No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  In one iconic episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a survivor of the Holocaust comes to dinner expecting to meet a fellow “survivor” and instead encounters a runner-up of Survivor, the television reality show. The transparent humor in the term’s double entendre grows funnier as the two men compete in recounting their respective sufferings, with their machismo invested in how much each has overcome. The reality show contestant expounds on the deprivations he experienced in the Australian outback—he was reduced to wearing flip-flops! The tough old Jew’s contempt for such a poor excuse for hardship detonates the whole convention of reality shows, but his participation in this sweepstakes of victimhood spoofs as well the catalog of horrors that has become a Jewish badge of honor. If American Jews have indeed reduced their cultural heritage to the Holocaust, and appear to congratulate themselves on the enormity of their loss, they deserve a satirist’s derision. In a cyclic process, the ridicule coarsens Jewishness and a coarsened Jewishness invites ridicule.

  The schlemiel—that once-familiar Jewish comic character—functioned as the underdog who pits his moral strength against the greater political and social powers of the surrounding majority. The schlemiel of Yiddish humor was an innocent—the soldier who, when ordered to charge the enemy with a bayonet, says, “Captain, please show me my man. Maybe we can come to an understanding.” Finding another man in bed with his wife, the schlemiel refrains from waking the usurper lest he also wake the child in the adjoining crib—who turns out not to be his. In this same tradition, U.S. fictional characters, like the eponymous Gimpel the Fool (1945) by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Friedman’s Stern (1962), Bellow’s Herzog (1964), and Malamud’s Fidelman (1969), interpret the perceived unmanliness of the Jewish male, the short guy in glasses, as a moral counterforce to a success-driven world. In many of the parts they played, Danny Kaye and Woody Allen exemplified the weakling who outmaneuvers the generals, the sucker who bests the sages, and the loser who wins the girl.

  It was foolish of me to believe, as I once did, that having been refined to artistic perfection by Sholem Aleichem, reproduced ad infinitum in Jewish joking, and put to use by so many Jewish writers and producers, the schlemiel would have to be retired from Jewish comedy, like the coat in the song that is reduced as it gets worn down progressively to jacket, waistcoat, pocket, and button, until all that’s left of it is the song about the process. Not at all! In came the Bulgarian Jewish novelist Angel Wagenstein’s tragicomic novel of the “life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld through two world wars, three concentration camps, and five motherlands,” which credits as its sources Sholem Aleichem and the whole repertoire of Jewish joking the way that the Talmud credits the Bible as its source. In came the Hungarian-born French writer Adam Biro’s “autobiography” in the form of Jewish jokes that he claims have formed him to the point that telling them is his medium of self-revelation. And in came the young American Jewish novelist Joseph Skibell, who turns the credulous schlemiel of early twentieth-century Vienna into an eponymous “curable romantic,” an ingenious term for the innocent whose life’s journey takes him to Auschwitz. In these literary amalgams of history and invention, fiction and fact, the innocent schlemiel emerges durable, engaging, and morally intact.7

  Very much in contrast, our television schlemiel LD earns the contempt in which he is held. He is now the Jew with influence, thoughtlessly rich. The transformation of this character from harmless to hurtful demonstrates the adjustment of Jewish humor to altered conditions of power and prosperity. Puncturing political correctness in liberal democracies is hardly as dangerous as defying Hitlerism or Stalinism in Europe, which may be why American Jewish comic heroes are no longer necessarily winsome or charming. The man who drives the slickest car on the road can’t claim the naïveté of an eastern European Jew in his wagon, and the owner of the biggest house on the block can’t garner the affection reserved for Molly Goldberg yoo-hooing out of her cramped apartment window. From behind the mask of Hollywood success, the creator of LD exposes the foibles of a community that has no excuse for its moral failures.

