Jewish mothers are also portrayed, as the one is in the kugel joke, as being overly concerned with what other people think. There was obvious concern and pride invested in what others might think of these Jewish mothers based on their children’s ability to eat. My sister, Lois, now herself a Jewish mother and grandmother, will never be at peace over the fact that our beloved mother sent her to Fresh Air Camp, concerned Lois was too thin. What might others think? That she did not feed her daughter enough? That she was a bad mother?
The fact is, the Jewish-mother stereotype parodied in guilt-themed jokes is now dated, though vestiges and, of course, the jokes all remain.
A Jewish mother’s daughter calls to inform her that she has fallen in love with a wonderful man and is getting married. The mother is ecstatic and eager to know all the details. However, before she can inquire about her daughter’s fiancé, the daughter informs her that he is [insert ethnicity here]. The daughter then tells her mother that her husband-to-be is unemployed. But, the daughter exclaims, she loves him madly and intends to be his wife. To her surprise, her mother tells her that she and her fiancé are welcome to come and stay as long as they want. “Your father,” the mother says, “will sleep on the couch and the two of you can sleep in our bedroom.” Whereupon her daughter asks, “But what about you, Mother? Where will you stay?” Her mother answers: “Don’t worry about me, darling. As soon as we hang up, I intend to put my head in the oven.”
The Jewish mother in the joke prefers martyrdom to living with an interfaith or interracial marriage for her daughter, but it is important to note, given the strong bourgeois values of many Jewish Americans, the Jewish daughter’s choice of a mate is also a violation of her mother’s wishes that she marry someone with a lucrative job, a man who is a good provider of naches if not money. The mother will provide a roof and shelter for her daughter and her daughter’s fiancé, but she will give up her own life, imposing a lifetime of guilt on her daughter.
The generational clash in Jewish values is on display in this next joke, where a daughter tries to enlist her mother’s help in dating following a failed marriage.
Hi, Mom. Can I leave the kids with you tonight?
You’re going out?
Yes.
With whom?
With a friend.
I don’t know why you left your husband. He is such a good man.
I didn’t leave him. He left me!
You let him leave you, and now you go out with anybodies and nobodies.
I do not go out with anybody. Can I bring over the kids?
I never left you to go out with anybody except your father.
There are lots of things you did and I don’t.
What are you hinting at?
Nothing. I just want to know if I can bring the kids over tonight.
You’re going to stay the night with him? What will your husband say if he finds out?
My EX-husband. I don’t think he would be bothered. From the day he left me, he probably never slept alone!
So you’re going to sleep over at this loser’s place?
He’s not a loser.
A man who goes out with a divorced woman with children is a loser, a parasite.
I don’t want to argue. Should I bring over the kids or not?
Poor children, with such a mother.
Such a what?
With no stability. No wonder your husband left you.
ENOUGH!!!
Don’t scream at me. You probably scream at this loser, too.
Now you’re worried about this loser?
Ah, so you see, he is a loser. I spotted him immediately.
Good-bye, Mother.
Wait! Don’t hang up! When are you bringing them over?
I’m not bringing them over! I’m not going out!
If you never go out, how do you expect to meet anyone?
The mother’s ambivalence about her daughter’s divorced status is maddening—she wants her daughter to be a responsible and devoted wife and mother at the same time that she recognizes the need for her daughter to find someone to replace her no-good, two-timing husband. But also, of course, the Jewish mother is a doting Jewish grandmother. She makes her daughter feel guilty for not being able to keep a husband and provide an intact home for her (the mother’s) grandchildren. The power of a Jewish mother to instill guilt in her child is right at the core of this dialogue. Moreover, the Jewish mother can see only clouds in what could be the silver lining of losing a rotten son-in-law.
