Men are frequently presented in Jewish jokes as being out of control sexually. As Billy Crystal once put it, “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.”
In much Jewish humor, Jewish men of all ages have been presented as being as drawn to shiksas as Ulysses was to the Sirens—except, unlike that Greek hero, often there was nothing to restrain their lust and ardor, no masts to tie them to. “Shiksa” is a word that, thanks to characters like Elaine in Seinfeld and Charlotte in Sex and the City, has become nearly commonplace in referring to a female non-Jew. But the original meaning of the word is far more pejorative. Which, perhaps, helps explain how Gentile women often became highly sexually appealing to Jewish men. It became, however, more acceptable over time for non-Jewish men to wed Jewish women, doubtless because of Jewish identity being passed down through the mother rather than the father. The beautiful biblical queen Esther of the Purim story married the Persian king Ahasuerus, a Gentile, and was, as a result, able to save her fellow Jews from the murderous Haman. Esther stayed Jewish. By contrast and against her father’s wishes, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, marries Lorenzo and converts to Christianity in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Jewish men, during the Nazi era, were often pictured as sexual predators of snow-white virgin Aryan beauties, a stereotype brilliantly satirized in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Nazi propaganda was filled with pictures of gross-looking, stooped-over, hook-nosed Jews lusting after blond fräuleins. An episode of Seinfeld was all about the unstoppable sexual desire for Gentile women, or what was called shiksappeal, taking possession of Jewish men of all ages, even a rabbi. Elaine portrayed the alluring and irresistible shiksa, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who despite being a descendant of the French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, does not identify as being Jewish).
I interviewed Larry David onstage for a fund-raiser for the environmental action group NRDC. Julia was there. “I’m here for Larry,” she told me. He was there for Laurie David, then his wife, who was also a major environmental activist and a trustee of the NRDC, as well as one of the producers of the film about global warming An Inconvenient Truth. I asked David why he decided to make his television wife Cheryl, played by Cheryl Hines, a shiksa rather than a Jew, like his then real wife, who was seated in the front row with their two daughters and Julia; he told me he had such a perfect Jewish wife in real life that he felt he could give himself a Gentile one on his HBO series. Once he and Laurie were divorced, Jay Leno had the temerity to ask David how he felt about the divorce and David made a joke about finally being able, with his environmentalist wife out of the picture, to take long showers.
David’s response reminded me of the old Jewish joke that answers the question “Why is divorcing a Jewish woman so expensive?” The answer: “It’s worth it.” Once again we are dealing, obviously, with stereotypes, in this case of the overly dominating and restricting Jewish wife. Many find such stereotypes odious. But they can apply not just to wives—as we see in the joke about the woman who divorces her husband after seventy-five years of marriage. When asked by the judge why she was suing for divorce after three quarters of a century, she exclaims, “Because enough is enough!”
There is something in these types of jokes that elicits laughter, often laughter tied to the recognition of stereotypes. The stereotype of the harpy Jewish wife can be seen written large in the character of Susie, played by Susie Essman, in the series Curb Your Enthusiasm. This is a woman who screams, “You fat fuck,” at her husband, Jeff. She upbraids, nags, and taunts him constantly, but is somehow still worthy of affection and even admiration from many who appreciate her toughness of character (especially because her husband is often engaging in morally questionable and sneaky or juvenile behavior). She is also presented as a loving, overly protective Jewish mother, though her daughter is somewhat conniving and sneaky like Jeff.
Yes, Jewish wives are often maligned in jokes, many centered around husbands who are sexually dissatisfied or believe their wives favor material things over them. A Jewish man asks to be cremated and have an urn of his ashes placed in Bloomingdale’s since he knows his wife will visit him often. Or the Jew who dies and his widow is told she must pay by the word for his obituary in the local newspaper. She submits to the newspaper—“MORT DIED. VOLVO FOR SALE.” (Other versions have a Lexus or a Cadillac.) I used to suspect these kinds of jokes emanated from Jewish husbands who felt their wives did not care enough about them, appreciate them, or pay enough attention to them, a kind of perverse way of making themselves into martyred victims. If a Jew dies in the forest, will his wife go shopping? The Jewish wife’s perfect house? Six thousand square feet with no master bedroom and no kitchen.