  One update, and I am done. In 2010, Howard Jacobson was awarded the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest annual literary honor, for The Finkler Question, a funny study of the current war against the Jews in the birthplace of the Magna Carta. The book turns on the prickly friendship of three aging men—two Jews and a Gentile—who together probe “the Jewish question,” which the non-Jew among them, Julian Treslove, has named for one of the two others, his old schoolmate Samuel Finkler. Finkler’s Oxford degree in moral philosophy has given him the caché to write a series of “practical wisdom guides” with titles like The Existentialist in the Kitchen and The Little Book of Household Stoicism, whose commercial successes he has parlayed into minor celebrity as a television talking head. But the novel’s point of view is that of the more pedestrian Treslove, and its satire is directed mostly at Samuel for the way he embodies the Finkler question.

  Though the plot turns on mourning and love (as his name suggests, Treslove comes close to love without finding it), the novel’s main comic target is Finkler’s obsession with the criminal behavior he attributes to the nation-state of “Israyel” (sneer when you say it). Having joined the British elite, Finkler outdoes the anti-Jews among that class by taking up their hostility to Israel and blaming his fellow Jews for the aggression directed against them. He becomes the creative voice of Britain’s Ashamed Jews—a group whose logo he changes to “ASHamed Jews,” which, he explains, “might or might not, depending on how others felt, be shortened now or in the future to ASH, the peculiar felicity of which, in the circumstances, he was sure it wasn’t necessary for him to point out.”8 Needless to say, this group is chagrined not by any sins of its own but rather by Israel’s alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians. ASH means that where the Nazis dared to go vis-à-vis the Jews, there go the Zionists vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arabs.

  Like all good social satire, Jacobson’s merely exaggerates what is real: in today’s England, Jews are not vilified primarily as capitalists, Communists, or aliens but instead as claimants to their own country and its protection. Contributing to this assault are the political actions of anti-Israel Arabs and Muslims, the recycled anti-Jewish prejudice of a faded aristocracy, and democracy’s recourse to a convenient scapegoat. At the time I write this, the British Academic and Cultural Movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions is trying to persuade the Shakespeare Festival to revoke its invitation to Israel’s Habimah Theater to participate in a multinational commemoration. The fictional Finkler would be among such actual petitioners, for, as the narrator notes:

  To be an ASHamed Jew did not require that you had been knowingly Jewish all your life. Indeed, one among them only found out he was Jewish at all in the course of making a television program in which he was confronted on camera with who he really was. In the final frame of the film he was disclosed weeping before a memorial in Auschwitz to dead ancestors who until that moment he had never known he’d had. “It could explain where I get my comic genius from,” he told an interviewer for a newspaper, though by then he had renegotiated his new allegiance. Born a Jew on Monday, he had signed up to be an ASHamed Jew by Wednesday and was seen chanting “We are all Hezbollah” outside the Israeli embassy on the following Saturday.9

  With a single dart, Jacobson spears Holocaust exploitation—that by now perennial target of Jewish satire—and the Jew’s floundering sense of identity in a declining culture attracted to fanatics who are secure in their cause. But Jacobson has chosen a doubly clever angle for his satire. Rather than taking on anti-Semitism outright, he targets the Jews who have aligned themselves with the anti-Jews. In doing so, he deflects his ridicule from British elites per se and toward the craven Jewish complicity with them. One is tempted to speculate that this is what allowed the Man Booker committee to award him its prize without implicating the cultural establishment, of which it is a representative, among the targets of his satire.

  Be that as it may, let us also not ov
erlook the ASHamed Jew’s attribution of his “comic genius” to his newly discovered Jewishness. This know-nothing claims the license, as his birthright, to exploit for comedy what other Jews have been paying for with their lives. In the course of this book I have tried to highlight warnings against Jewish humor that issue from the best of its practitioners. Some, like Sholem Aleichem and Roth, have pointed out its injurious potential when used to excess. Others, in very different circumstances, have resorted to humor to redress a moral order disfigured by immoral regimes, and have been forcibly silenced by those whom their humor has exposed. The Finkler Question warns us that with the rise of anti-Israel aggression and concurrent slippage of Jewish confidence, a real-life ASHamed Jewish comic may soon be mocking the likes of Jacobson—and perhaps to no less critical and popular acclaim.