It may go without saying, but I’ll say it: traditional Jewish mothers or Jewish grandmothers want their sons, daughters, and grandchildren wed. My sister, Lois, divorced for many years, was convinced, even when our mother was in a coma, that Mom would come out of it if only Lois could announce that she had found a worthy groom. A Jewish woman friend of mine, in her sixties and a Jewish grandmother herself, confided to me that she drove long distances to shop for groceries lest she run into people she knew in her own neighborhood who might ask her about the marital status of her single, forty-year-old daughter.
An older Jewish grandmother is sitting alone on a park bench when a dissolute and sinister-looking, heavily tattooed man suddenly sits down beside her. She asks where he is from, quickly adding that she sits on the bench every day and has never seen him before. He says, in a low, muttering, intimidating voice, “I just got out of prison.” “For what?” the old Jewish lady asks. “I killed my wife,” he says. In an enthusiastic, Yiddish-inflected voice, she responds, “Ohhh, you’re single!”
The fact that the man is undesirable, a convicted wife murderer no less, makes the joke funny. And yet this is another joke about the loss of Jewish identity. The Jewish grandmother is interested in someone as a potential husband, if not for herself, then, more likely, for a daughter or granddaughter, even if the single man is a wife killer. The single man also likely is not a Jew, given his tattoos; and his status as an ex-con does not make him a promising marriage prospect. The joke is, pointedly, about marriage as an end in itself for Jews.
Marriage is a form of naches. The meaning of many jokes, like the last one, is that Jewish mothers or grandmothers will do whatever it takes to find whatever can shep naches (provide pride and joy). It is best, of course, with a husband who is Jewish, and better yet, with one who is successful. But the joke suggests naches must be attained at any cost. A potential husband is a potential husband.
Saul Bellow’s great, sprawling, award-winning Jewish American novel The Adventures of Augie March was originally titled Life Among the Machiavellians, meaning those for whom the ends justify the means. The title applied mainly to the men in the novel but could as easily have been applied to the character of Grandma Lausch. She is not the biological grandmother of Augie and his brother Simon, but like a true Machiavellian Jewish grandmother, she will do whatever it takes to see that the children in her charge are cared for. She places a premium on education and, if necessary, is tough and tyrannical in the pursuit of a single end—making the brothers into mensches. This is where Jewish mothers and grandmothers appear to excel, and it is what has made them—and continues to make them—objects of love and admiration as well as targets of ridicule for the anxiety and guilt they engender. You have the four Jewish grandmothers who are having lunch together in a restaurant when the waiter walks up to their table and asks, “Is anything all right?” Or the joke about the beggar who tells a Jewish grandmother he hasn’t eaten in a week, and she says: “Force yourself.”
If you delve deeply into the often-stereotyped portraits of Jewish mothers and Jewish grandmothers that emerge from the wide and disparate pool of jokes about them, you discover as much exasperation as you do recognition of the central part they play in shaping futures and forging lives.
Let’s not forget the classic one-liner about the Jewish mother who sends a telegram that reads: begin worrying. details to follow.
II.
Sex & Marriage
“My name is Tonto Goldstein”
/> A man looks at a scraggly and bedraggled parrot he sees in a cage at a pet store. The owner of the pet store tells him he can have the parrot for a couple of bucks but warns him that the bird, a female, says only one word. Soon the man hears the female parrot squawk the one word, repeating it over and over: “HORNY.” The man pays the owner two bucks, takes the parrot, in its worn and rotted cage, home with him, and finds a friend waiting for him in his driveway. The friend, naturally, asks about the parrot and is told of its single-word vocabulary, which, soon enough, the friend hears as the parrot again squawks, “HORNY,” and repeats it again and again. “HORNY. HORNY.” “Listen,” says the friend. “I know a guy who has parrots that daven and say Hebrew prayers all day long. Why don’t we take your parrot and expose her to them? She can learn to say pious and holy words instead of constantly saying ‘HORNY.’” The owner of the parrot is dumbfounded and cannot believe there are really praying parrots, but he goes along with his friend. They drive over, with the parrot, to the home of the man who owns the davening parrots. Sure enough, once they get inside the house, the parrot owner sees two parrots in a cage with small skullcaps on their heads and lovely little tallises, prayer shawls, draped across their feathers. It is incredible! Unbelievable! The two parrots, on top of their perches, are swaying back and forth, muttering Hebrew words in unison, in deep prayer. “Let’s do it,” says the owner’s friend, and the owner takes the female parrot out of her cage and puts her in the cage with the two pious, praying parrots. No sooner is the female parrot in the cage than she squawks, “HORNY,” and the two male parrots stop praying and together shout, “OUR PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED.”
