No Joke

Similarly, while Jewish tradition offers occasions of merriment and templates for humor, these are part of an ultimately, if not at all times, well-ordered universe. Jews everywhere celebrated the feast of Purim that recorded the improbable political victory of their ancestors Esther and Mordecai over their archenemy Haman in Persia. On that day of merrymaking, the Talmud encourages drinking to the point that one can no longer distinguish “cursed be Haman” from “blessed be Mordecai.” Some communities of eastern Europe got into the spirit of inversion by appointing a Purim rabbi to upend homiletics for a day. But in the 1930s, as we will see, a Yiddish writer forging his own rendition of the Purim story felt it necessary to add a jilted lover and failed assassin to the cast of characters to represent the disastrous realities of Jewish politics that stood in ironic contrast to the victory recorded in the Book of Esther. Rather than celebrating the exception, he reintroduced the more likely failure, reversing the reversal, recording what the Jews of Europe were actually experiencing in his time.

  Modern Yiddish “proverbs” did the same with the liturgy: “Thou hast chosen us from among the nations—why did you have to pick on the Jews?” “God will provide—if only He would provide until He provides.” “Pray to the Lord—and talk to the wall.” Whereas religion reinforced God’s promise, modern humor questions His constancy. True, modern scholarship has found commonalities in the language play of the midrash and Marx Brothers, and some of this material will be alluded to in the following chapters. But it was only in the modern period that humor became the aim of such entertainment as opposed to a delightful by-product of otherwise-earnest interpretation.

  All this is to say that this book explores Jewish humor at the point that it becomes a modern phenomenon. A creation of the Jewish people, drawing on its texts and habits of mind as well as heart, reflecting its historical development and interaction with surrounding cultures, it emerges from Baruch Spinoza’s mid-seventeenth-century denial of any functional reciprocity between the divine and human spheres, thus undercutting the philosophical basis of the covenant without dissolving the community formed by its demands. The ensuing rifts between the religious and agnostics, elites and masses, and especially warring impulses of loyalty and restiveness within individual Jews and their communities generates the humor that is this book’s subject. Jews who found cognitive security in tradition or revolution may not have needed humor to reconcile their contrarieties, but they became the unwitting butt of the conflicted Jews who did.

  An association with humor would seem to have benefited Jews, since physiologists nowadays confirm the advantages of joking, long since touted by philosophers:

  [Laughing] lowers blood pressure, reduces stress hormones, increases muscle flexion, and boosts immune function by raising levels of infection-fighting T-cells, disease-fighting proteins called Gamma-interferon and B-cells, which produce disease-destroying antibodies. Laughter also triggers the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, and produces a general sense of well-being.17

  A popular Web site lists among the benefits of laughter everything from the relief of physical tension and prevention of heart disease to strengthened friendships and the promotion of group bonding.18 Sholem Aleichem was fond of saying, “Laughter is good for you. Doctors prescribe laughter.”19 Now that its therapeutic value is being scientifically confirmed, why would anyone question the merits of joking?

  Yet I am obliged to ask whether an excess of laughter might exacerbate the tensions it is meant to alleviate. Can a surfeit of comedy be unhealthy? Is there a point at which too much joking could cause someone harm? In his biography of Lenny Bruce, Albert Goldman describes a fellow comedian engaging in what Germans call Todlachen—making people helpless with laughter so that they beg him to stop. “When he sees you’re on the ropes, going down, he works twice as hard to kill you. Zooms in close to your face, locks onto the rhythms of your body, lasers and razors you till finally you tear yourself away.”20 The ostensible provider of psychic relief appears to have become an instrument of torture. As it happens, Sholem Aleichem uses the quoted tagline, “Doctors prescribe laughter,” at the end of a story that takes its hero beyond comedy into madness. Speaking as the professed comic writer, he asks the readers’ pardon for having been unable to rescue the humor from its end in tragedy. The late rabbi Joshua Schmidman, who had considered becoming a stand-up comic but found himself officiating instead at a great many funerals, was fond of reminding his congregation that Judaism considered dying only a minhag, not a mitzvah. He might have said the same about joking: it is only a custom, not a religious imperative, and it is a custom that may be revved up into overkill.