An Italian man, a Frenchman, and a Jew are comparing notes on their marital sex lives. The Italian tells of a time he put olive oil all over his wife’s body and made love to her as she screamed in ecstasy for five full minutes. The Frenchman counters with a tale of how he rubbed sweet butter all over his wife’s body and made love to her, after which she screamed with delight for a solid twelve minutes. The Jew then relates how he rubbed schmaltz (chicken fat) all over his wife’s body, made love to her, and then was screamed at for an hour and a half because he wiped his hands off on the drapes. (In another version he wipes a more intimate part of his anatomy on the drapes and she is still screaming as he relates the story.)
Jewish wives can be portrayed not only as low in libido but as insufferable nags, and all too often the portrayals are laced with venom. But even more often, we find that they are portrayed, like Jewish princesses, as spoiled and demanding.
If the Jewish wife is spoiled—and there are many jokes about people of all classes and varieties of backgrounds wanting to be reincarnated as a Jewish wife—who is the one spoiling the wife (or princess daughter)? The credit goes, of course, to the patriarch, the paterfamilias or head of the family who brings home the not-necessarily-kosher bacon. The real message in many of the jokes about Jewish wives, which, I believe, is also true of many of the Jewish American princess jokes, is not only that the Jewish women in them are provided for but that they can be tough and willfully independent of their husbands, the antithesis of geishas or Stepford wives.
A woman, Rita, is beyond consolation over the death of her husband, Marty. After months of grief, and in desperation, she goes to see a medium, who assures her that she can make contact with her late husband. Rita wants to believe the medium, but after a good deal of the medium’s attempts to summon Marty’s spirit, nothing occurs. That is, until the medium begins to speak in a voice like Marty’s and calls Rita by endearing pet names no one outside their marriage could possibly know. Rita is thrilled and excited, nearly beside herself, certain she is actually communicating with her dead husband.
“Marty! Dumpling!” she shouts, as if she needs to be more audible to be heard. “What is it like for you on the other side? Tell me, Pumpkin!” Marty, through the medium, tells her that each day is like the one before. He wakes up, eats, schtups, and then goes to sleep. Then he eats again and schtups again and goes to sleep again, all repeated many times each day for seven days a week. “It’s great,” says Marty through the medium. “It sounds great,” Rita repeats. “I am so happy you are happy in heaven, even if you are schtupping other women.” Marty’s voice comes once more out of the medium and he says, “Heaven? Other women? Who said anything about heaven or other women? I’m in Missouri. I’m a rabbit.”
In some versions of this joke, Marty is a bull in Montana or a bear in Yellowstone. The animals, regardless of what they might be in the animal kingdom, are Jewish. A good deal of such humor, of course, like the horny male parrot joke, is in the absurdity of anthropomorphizing and giving Jewish qualities to animals. There is, in addition, perhaps a kind of latent wish for the nature of Jews or Jewish identity to be transmuted to other of God’s creatures. But the real wish underlying this joke is for a man simply to schtup (have sex) all day, eat, and sleep for what may
be eternity.
Jews as animals, by the way, is an ongoing literary tradition from Kafka’s Gregor Samsa turning into a dung beetle to Bernard Malamud’s talking Jewbird and Art Spiegelman’s mice. But notice how Jewish jokes with animals often have to do with transgressive and forbidden behavior—horniness and adultery especially.
A sheep serves such a sexual purpose in an early Woody Allen film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex. Gene Wilder portrays a doctor who has fallen madly in love and is carrying on an adulterous affair with a sheep. His wife finds out and he loses not only his marriage, but all his life savings. He even loses the sheep, who sends him a Dear John letter. He becomes, in fact, a down-and-out schlemiel, suffering misery alone and in disgrace and feeling shame over the loss of his woolen true love. At first, he works as a waiter in order to earn a living, wailing at the customers he serves that he used to be a doctor. Finally, he becomes utterly lost and forlorn.
Gene Wilder told me in an interview that it was a challenging role for him because he had to play it with complete seriousness, even when ordering champagne and caviar as well as grass (the kind that you mow not smoke) from room service in the hotel room he shared with the sheep. Wilder, whose real name is Jerry Silverman, and who, before my interview with him, was married to famed comic Gilda Radner, told me he learned at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio the importance of playing comedy just as naturalistically as drama. The same Woody Allen film, incidentally, includes a rabbi being whipped by a beautiful blond shiksa while forced to watch his wife eat pork.