  Always eager to “contribute” to the world around them, which was the long-standing precondition of their stay in other people’s lands, Jews in modern times may want to claim humor among the blessings they share with and bestow on their fellow citizens. Returning us to where this book began, the cultural historian Michael Brenner asks, for example, what the history of humor in German would be without the poetry of Heine, anecdotes of Max Liebermann, films of Lubitsch, satires of Kurt Tucholsky, and so forth and so on, and on.10 That these masters of German humor ended in exile and some in suicide, their works banned and burned by the masters of German politics, merely reinforces the benefits of tolerating laughter over its suppression, since what was better for the Jews would have been indubitably and incomparably also better for Germany. It is this correlation between Jewish humor and toleration that the Czech liberal Karbusicky celebrated as the hope for a better Europe.

  Internally, among themselves, modern Jews took for granted the advantages of humor. Two old Jews meet in the Warsaw Ghetto, and one complains to the other of hunger, typhus, and people dying like flies: “Not one of us will survive to the end of the war.” The second comforts him. “Don’t worry. It’s true that you won’t survive, and I won’t survive, but we will survive.” Transcribed in February 1941, this would not make it into the 2012 Broadway review Old Jews Telling Jokes, though the underlying assumption—of a kind of enduring collective triumph over adversity of all descriptions—is as implicit in the jokes of the show as, mutatis very much mutandis, in those of the ghetto. Getting a joke may indeed be the last cultural bond among Jews headed for doom—or doomed to be Jews. Yet the German example also reminds us that Jewish humor, which has set the bar for moral self-correction and self-accountability, also sends a cautionary note. If Jews truly consider humor to have restorative powers, they ought to encourage others to laugh at themselves as well. Let Muslims take up joking about Muhammad, Arabs satirize jihad, British elites mock their glib liberalism, and anti-Semites spoof their politics of blame.

  If the Jewish kind of laughter is truly wholesome, it ought to become universal fare. Until such time, Jews would do well to reexamine their brand and appreciate what it portends. One side laughing is not as harmless as one hand clapping.

  Acknowledgments

  My late teacher Uriel Weinreich identified anonymity as a distinguishing characteristic of folklore. Scholarship demands attribution, but folklore, a category emphatically embracing humor and joking, is a geyser that spouts for anyone with a handy pail. In this book I owe much to humorists whom I cannot identify; nor can I hope to credit all those whose ideas and information I have ingested.

  Some thanks are straightforward. Harvard’s libraries, and especially Widener’s Judaica division headed by Charles Berlin, contain so much more relevant material than I was able to integrate that my gratitude for daily access to its treasures is riddled with anxiety over how much more might have been included. The National Yiddish Book Center and constituent units of the Center for Jewish History provide welcome access to documents and sources via the Internet. Special thanks to Jacob Wisse, director of the Yeshiva University Museum, for making the museum’s resources available to me.

  Among the kinds of materials I consulted are general studies of humor and humorists, specialized studies and anthologies of Jewish humor, studies of humor in other cultures with which Jews interacted, works on authors and texts discussed in this book, works on the emergence of comedy as a modern profession, and visual material, including art and photography, comics and caricature, film and video. Excepting English, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and German, I am dependent on translation, so I owe special gratitude to those who have rendered into English the delights of other languages. My most humbling scholarly source in this project was Dov Sadan, the first professor of Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who served in his own person as a veritable Jewish encyclopedia. Once, overwhelmed by his erudition, I asked how he succeeded in knowing so much; he replied that he gained at least two hours a day by not being able to read English.

