Dedication
To my parents, my wife & children & my sister & brother—who all have loved & cherished Jewish humor.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Frontispiece
Dedication
Introduction
I. Jewish Mothers & Jewish Bubbies
II. Sex & Marriage
III. Schlemiels & Schmucks
IV. Yiddish, Generations & Assimilation
V. Celebration
VI. Suffering
VII. Separate & Distinct
Conclusion & Outtakes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Steve Allen, the first television talk-show host and a non-Jew, once troubled himself with the task of assessing the percentage of Jews involved in the American world of comedy—whether in performing or writing and producing—and he came up with a figure exceeding 80 percent. It may not necessarily have been quite that high at the time, and perhaps isn’t now, but from vaudeville and the Catskills to stand-up comedy, television and film comedy writing, and such popular culture phenomena as Mad and Cracked magazines, the National Lampoon, and the Borowitz Report, Jews have continued to play overwhelmingly dominant roles in the world of comedy and humor—even Jews short on much if any sense of Yiddishkeit, Judaism, or what might be termed a Jewish sensibility.
How do we account for such dominance? Gene pool? Culture? A business that a people found themselves at ease working in, through generations, like the Chinese with laundries, the Vietnamese with nail salons, Italians with pizzerias, Koreans with grocery stores, or the Irish with pubs? Or, for that matter, Jews with delis or Jews in the garment industry or Jews as doctors? It is a challenging question and one with no simple answers. But consider the wild range and diversity of the major figures from the world of Jewish humor, through the generations, from the vaudeville and Borscht Belt performers like George Jessel and Fanny Brice; the zaniness of the Marx Brothers; the early goofball comedy of Sid Caesar and Jerry Lewis; the cleverness of the married team of George Burns and Gracie Allen; the breakthrough humor of Shelley Berman and Buddy Hackett; the amiable silliness of Milton (“Welcome, Ladies and Germs”) Berle; the inimitable wit of Jack Benny (“Give me golf clubs, fresh air, and a beautiful partner and you can keep the golf clubs and the fresh air”); the brilliant parody lyrics of Tom Lehrer—
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews
—the slapstick and silliness of the Three Stooges (“And what were you doing in Paris?” “Oh, looking over the Paris sites”); the pop-song satire of Allan Sherman (“Oh, Harry Lewis perished in the service of his Lord/He was trampling through the warehouse where the drapes of Roth are stored”); the mordant satire of Mort Sahl (“A family of agnostics moves into a neighborhood and a question mark is burned on their lawn”); the comic genius and zaniness of Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers, Red Buttons, Jack Carter, Victor Borge, Irwin Corey, and Peter Sellers; the nightclub shtick of Shecky Greene; the aggressive and mocking, caustic humor of Lenny Bruce, Jack E. Leonard or Don Rickles, Joan Rivers and Andrew Dice Clay; the sweet, schmaltzy nostalgia humor of Sam Levinson, Myron Cohen, or Harry Golden; the delightful comedies of Neil Simon; the brilliant wit of writers such as S. J. Perelman, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin, and Mordecai Richler; the comedy column writing of Art Buchwald and Calvin Trillin; or the comedic filmmaking of Billy Wilder, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ivan Reitman, Nora Ephron, Harold Ramis, the Coen brothers, the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams; Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, and Seth Rogen.
Where do contemporary figures such as Roseanne Barr, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and Billy Crystal, or for that matter, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Albert Brooks, Richard Lewis, Gilda Radner, Gary Shandling, Larry David, David Brenner, Howard Stern, Richard Belzer, David Steinberg, Robert Klein, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Chelsea Handler, and Amy Schumer all fit in? Do they? Are there, aside from Jewishness, any real connections or links in all of the wild diversity of the generations? Is there a tribal gestalt of Jewish humor? A lineage? A religious or cultural taproot?
No matter. The contributions of generations of Jews in comedy is something I cannot possibly overstate. On the other hand, notwithstanding towering iconic figures like Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, and Mark Spitz, another question lingers. What is the shortest book ever written? Answer: Great Jewish Sports Heroes.