It is the night of the marriage of a young Orthodox man. He seeks advice from his rabbi about the wedding night. “Rabbi,” he begins, somewhat flustered and embarrassed, “I’m afraid I have three questions. I need to know, first, if it is okay for me to have relations with my wife doing what they call doggy style.” A wise and compassionate man of erudition, the rabbi goes to his voluminous bookshelves and takes down one of the tomes. “Right here, in the twelfth century, Rabbi Yitzhak ben Gashtroodle says it is not only okay to have sex with your bride in that way, it is a machaya!” “Good,” says the young man. “But what about doing it with my wife on top of me.” Unblinking, the rabbi takes another volume from the shelf, opens it, and announces to the answer-seeking groom, “Here it is in black and white, going back to the ninth century. Rabbi Akiva Pupik says it is good to have one’s bride on top on the wedding night, a blessing.” “Fine,” says the young man. “Then I only have one final question. What about our doing it standing up?”
Outraged, the Orthodox rabbi shouts, “Standing up? Absolutely not! That could lead to dancing!”
For practicing Jews, marital sex has always been a mitzvah, both a commandment and a good deed, and the subject of sex has long provided grist for Jewish humor and Jewish jokes. Much of the material is based on stereotypes of oversexed men; passive, cowed, and docile husbands; and undersexed women, domineering wives, and Jewish American princesses. Much also has changed thanks to the work of feminists, many of whom have been Jewish, such as Betty Friedan, Bela Abzug, Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, and Gloria Steinem. Though I have interviewed all of these women, I know Gloria best. We have become friendly through numerous interviews over decades. I used to call her my “landsperson” instead of landsman. (A landsman refers to someone who originates from the same region or territory as you do.) Gloria is from Toledo and I am from Cleveland. But she informed me after one of our interviews that her mother was Presbyterian and she herself knew little about Judaism or Jewishness until she left Toledo.
Joan Rivers, early on, had a quiverful of self-deprecatory, well-delivered lines, rendered with aggressive gusto, about her lack of sex appeal, like the one about prison guards using nude pictures of her to curb the sex drive of men on death row. Or, as she aged, her line about wearing open-toed shoes to show off her breasts. A good deal of the humor of Jewish women has been tied to sexual self-deprecation. Years later, comic Amy Schumer would respond on air to Jon Stewart showing a photo of her on a boat with the actress Jennifer Lawrence, her reported BFF, saying she (Schumer) looked like Alfred Hitchcock.
As she became more successful, Joan Rivers became more aggressive (and blue) on the show Fashion Police, where she still made jokes about herself but, more often, launched verbal grenades at other celebrities, not all of them in very good taste. She would hit multiple targets with just a single photo—a picture of the singer Justin Bieber with his then girlfriend Selena Gomez goes on-screen and Joan comments: “Some things just do not go together. Like Britney Spears and books. Or Kim Kardashian and white penises.” This type of outrageous humor, which many find vulgar, has its American roots. As Rivers often pointed out, these roots go back to the work of the Jewish comic Lenny Bruce and, later, the Jewish radio comic and self-proclaimed king of all media, Howard Stern. As Joan got older her humor became increasingly risqué and over-the-top—as if to shout out that she could be as crude as guy comics. She could also simultaneously ridicule the changing nature of the double standard in such one-liners as: “A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes, she’s a tramp.” She did revert to self-deprecatory Jewish humor, however, when she returned to The Tonight Show as a guest of Jimmy Fallon (after having been excluded for years by Johnny Carson and Jay Leno). That night she announced that her last appearance on the show was “four nose jobs ago.”