  I had help from former and present colleagues, including James Kugel, Jay Harris, Shaye Cohen, Bernard Septimus, Marion Aptroot, and Irit Aharony; excellent editorial advice from Werner Sollors; guidance from Hana Wirth-Nesher, Michael Brenner, Saul Morson, and Yossi Prager; jokes from Menahem Butler and Allan Nadler; and research assistance from Tom Connolly and, longer ago, Kyle Berkman. I borrowed from the cartoon collection posted on the office door of my Harvard colleague Jon Levenson, and drew inspiration from Bill Novak and Moshe Waldoks’s tasteful The Big Book of Jewish Humor, which—dare I say?—rivals Nathan Ausubel’s Treasury of Jewish Folklore (1948) and Treasury of Jewish Humor (1951). Moshe and Bill shared their experiences with my classes at Harvard on “The Comic Tradition in Jewish Culture,” as did members of the Friars Club and the ever-generous Saul Bellow. Among my fellow professors of Yiddish, I owe special thanks to Justin Cammy and Jeremy Dauber, whose work on humor has been a great help to mine. It is my good fortune to have for a brother David G. Roskies, who shares my excitement over Yiddish and Jewish literature, suggests new directions, and inspires by creative example.

  Heartfelt appreciation to graduate students and teaching fellows who contributed to this project over the years, including Debra Caplan, Ofer Dynes, Jessica Fechtor, Jennifer Heilbronner Munoz, Kelly Johnson, Alberto Ribas Casasayas, Sasha Senderovich, Miriam Udel, Asya Vaisman, Yuri Vedenyapin, and Sunny Yudkoff—with special thanks to Eitan Kensky and Dara Horn for their continuing feedback. I am hardly less grateful for the papers and insights of undergraduates in my classes, some of whom have gone on to distinguished careers in comedy. Ross Arbes kindly introduced me to the inner sanctum of the Harvard Lampoon, where I learned, what should not have surprised me, that its most fabled alumnus is my friend George Rohr.

  Bellow’s contribution to Jewish humor far exceeds its citations in these pages; I am grateful to Janis Bellow for her generous supervision of his legacy. Thanks to Ann Charney for constant encouragement, to Lida De Fougerolles for the trip to Prague, and to Gita Rotenberg and Jennifer Roskies for their funds of material. I am as fortunate in my friends as I am in family, and thank each in turn.

  Since Fred Appel of Princeton University Press was the first person I proposed this project to years before I began writing the book, I was delighted that it landed in his capable hands. It has been a true pleasure to work with him along with Sarah David and everyone at the press. Inexpressible thanks to Arthur Fried, Mem Bernstein, and Roger Hertog for their publishing and cultural initiatives, including the Tikvah Fund’s Library of Jewish Ideas, of which this volume forms a part.

  Neal Kozodoy, editor of the Library of Jewish Ideas, oversaw the progress of this book from proposal to publication. Those who have enjoyed his editorial supervision will take me at my word when I credit him for everything sound in it; my book’s shortcomings betray that he could only do so much. I could not have written this without his friendship.

  Although No Joke exposes the threat of a hilarity that impedes effective communal self-protection, it also celebrates the Jewishness into which I was born and raised, and the joys of a Jewish home—ours—that h
as been an incubator of Jewish humor. Our children inherited the talent from their father, and have imported it into their own adult lives and acquired families with reciprocal give-and-take. I hope that Billy and Suzanne, Jacob and Rebecca, Abby and Ben reap as much joy and laughter from their children as they have brought to Len and me.

  This book is dedicated with timeless gratitude to our adored grandchildren, Sonia, Maddy, Resa, Nate, Pearl, Camilla, and Claire, and to our step-grandson, Benjamin.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Immanuel Olsvanger, ed., Royte Pomerantsen: Jewish Folk Humor (New York: Schocken, 1947), 3. This book and its companion volume, L’Chayim (New York: Schocken, 1949), are superior collections of Yiddish humor. Consisting of transcriptions of Yiddish originals into the roman alphabet, they also make effective teaching tools and invaluable guides to regional differences in pronunciation.

  2. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 133.

  3. Ibid., 95.

  4. Ibid., 134.

  5. Theodor Reik, Jewish Wit (New York: Gamut Press, 1962), 136. The phrase Barukh atoh adonoy, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord,” is the opening formula of most Jewish blessings.

  6. Arthur Schnitzler, The Road into the Open, trans. Roger Byers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 113.