I believe the first time I told a Jewish joke was in the tenth grade. My social studies teacher, a curmudgeon, was talking to us about the Middle East. I remembered a joke that I thought might amuse sour-faced old Mr. Lehman. So, after class, I asked him if he knew what the fastest thing on water was. He bit and I delivered the punch line: “A Jew in a canoe on the Suez Canal.” It brought him to laughter so hard he had to hold on to his desk.
Fast-forward over four decades later when (name-drop alert) the film director Barry Levinson introduced me to Dustin Hoffman as an English professor and public radio talk-show host who knew more Jewish jokes than anyone else. I could hardly confirm that description, but in the years since telling the Suez Canal joke, I collected an extensive bounty of Jewish jokes. And I relished telling them to Jews and non-Jews alike.
But I was not cut out to be a comedian.
I wanted to be a novelist.
I even got a Ph.D in literature, thinking that, in addition to deferring conscription to Vietnam jungles, it would help me realize my novelist dream. I became a scholar and then, with an unexpected detour, I embarked on a career as a talk-show host on public radio, known more for handling serious and newsworthy subject matter than for Jewish joke telling.
Yet my interest in Jewish jokes increased. I began to do routines of Jewish joke telling at small and then larger venues. As I became more widely known as a radio host, with one of the nation’s largest locally produced public radio listening audiences, the demand increased for me to mount the stage and tell Jewish jokes. I was also able to interview, throughout my years in broadcasting, a number of the great Jewish comedians. But I was not just telling Jewish jokes. I was also analyzing them.
The initial spur to explain meaning in Jewish jokes came from my reading Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a book that tells us how jokes discharge aggression and anxiety, and, of course, conceal deep and often repressed sexual meaning. As a teacher of literature, I came to view jokes, like fiction, as portals to knowledge and ways to see how the powers of storytelling and laughter are linked.
I decided to write a book on the great Jewish jokes and what they mean.
This was a formidable task. Why? Because jokes are often more successfully told than read. The Internet has made many good Jewish jokes simply a click away, and a number of Jewish joke books were already out in the world. But I had a wide-ranging repertoire and I wanted to focus on meaning.
Once I started working on the task I’d set for myself, I expanded into a broad discussion of Jewish humor by bringing in folkloric and stand-up material, television, film, cartoons and comics, as well as jokes. I also realized that I had a wonderful set of anecdotes from personal experience, including decades of interviewing many famous and illustrious people. I wasn’t writing a novel. But I was, in both the jokes and stories, creating narrative.
There is a joke about an Esperanto convention, Esperanto being the once highly touted universal language. In the joke, everyone at the Esperanto convention is speaking Yiddish.
Today, Jewish or non-Jewish, most people need
a search engine to learn what the majority of Yiddish words mean.
Jewish jokes mourn loss, especially of the Yiddish language and culture, both having endured secular change and assimilation. But many jokes succeed in creating humor out of these and other losses, the most powerful of all possibly being loss of religious belief, piety, ritual, and identity. Jewish humor highlights suffering and neurosis but also emerges with laughter. Much Jewish humor simply celebrates life.
So-called Jewish American princess jokes are often misogynistic, even anti-Semitic, but they also celebrate Jewish material success.
Jews are portrayed in jokes as being overly greedy schmucks and also as poor schlemiels.
Jewish jokes canonize Jewish mothers and Jewish grandmothers but also display despair, impotence, and even rage about their overprotectiveness and guilt making.
Sex and marriage are celebrated in Jewish jokes and are also mercilessly ridiculed. Jewish jokes reveal profound feelings of chauvinism and chosenness as well as deep feelings of inferiority and self-laceration.
If ambivalence is the emotional currency of Jewish lives, then the humor of Jews embodies and even embraces it. Perhaps that explains why Jewish humor has become, in many respects, inseparable from American humor. Or even, in our global age, universal humor. A lot of Jewish jokes cross over to other nationalities and cultures and are indeed universal. But, paradoxically, many stand utterly alone and nearly cry out repeatedly with three simple words: WE ARE DIFFERENT.