  Caveat Emptor

  I was once addressing an academic audience, and caught off guard by a request to tell them my favorite Yiddish joke, could only come up with a quip attributed to the Zionist activist Shmaryahu Levin: di yidn zenen a kleyn folk, nor paskudne, “Jews are a small people, but rotten.” A deadly silence fell, and my discomfort was so great I felt obliged to try to explain: “The expected reversal introduced by ‘but’ is supposed to be followed by a mitigating quality to compensate the Jews for their ‘smallness.’ Instead, it damns them for their nastiness,” or words to that effect. All the while, I was thinking, How fortunate the audience that doesn’t understand Levin’s sally! Anyone who lives at the heart of the Jewish community—of any community—and is fighting an uphill battle for what they think is in its best interest would appreciate the frustrations that triggered this epigram. Levin (1867–1935) might happily have traded in the witticism for a stretch of Jewish history calmer than the one he had to navigate.

  An analogous moment of bitter intimacy occurs in the wondrous story “Gedali” by the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel (1894–1940). The tale is based on Babel’s own experiences as a Soviet propagandist for the Bolshevik revolution. His narrator, Lyutov, is accompanying the Red Army as it fights its way into Poland, harassing (to put it mildly) the Jews in the small towns it occupies. One Friday evening, Lyutov is engaged in a conversation with a Jewish shopkeeper, Gedali, who cannot reconcile the revolution’s stated intentions with the barbarous actions of its enforcers. The old Jew complains, “The International, comrade, one does not know what to eat it with.” “One eats it with gunpowder,” I replied to the old man, “And seasons it with the finest blood.”21

  Gedali’s Yiddish expression, mit vos est men es, translated in the Russian text, conveys how much understanding still exists between these two politically divided Yiddish speakers, and also between the author, Babel, and the native language and culture that he is suppressing. Lyutov’s reply is as brutal as the actions of the Cossack soldiers. Of all those who justified Bolshevism, no one ever assumed as much moral blame for it as this Jewish writer from the Odessan Jewish heartland, who did finally season it with the finest blood—his own. Babel exaggerated his complicity with evil in order to exploit for irony the paradoxes of a Yiddish-speaking Jew (himself) defending the violence of Cossacks to a fellow Jew with whom he then welcomes in the sabbath.

  My discussion of humor, which includes all manner of comedy, satire, and irony commensurate with the ironies of Jewish experience, goes well beyond light entertainment and what some consider funny. It is therefore not surprising that in the following chapters, some of the strongest warnings against the excesses of humor come from its finest practitioners—Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Babel, and Philip Roth—which of course did not prevent them from continuing the practice. If there were an Olympics for irony, Hatikvah (The Hope), might be the most played national anthem in the world. The Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky is reputed to have said of it, “Don’t count on me to stand still during the singing of the national anthem if at the same moment I feel someone picking my pocket.”

  When they search for universal aspects of human behavior, social scientists—many of them Jews—sometimes underplay the distinctions among cultures. But as long as Jewish experience remains distinctive, so, too, will its impulse for laughter. Th
is book demonstrates how the benefits of Jewish humor are reaped from the paradoxes of Jewish life, so that Jewish humor at its best carries the scars of the convulsions that brought it into being.

  Which might have remained an insular problem were it not for the fact that by now, much of the United States is almost as addicted to joking as are the Jews. News programs regularly end with comic segments, as though the reporters were charged to leave ’em laughing. We are told that most young people take their news straight—straight from the comedians. When did news get to be an excuse for comedy? Or rather, when did Americans begin to deal with the news by laughing at its absurdities and their own attempts to solve the problems of the world?

  Laughter may be the best medicine, but conscientious doctors also warn against overdose.

