of Israel invites the myriad interpretations that the book has received. According to Agnon, Heine’s prince may now be restored to his homeland, but he remains in danger of self-transmogrification, of inadvertently doing damage to himself. I cite this famous episode from Only Yesterday merely to suggest how humor in Israel takes up the tradition into which it was born.

  Yet the chapter on Israel also includes jokes that lack the angst of that tradition:

  A rabbi dies and rises to the gates of heaven. As he waits for admission, an Israeli bus driver comes up beside him. Without a second thought, the admitting angel waves the bus driver through. The rabbi cries, “Hey! How come he gets in so quickly? He’s a bus driver, while I’m a rabbi!” The angel explains, “When you delivered your sermons during the prayer service, the whole congregation fell asleep. When this man drove to Tel Aviv, all his passengers were praying to God!”

  Like the joke about Mrs. Rosenberg inspecting the poultry, this one, too, with a little tweaking, could be transposed to an Irish Catholic context.

  With What Do We Eat It?

  This book’s inquiry into the varieties of Jewish humor in different languages and under diverse conditions hopes to advance our understanding of its various parts along with our appreciation of the whole. There is no denying that humor, the consummate insider’s sport, has flourished among Jews, prompting us to ask why this activity should enjoy such widespread popularity. The subject begins to interest us at the point that humor is identified by others and Jews themselves as a Jewish specialty, a pursuit disproportionately associated with Jews. That this occurs only at certain points of intersection between tradition and modernity helps us arbitrate the dispute between those who want to trace its origins back to biblical times, and others who insist on its contemporaneity. Jewish humor obviously derives from Jewish civilization, but Jews became known for their humor only starting with the Enlightenment. As this book will show, it responds to conditions of Jewish life, but only where it becomes the response of choice.

  This focus on Jewish humor at the point that the phrase begins to trip off the tongue accounts for what some readers may resent as the Eurocentrism of this book. Comedy and laughter are common to all cultures, and for most of Jewish history, humor was no more observably associated with Jews than with other religious or ethnic groups. In some parts of the Jewish world, this remains the case. The Ladino folktales of the Jewish trickster Joha bear a close resemblance to the Arabic ones of the Muslim trickster Juha and his Turkish counterpart Nasreddin, but recent collectors of these tales do not claim they were any more prominent among Jews than their analogous versions among other peoples of Yemen, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, or Morocco. Jewish humor in Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish, or Judezmo (Ladino), generated no treatises about the schlemiel or schlimazel, and no theories about parody as compensation for powerlessness. Jews laughed in Casablanca as they did in Kraków, and maybe at some of the same things, but though there are scarcely five hundred Jews left in Kraków, its bookstores still carry Polish collections of Jewish humor, whereas today’s Casablanca, with more than ten times as many Jews, has no such Arabic equivalent. Jews of Arab lands appeared to have acquired no comparable reputation for humor.

  The Yiddish expression, mit vos est men es? (With what does one eat this?) means something like, “Please explain to me why this matters?” or, “How does this apply?” That Jewish humor becomes prominent at a certain point does not yet address its significance or functions. How and why does it explode at the point when ghetto doors are breached, and as Jews begin mingling with fellow Europeans who also are being granted new rights and freedoms? Suppose we establish that it gains momentum among Jews who lose divine justification for their exceptionalism and now face the world stripped of the authority of the covenant in whose name they were Jews. Suppose we see its escalation in times of threat—which are nothing new in a history replete with massacres, expulsions, and inquisition, but are now experienced for the first time without the perceived protection of God in whose name Jews are being threatened. Suppose we can demonstrate that Jewish humor erupts at moments of epistemological and political crisis, and intensifies when Jews need new ways of responding to pressure. Does this mean that humor compensates them for the absent security? Does it work to their benefit or detriment? Does it become a secular expression of their identity? And what do these findings tell us about the universal significance and functions of humor?

  To be sure, Oring’s cautionary note about the chief rabbi of London reminds us that not everyone savored Jewish humor to the same degree. Observant Jews who kept their cultural distance from Gentile society, whether in Christian or Muslim lands, did not all take up the Jewish sport with the same enthusiasm as those who relished contradictions between the foundational idea of Jewish chosenness an
d the historical record of persecution. At the other end of the religious spectrum, young people dedicated to socialist or nationalist political action did not appreciate ridicule of their goals. “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” “That’s not funny!” Ideologues do not welcome levity. Joking flourishes among those who sustain contrarieties, tolerate suspense, and perhaps even relish insecurity. Many writers featured in this book are situated—none put it better than Franz Kafka—with their posterior legs still glued to their father’s Jewishness, and their waving anterior legs finding no new ground. But other Jews preferred to seek out steady, level land.

  As for Jewish humor’s genealogy, scholars are certainly justified in tracing its roots to its sources in the Bible and Talmud. One might locate the seeds of Jewish skepticism in Sarah’s laughter when she is informed in Genesis 18:12 that she and Abraham, at their very advanced age, will conceive a child. “Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?’ ” Joking frequently exposes unauthorized truths, and Sarah’s trust in biological probability over divine prophecy is an early example of the cognitive independence that Judaism encourages. Biblical challengers to authority often outdid even the boldest of moderns in daring, and the Talmudic record of disputation supplies incontrovertible proof that Abraham and Job invited emulation on the part of generations of rabbis. Yet the Bible confirms that Sarah did bear Isaac, and duly named her son Yitzhak, signifying a laughter of joy more than cynicism; Abraham’s challenge to God over His intention of destroying Sodom is finally quashed by the wickedness of that condemned city. In each case, the Bible’s claim of divine authorship guarantees the predominance of the Lord’s point of view. Modern humorists, in contrast, challenge authority without conceding its supreme authority.