I.
Jewish Mothers & Jewish Bubbies
“He Had a Hat”
A Jewish grandmother takes her handsome young grandson to the beach. The boy is close to the incoming waves and unexpectedly gets knocked down by a powerful one and is washed out into the ocean. The Jewish grandmother, unable to swim, screams in terror that her grandchild is drowning, pleads for someone to save him, and prays to God for help. As if God hears her anguished cries, a young muscular lifeguard appears and dives into the water. She, meanwhile, is still distraught, terrified that the child has been under the water too long to survive. The lifeguard brings the blue-looking little boy to shore and begins to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him while the grandmother continues to pray. Soon water spurts from the boy’s mouth and he is breathing. The lifeguard reassures the grandmother that her grandson is going to be okay. Whereupon the old lady nods, unclasps her hands from the prayer position, and says to the lifeguard, with a bit of an edge in her voice, “HE HAD A HAT.”
An older Jewish woman, Mrs. Rosenblum, signs up for a difficult trek up the Himalayas with a mostly youthful and vigorous Sierra Club—type group who are told, when they complete the journey to the top, they will meet a guru. With an effort that astonishes and amazes all members of the group and, especially, its youthful leader, she manages to make it to the top. Once they’re all there, the leader tells the group that the guru lives in a cave, which he points to and says, “Right there at the top of the Himalayas.” The young leader informs them: “The guru receives visitors, but please be advised that you can only say three words to him. This is an extraordinary opportunity to be in the presence of, as well as speak any three words of your choice to, this most revered and venerated guru.”
Each of the intrepid hikers files in to meet the guru and speak whatever three words they wish to utter in his presence. This includes Mrs. Rosenblum. When she emerges from the cave, the young leader asks her if she saw the guru. “Yes,” she replies. “I saw him.” The young leader then asks, “And did you say three words to him?” Mrs. Rosenblum replies, “Yes. I said three words.” The curious young leader then asks, “May I ask what those words were?” Mrs. Rosenblum answers: “SHELDON, COME HOME.”
Jewish mothers are quite possibly seen as the most overbearing and overly protective mothers of them all, and have yet to be eclipsed in popular culture by either the tiger mom or the helicopter mother. Philip Roth’s Sophie Portnoy, in his nationally best-selling novel Portnoy’s Complaint, led the archetypal way as the mother of all Jewish mothers—as unrivaled in her ability to tear down her son, Alexander, as she was in revering him. We had Dan Greenberg’s How to Be a Jewish Mother and Bruce J. Friedman’s A Mother’s Kisses. There have been a host of other books, films, and TV shows that served to provide a well-established picture of the Jewish mother being unlike any other mother in the guilt-dispensing category or in smothering overprotectiveness . . . or in adoration.
My own mother would nag and scold as much as kiss. Unfailingly, she would also sob whenever she put the recording on our small Victrola of Connie Francis singing “My Yiddishe Momme.” Her mother, my bubbie, was extremely different from her—not only rooted in the Old World of Russia, but also much easier and simpler to deal with (until senility set in). She was less prone to nag and scold and gave fewer (though wetter) kisses. Perhaps, as the old saw has it, grandparents have greater ease with their grandchildren than parents because they don’t have to raise them. Yet bubbies like mine, with Old World roots, could be even more overly protective than their sons or daughters. A woman friend of mine told me once that when she stayed overnight at her grandmother’s house, she was not allowed to go out to pick up the morning paper in the driveway without her bubbie walking with her and holding her hand. This was as true when she was eighteen as it had been when she was eight.
Another woman friend of mine, the songwriter Rita Abrams, told me when she was in her twenties, her aging grandmother took her to the movies. As they entered the theater, her grandmother commanded, “Get yourself some POPCORN!” Rita said, “It’s okay, bubbie, I don’t want any popcorn.” Her bubbie repeated, “Get yourself some POPCORN!” Rita again declined. But when her bubbie once more insisted, she gave in and got the popcorn. After the movie, they went to dinner. Looking at Rita’s plate, her grandmother observed, “You haven’t eaten very much.” Rita said, “I’m not very hungry.” Her grandmother scolded, “Of COURSE you’re not hungry—after all that popcorn!”