  1

  German Lebensraum

  “[Do] you believe that one’s inner nature is completely altered by baptism? Do you believe that one can change lice into fleas by pouring water on them?”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t, either, and for me it is a sight as melancholy as it is ridiculous…. I have seen on the street in Berlin old daughters of Israel wearing long crosses at their throats, crosses that were longer than their noses and reached to their navels; in their hands they held a Protestant hymn book, and they spoke of the splendid sermon they had just heard in Trinity Church…. Even more repellent to me was the sight of dirty bearded Jews who came out of their Polish cloaca in order to be solicited for heaven by the Conversion Society in Berlin, and preached Christianity in their mumbling dialect and stank so horribly. It would in any case be desirable if one were to baptize that sort of Polish lice-folk not with ordinary water but with eau de Cologne.”

  “In the house of the hanged,” I interrupted him, “one does not talk about ropes, my dear doctor.”

  —Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: A Memorial

  At the dawn of the twentieth century, when Theodor Herzl drew up his vision for the Jewish future in Palestine, he included a withering portrait of the European Jews he was hoping to transform. His 1902 novel, Altneuland (Old-new land), features Viennese Jews afraid to speak freely in front of their Christian servants and young professionals with no practical prospects of employment or matrimony. In the novel, a Dr. Friedrich Loewenberg, an “educated, desperate young man,” attends a lavish engagement party—really a disguised business merger between the families of a well-born male and the female whom Loewenberg himself is hoping to marry. For Herzl, the scene demonstrates why Jews need a home in Palestine even more urgently than Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland, needs the return of its Jews.

  The dinner guests whom Herzl mocks include a financial speculator, several industrialists, a representative of Baron Goldstein (read Rothschild), and Messrs. Gruen and Blau, the “two wittiest men in Vienna.” “Why so late, Mr. Gruen?” asks the hostess. “Because I could come no later.”1 Returning insult for courtesy, the entertainers Gruen and Blau are evidently much in demand: “no reception, no wedding, no betrothal party or anything else comes off without them.” Herzl shows us a Jewish society that fearing the Gentiles, cultivates an aggressive humor whose malice is directed chiefly against its own kind. Thus, when another invited guest, Rabbi Weiss from a provincial town in Moravia, ventures some shy remarks about the new movement to resurrect a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the two wits lead the charge in merriment. Gruen volunteers to be Palestine’s new ambassador to Vienna. Blau protests that too many Jews would be competing for that post. In any case, Goldstein should be the appointed king of the Jewish land, rewarding public benefactors with the Order of the Fleishik Sword—an allusion to the kosher laws that require separate cutlery for dairy and meat.

  Herzl was a popular dramatist before he became a political leader, and here he appropriates for his own satiric purposes the barbs that were already greeting his Zionist idea. But in the latter part of the novel, where he sketches his vision of the new society in Palestine, he turns the tables on Gruen and Blau. The two men, having come to visit the land whose emergence they once ridiculed, are being shown around by Friedrich, who is now their host.

  Gruen, the jester, was holding forth. “Well, Dr. Loewenberg, and how do you like it here? What! You find no words! Perhaps you think there are too many Jews here!”

  Laughter. “I am frank to say,” remarked Friedrich slowly, “that you are the first person to have made me think so.”

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! Very good!” laughed [one of the visiting Viennese]. The others joined in the merriment. Only then did Friedrich realize that his remark had been construed as one of the rude wisecracks common in this set.2

  Friedrich, that is, has been witty only unintentionally. In harmony with himself, he no longer has need of double meanings. Irony is for those who accept the threatening conditions in which they choose to live, whereas the new society tackles imperfection instead of joking about it. Where Jews are free to realize their ambitions to the limits of their abilities, the wit of Gruen and Blau is stale and superfluous.