A Jewish man, Ben, and his much younger wife, Holly, are both troubled by the absence in her of much if any arousal or excitement in the bedroom. She is completely nonorgasmic. They decide to consult their rabbi, known for his compassionate counseling and, surely just as important, for his reputed proven track record for finding workable solutions to marital problems.
The rabbi proposes a plan. Ben and Holly should make love later that same evening at ten o’clock and the rabbi will see to it that a handsome young man in his congregation named Paul will be sent there before the action between the two begins. The rabbi will arrange it all. Handsome and muscular young Paul will stand naked before Holly and wave a towel back and forth while husband and wife are engaged in sexual relations. Holly, the rabbi hopes, will get excited and the lovemaking will get a much-needed game changing charge.
Unfortunately, the naked young man waving the towel in front of Holly has little or no effect and does not arouse her at all.
The couple go back the next day to see the rabbi. He is deeply concerned. “Let’s have you try something else,” he says to them. “It may sound quite radical, but it may turn things around. Let’s have Ben trade places with Paul. In other words, Paul will make love to Holly and Ben will stand there naked and wave the towel.”
They do as the rabbi suggests and Holly screams and howls in ecstasy as she has a number of convulsive orgasms with young Paul while a naked Ben waves the towel and shouts to Paul , “Now, that’s how you wave a towel, boy!”
The real theme of this joke, of course, is sexual competition. Though the younger man has the obvious virility advantage, the Jewish husband is still trying to show that he is the better man, more potent and adept at his personal brand of towel waving. It’s a bit of a dark comic joke because clearly the older husband does not have what it takes to satisfy his younger wife. But he tries!
There are many jokes about Jewish men competing with each other. In fact, there is an old saw about how every Jew thinks he can tell a better Jewish joke than the one who is telling the joke. A story comes to my mind about Jewish men competing with each other and a couple of Hollywood shiksa starlets on top of it. (Someone needs to do a book on all of the Jewish men who have been involved with or married to shiksa starlets).
The novelist Ethan Canin called me one day and asked if I wanted to see which of us could lose more weight in a week at twenty dollars a pound. I told him I wasn’t interested. Soon after he called to tell me to look at an interview with the actress Helen Hunt in the then new issue of Vanity Fair. In it, Helen Hunt was asked what her ideal way would be to spend a day. Her response: “Hanging out with the author Ethan Canin.” I called Ethan and told him I read what she had said and he immediately challenged me: “Go ahead and try to top that!”
I thought his challenge juvenile but a few weeks later two events occurred within a single day. Sydney Goldstein, who runs City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco, called to tell me she had lunch with famed novelist Umberto Eco. I had interviewed Eco that morning on my radio program. “He said you were a genius of an interviewer,” she reported. Then, later that afternoon, I kept an appointment with filmmaker Barry Levinson at his home to discuss an event at a film festival where I would be interviewing him. As he led me toward the screening room in his home, he told his aide, “Hold my calls. I’ll be with Michael.” So I wrote Ethan an email saying “Umberto Eco called me a genius and Barry Levinson said, ‘Hold my calls. I’ll be with Michael.’ You top that!”
Soon after I got an email from Canin telling me to check out the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. There I saw one of the puzzle items asking for the author of Emperor of the Air, Ethan’s acclaimed first book of short stories. The email ended with “Top it!”
This, I thought, was getting silly. But a week later a mutual friend of mine and the then San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein called to invite me and my wife to dinner at his home. Phil had just started dating (and would later marry) the film actress Sharon Stone, who had created a sexual sensation in her starring role in Basic Instinct. I wrote Ethan: “I had dinner with Sharon Stone.”
Ethan wrote back: “Game over!”
As Jewish men age in Jewish jokes, they often become increasingly less potent and less libidinal. Take the following jokes:
A ninety-year-old Jewish man has a fifty-year-old wife. His wife yells to him from upstairs in the bedroom of their house, “Come upstairs and make love to me.” He faintly yells back, “I can’t do both.”
An elderly Jew brags about having sex with his wife “almost every night,” meaning, literally, almost having sex every night.