Men, too, can savage their sexuality, of course. The constantly suffering comic Richard Lewis claimed his self-esteem was so low that when he was in bed with his girlfriend he would fantasize that he was someone else.
But women with a sexual track record have long been the subject of Jewish jokes, as in the joke featuring a shadchan, the traditional Jewish matchmaker or marriage broker. The shadchan goes to see parents who are looking for a mate for their son. He tells the parents he has a young woman from a family of considerable wealth. She is a rare beauty and has a model’s figure, is a marvelous cook and a great conversationalist. The mother asks, “Is she good with children? Will she be a good mother?” The shadchan assures the mother that the young woman loves children and will no doubt make a wonderful mother. The father and mother are delighted. Then the father, somewhat hesitantly, asks: “Do you have any idea if she will be good in bed?” The shadchan hesitates, muses, rubs his chin, then says: “Some would say yes and some would say no.”
When I interviewed Joan Rivers in 2010, I realized the impact her humor had had on women. As I escorted her out of the studio, we walked toward a queue of at least thirty women, who all worked in the broadcast building and had lined up to bow to her as she passed.
I asked Joan during our interview if anything was out of bounds for her and she said she reluctantly had decided not to tell a racial joke about first lady Michelle Obama. Otherwise, anything was permissible and no subject out of bounds, especially sexual ones. That proved to be the case when she created outrage by joking about the young Cleveland women held captive and abused for over a decade as sex slaves. According to Joan, they lived rent-free and were waiting for an invitation from Dancing with the Stars. No bounds, too, for Sarah Silverman, who once said she was raped by a doctor and added that the experience was bittersweet for a Jewish girl.
Traditional Jewish jokes and Jewish humor are often all about delivery and characteristically told more often by men. It was the speed and the cadence of shtetl-born Isaac Singer’s Yiddish-inflected response to my question, in an onstage interview we did about free will (I asked him if he believed in it and he answered, “I have no choice”) that the crowd found hilarious. The poor, henpecked husband’s helplessness is the essence of many of Henny Youngman’s rapid one-liners, the most famous being “take my wife—please!” Or take the Youngman joke, again told with a quick, jabbing, and aggressive delivery: “My wife divorced me for religious reasons. She worshiped money. I didn’t have any.” Jokes like
this can lose a lot in the transition from oral to written.
The self-deprecation at the heart of much of Youngman’s humor is the foundation, too, of Rodney Dangerfield’s famous laments about getting no respect. But, again, even in jokes that ridicule his lack of sex appeal, the key to his success as a comic was tied to the telling, the delivery, with its Yiddish inflections and tone, the speed and “chic-a-boom” uplift at joke’s end as well as the rapidity of one joke following after another. “A woman I met told me to go to her house that night. She said no one would be there. I went. No one was there.”
Traditional Jewish jokes about dominated, passive husbands are rooted in shtetl life. It was commonplace there (as it still is among many of the ultra-Orthodox) for women to take charge of nearly everything while the men studied Talmud and Torah. Women in the shtetl were, in fact, often the sole earners of what little money the household possessed. They were the ones who put bread on the family table, while the patriarch of the family acquired more learning and presumably became closer to God. There is one such joke about how marriage may be exceedingly difficult for most men, but for a Jewish husband it means never having to make a decision. Or the joke about Jewish husbands getting along with their wives if they simply wake up every morning and say, “I’m sorry.” In the words of Groucho Marx, “Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.” Or consider the joke about the young man who goes off to college and tells his parents he has decided on a career as an actor and is thrilled to be cast in his first play in the role of a Jewish husband. His mother asks, “A role with no speaking part?” That joke reminds us of the one about why no Jewish wives are on parole boards. The answer: they wouldn’t let anyone finish a sentence.
On the one hand, there are Jewish jokes about passive husbands, and on the other, there are jokes about aggressive and horny Jewish men, often younger single men or middle-aged married ones.
Let There Be Laughter Page 3