  How very different from Herzl’s disparagement of self-directed Jewish wit is the praise of its restorative value by his Viennese contemporary Freud! The founder of psychoanalysis was a great lover of Jewish joking, and for many years collected material for the study that would appear in 1905 as Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He appreciated one-liners: “A wife is like an umbrella; sooner or later one takes a cab.” He was fond of wordplay: old people fall into “anecdotage”; the Christmas season kicks off the “alcoholidays.” He especially favored Jewish jokes in which matchmakers, rabbis, and sophisticated beggars, or schnorrers, upend our expectations of them:

  The young man was most disagreeably surprised when the proposed bride was introduced to him, and drew aside the shadkhen—the marriage broker—to whisper his objections: “Why have you brought me here?” he asked reproachfully. “She’s ugly and old, she squints, and has bad teeth …” “You needn’t lower your voice,” interrupted the broker, “she’s deaf as well.”

  Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. “Where are you going?” asks one. “To Cracow,” replied the other. “What a liar you are!” objects the first. “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?”

  A schnorrer, who was allowed as a guest into the same house every Sabbath, appeared one day in the company of an unknown young man who was about to sit down at the table. “Who is this?” asked the householder. “He’s my new son-in-law,” the schnorrer replied. “I’ve promised him his board for the first year.”3

  In the first joke, expecting the shadkhen to parry the young man’s objections, we are surprised that he reinforces them instead. In the second, convolution, which normally serves to obscure the truth, ends up confirming it. In the third, the beggar assumes the host’s prerogative, manifesting largesse at the expense of his benefactor. Reversal, displacement, and turning the tables are the wellsprings of a tradition that mocks the contradictions of Jewish experience—the gap between accommodation to foreign powers and promise of divine election. Although many religions acknowledge a tension between the tenets and confutations of their faith, few have had to balance such high national hopes against such a poor political record. Jewish humor at its best interprets the incongruities of the Jewish condition.

  But I am doing what Freud does not. Though he draws heavily on the humor of his native Jewish culture, he extrapolates from it only such findings as are presumably universal. He is interested in the relation of joking to other psychological phenomena, not in relation to Jews. “[We] do not insist upon a patent of nobility from our examples,” he writes. “We make no inquiries about their origin but only about their efficiency—whether they are capable of making us laugh and whether they deserve our theoretical interest. And both these two requirements are best fulfilled precisely by Jewish jokes.”4

  One can�
�t help musing on the analyst’s reluctance to comment on the Jewishness of the Jewish material he discusses. Take a phrase like “patent of nobility”—transposed from the Yiddish yikhes-briv, a hybrid Hebrew-Yiddish term for pedigree. The irony implicit in Freud’s use of the term, which follows a joke about Jews’ aversion to bathing, derives from the distinction between Jewish and Christian-European concepts of nobility, with each side looking down on the standards of the other. Freud’s obvious pride in the claim of Jews to primogeniture as well as cultural and ethical advantages over their Christian overlords belies the scientist’s claim to be transcending parochialism.

  Only once in this book does Freud indulge in some speculation about the specifically Jewish affinity for humor. He does so during a discussion of tendentious jokes, “when the intended rebellious criticism is directed against the subject himself, or, to put it more cautiously, against someone in whom the subject has a share—a collective person, that is (the subject’s own nation, for instance).” In other words, Freud makes a distinction between jokes directed by Jews at Jews and jokes directed at Jews by foreigners—not because the former are any kinder, but instead because Jews know the connection between their own faults and virtues. “Incidentally,” he concludes this part of the exploration with a sentiment already cited in the introduction, “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.”5 The offhand quality of this observation has not prevented it from becoming the most quoted sentence in Freud’s book, perhaps because others have realized better than the author how much it says about the Jewish condition.

  Herzl and Freud, otherwise so alike in their German Jewish ambience and restless intelligence, reached opposite conclusions about Jewish humor. Both recognized its connection to anti-Jewish hostility, but Freud admired what Herzl—like Schnitzler in Der Weg ins Freie—feared. Freud put up with anti-Semitism in much the same way that he accepted civilization with its discontents (to paraphrase the title of one of his most famous works).6 He therefore welcomed joking as a compensatory pleasure—the expressive venting of people who lived under the double weight of their own disciplining heritage and the collective responsibility to behave well among the nations. Herzl, in contrast, wanted to alleviate anti-Semitism for the betterment of Europe as well as the Jews.