A son sends his aged father a nubile, attractive prostitute in a G-string. She asks if he is ready for “Super Sex.” The old man takes one look at her up and down and says, “I’ll take the soup.”
Nevertheless, jokes about Jewish male sexuality more characteristically emphasize sexual appetite or virility, celebrating it as vigorous and enduring for Jewish men, even in old age.
An old Jewish man wakes up a priest after midnight in the church sleeping quarters to tell him he is screwing a beautiful, young, twenty-two-year-old woman. The priest is stunned and appalled. He asks the old man: “You are obviously Jewish. I am a priest. You woke me up to tell me this? Why? Why are you telling me this?” The old Jew enthusiastically shouts, “I’m telling everybody!”
A priest invites a rabbi to sit with him behind the screen as he listens to confession. The priest, with the rabbi also invisible and by his side, hears three attractive young women in succession, each confessing to adulterous acts three separate times over the past week. After each confession, the priest instructs the young woman to say a certain number of Hail Marys and put a twenty-dollar bill in the collection box. The priest then tells the rabbi he needs a drink and asks the rabbi to take over what he assures him is an obviously easy and repetitive ritual. When yet another lovely young woman confesses to the rabbi to having performed acts of adultery twice over the past week, the rabbi says, “Come back here. We got a special. Three for twenty bucks.”
This joke, a version of which I first heard many years ago as a boy, puts the Jew (in this case a rabbi) in the immoral role but also turns him into a deal maker. The given in the joke—that a priest would allow a rabbi to sit in on confession and, even worse, have him take over so the priest can go for a drink—is a way of ridiculing the priesthood (and the goyim) as drinkers, while also showing that
Gentiles, Catholics in this case, and Jews can be pals. (Bill Maher’s mother was Jewish and his father Catholic. He was raised Catholic and claimed he would go to confession with his lawyer, Mr. Cohen.) Though the rabbi in the joke about confession is no better for going along with the priest’s transgressions, he ultimately is the one who elicits the laugh, which is tied to his ability to take advantage of a favorable opportunity. The joke brings money and sex together in a way that implies that Jewish cleverness and manipulation can bring, if not actual sexual reward, the promise of it. The real truth in the joke rests on the importance of strategic and quick thinking, which many Jews like to believe is a part of Jewish character. On a deeper level, the joke indicates a change in interfaith relations. The rabbi and the priest are pals and obviously trust each other. At the heart of the joke is what used to be called the ecumenical spirit between Jews and Catholics—a coming together of the faiths, as evidenced, too, in the joke about the new Jewish/Catholic merger establishing a church called Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt. Or Jon Stewart saying how his wife’s Catholicism balanced with his Judaism: they were raising their children to be sad. Or the joke about the rabbi and priest who are good enough pals to open up and confide in each other about past transgressions.
The priest asks the rabbi if he ever in his life has eaten pork and the rabbi confesses that he once, as a youth, indeed did taste the forbidden meat. Whereupon the rabbi asks the priest if he has ever had sex and the priest admits he once did. The rabbi then says, “It’s a hell of a lot better than pork, isn’t it?”
Rabbi Federman goes on a private vacation to Las Vegas. Just as he is unpacking in his room, after checking into the hotel, he is surprised to hear the phone ring. It is one of the temple trustees, David Hertzel. “Rabbi,” says Hertzel, “there is a surprise for you. Open your hotel room door.” Puzzled by this, the rabbi puts down the phone, opens the door, and sees, standing there in the hall, a tall buxom blonde in a bikini. Uncertain what all of this is about, he tells her to come in and have a seat. He goes back to the phone and immediately asks, “What is going on, Hertzel?” Hertzel answers, “A few of us on the board thought you might want a little female companionship while you were on your vacation, so the blonde is our gift. Isn’t she sensational?” Rabbi Federman explodes in anger. “Hertzel! What is it with you and the others? Don’t you realize I am head of your congregation, the spiritual and moral leader, not to mention a married man with children? How could you stoop so low, you and the others, to do something like this to me? I am angry. I am humiliated. I am hanging up on you.” Whereupon Rabbi Federman slams down the phone. The blonde, having witnessed all of this, gets up and starts to walk toward the door to leave. The rabbi shouts, “Wait! Where are you going? No one is angry at you.”
Let There Be Laughter Page 4