Rita’s story about her bubbie is reminiscent of the joke about the Jewish mother who brings over two new ties as a birthday gift for her adult son. Later, in the evening, the two meet for dinner and the son is wearing one of the ties. His mother takes one look at him and says, “You didn’t like the other tie?”
Mothers and grandmothers can often be seen through a nearly identical lens. The bubbie, however, is a special embodiment of Jewish motherhood—but one that can probably be more accurately described as a Jewish mother on steroids. Bubbies can be pictured as being even more consumed with pride and love for their children’s children than for their own.
Why have Jewish mothers and grandmothers been fodder now for years for such a wide range of jokes that nearly sanctify their over-the-top feelings of love and pride in their children? The definition of a Jewish genius? An ordinary boy with a Jewish mother. Or Jesus obviously being a Jewish boy because he thought his mother was a virgin and his mother thought he was God. Jewish mothers, especially, are often portrayed as braggarts about their children at the same time that they are ridiculed for creating neuroses in them, as in the one about the Jewish mother who boasts to all of her friends that her son sees a psychoanalyst six times a week and, she adds proudly, “He talks mainly about me.” Or the Jewish mother who says, “Yes, my son is in a wheelchair and yes, he can walk perfectly well. But thank God he doesn’t have to!” Are these the same Jewish mothers who are compared in jokes to Rottweilers or, worse yet, vultures (the difference is vultures wait until you are dead to eat your heart out).
Yet generations pass and time and assimilation march on. Many of the young Jewish women thought to be prototypes for portrayals in Jewish American princess jokes are now grandmothers and even great-grandmothers. However, distinctive typing of Jewish mothers and grandmothers remains alive in many of the jokes we tell, hear, and read. We can even go to the line, from an unknown source, about what the mother of Christopher Columbus might have said if she were a Jewish mother (and there are scholars who claim Columb
us was a Jew!): “I don’t care what you discovered. You didn’t call. You didn’t write.”
The joke ending with “Sheldon, come home” has another version to it in which the Jewish mother says, “Enough is enough.” For me, the first version strikes a stronger chord. I told the joke with that ending to my friend the actor Peter Coyote, who, though born Jewish (née Cohon), had by that time become an ordained Zen priest. I kidded him that the joke was obviously about men like him. I also told it to Ram Dass because it easily could have been about him as well, a Jewish boy who went to Harvard and became a spiritual teacher with a name change from Richard Alpert plucked right out of the East (and I don’t mean Brooklyn). The joke resonates with present-day Jews by virtue of the fact that many have taken up Eastern, especially Buddhist, practices. The signifiers that denote this phenomenon, Bagel Buddhist and JewBu, have become part of the popular lexicon. I know a young woman whose mother insisted she go on JDate to find a Jewish mate. She did and soon began to write back and forth with a young Jewish man who seemed promising to her, until he asked her if she practiced yoga. When she responded that she was more into cardio, he sent back a message, completely in caps, that read: I CANNOT DATE ANYONE WHO IS NOT A YOGINI BECAUSE YOU CAN’T BE ZEN.
The name Sheldon dates that joke to another era—few Jewish mothers name their sons Sheldon anymore. It’s a name that has nearly disappeared, like Irving. (My parents knew a man, born Irving Irving, who legally changed his name to Irwin Irwin). But the joke really, at its core, is about a Jewish mother willing to climb the highest mountain peak and do whatever she needs to do to tell her son to come home. She speaks for all the Jewish mothers who wish their sons (and daughters) would come back to their religious home, Judaism. In that sense, the joke is reminiscent of the old ditty I heard as a kid in Cleveland, which juxtaposes the passivity of the old world of the European shtetl with a more assimilated, aggressive America where Jewish boys in Jewish fraternities like ZBT dated shiksas (Gentile girls) on the holiest of nights. A Jewish mother’s lament:
Let There Be Laughter Page 1