Let There Be Laughter

by Michael Krasny

  Celebration of Jewish male virility appears not only in the portrayal of a magician with a hammer-hard, nut-shattering penis. There is also the joke about the two Jewish men fishing off the Golden Gate Bridge. One of them says, “I have to pee,” and he takes out his penis and then remarks on how cold the water is. The other says he, too, must pee, takes out his penis, and adds, “Yes and deep.” I first heard that joke told about two black men fishing. It likely was appropriated by Jews, reflecting perhaps a wish, as can be seen in someone like Howard Stern, to have an enormously large penis. It reminds me of the one about the professor of medicine, Dr. Silverstein, who is showing his students how to work anatomically on a cadaver. The cadaver, he says, is that of a man named Goldberg. Silverstein and his students are mesmerized at the size of Goldberg’s genitals (which Norm Crosby, Jewish king of malaprops, used to say some old Jewish ladies called Gentiles, as in “the Genitals are different from the Jews”). No one can believe the gargantuan size of Goldberg’s penis. Dr. Silverstein decides to hack it off and take it home. He puts it in a large shopping bag. When he sees his wife, he says, “You aren’t going to believe your eyes when I show you what I took home from work on a cadaver with students earlier today.” He takes out the huge penis and holds it up for his wife to see. She screams, “Oh my God. Goldberg is dead!”

  These kind of chauvinistic, wishful jokes about penis strength or size can be connected to other jokes about overall Jewish male strength. Like the one about an old Jew who applies for a job chopping down trees. The prospective employer looks skeptically at him and says, “You seem kind of ancient for this type of work. What experience do you have?” The old Jew immediately responds, “I chopped many trees down in the Sahara forest.” The employer says, “You mean the Sahara Desert?” The old Jew: “That’s what they call it now.”

  A man shows up at a brothel in Omaha and tells the madam that he is an Israeli and has been told that her house of pleasure has a young Israeli beauty. The madam says, “Yes. We are very lucky to have her. She is the highest paid of all the girls in the house.” The man asks the price and the madam tells him a thousand, the room included. He agrees to pay the price and the stunning Israeli is summoned and introduced to him. She takes his arm and leads him to one of the house’s private rooms. He pays her the thousand dollars and proceeds repeatedly to have wild and unbelievably hot sex with her and then informs her that he, too, is an Israeli. “From where?” she asks. “From Haifa,” he says. “Really?” she exclaims. “I am also from Haifa! I still have family there. Would you by any chance know my brother? He is a dentist and his name is Baruch Holtzman.” The man says to her, “Yes. I do know your brother. In fact, he cleaned my teeth just last week, and when I told him I was going to Omaha on business, he asked me to see if I could find his sister and return to her the thousand dollars he owes her.”

  In this joke we see, again, Jewish cunning with money in exchange for what amounts to free sex. Given the usual focus in jokes about Jewish wives on their lack of sexual desire, it surely ought to come as no surprise that Jewish men are often portrayed as going to see hookers for sexual relief or gratification. Take the one about the Jewish father walking down the stairs in a brothel who sees his son walking up. The son is shocked and stunned. “Dad! What are you doing here?” The father sheepishly responds: “Better to spend a few bucks here than bother your mother.”

  I don’t know how common it was, but back in my day, at least a couple of the Jewish guys I knew were initiated into sex as boys by their fathers taking them to whorehouses. I could no more imagine my own father taking me to one than I could imagine him taking me to a church or a mosque to pray. Some of the miscreants I hung out with as a kid in Cleveland would go to houses of ill repute, though not with their dads. One of them, a guy we called the Duke, went one morning for oral satisfaction and was met by a rather large and obese hooker who told him she would service him for free. When he returned, he jubilantly told the guys he had free sex at the cathouse. They immediately convinced him, as a gag, that the hefty hooker was really a guy in a wig, something they made up on the spot to get him crazy. Easily provoked, Duke went back with his father’s shotgun demanding to know if she was actually a she and ordering her to prove it. All pretty lurid and even grotesque by today’s standards, but to adolescent Jewish boys, there was great mirth at having fooled Duke and made him temporarily go bonkers.

  Some of those adolescent forms of humor can last a lifetime. My adolescence in Cleveland had much of the angst and Sturm und Drang associated with growing up, but there was much humor, a rich vein of it, especially associated with sex, in a club I joined when I was fifteen. The club was made up almost entirely of Jewish guys (one of the lone Gentiles in the club used to sing, to the tune of Paul Anka’s “I’m Just a Lonely Boy,” “I’m just a lonely Goy”). One of the club leaders, Duke’s best friend, was a football player, a guy as strong physically and as good-looking as he was an inordinate bullshitter—but a very funny kid given to mocking nearly everyone he came in contact with, especially his friends. We called him B.S., and he went on to become a successful money manager and family man who never let up on the mocking.

  I am with B.S., his wife, and a few other friends, in a coffee shop in Cleveland years after I left my hometown and moved on to California, a family of my own, and careers in academia, broadcasting, and writing. The problem with any success, however, with a guy like B.S., is that he will never let up on the sarcasm and ridicule. He will never cease letting you know who you once were or who he thought you were; he will never let you forget any sexual rejection or odd sexual experience you might have had that he thought he knew. While with him in the coffee shop, I happen to spot a copy of San Francisco magazine in a big rack of magazines. I ask B.S. to come with me to the rack. With a display of mild annoyance, he follows. I take out the magazine and open it to a photo of me standing next to the actor Ed Harris at the San Francisco International Film Festival, both of us in tuxedos. The caption reads: “Actor Ed Harris and Radio Polymath Michael Krasny.” Can B.S. actually be impressed? He studies the photo, then looks at me and says, “So?”

  “So?” I say. “Did you read what it says?”

  “Yes,” he grumbles. “I read it.”

  As if talking to a child, I ask, “What does it say?”

  B.S. reads the caption with his usual tone of mockery.

  “Do you know who Ed Harris is?” I ask.

  “No,” he answers, his voice laced with sarcasm, “I do not know who Ed Harris is.”

  “Well then. Do you know what a polymath is?”

  Again in a voiced laced with sarcasm, “Yes. I know what a polymath is.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’s a fucking asshole.”

  A Japanese wife, Hiroko, is told by her husband that an anonymous source has informed him she is carrying on an affair with a Jewish man. Outraged and stung by the accusation, Hiroko responds, “Who told you such misheggass?”

  The humor in this joke, of course, is in “misheggass,” the Yiddish word for craziness. It is also in the sheer nature of the sound of that word—its euphonic force, in this case in a Japanese wife’s use of it.

  When Bill Clinton was president of the United States, a joke circulated that went: you could tell Clinton was crazy and truly out of his mind because he had a Jewish mistress and a Gentile lawyer. The joke is a combined JAP joke (Jewish women do not make good mistresses) and chauvinistic Jewish joke (but Jews are superior lawyers).

  Poor Monica. This Jewish girl Hillary Clinton called a mall rat became marked for life as the girl who gave the leader of the free world oral sex. I was walking in downtown San Francisco around the time of the Lewinsky scandal, when a black street guy holding a sign that said i left my african american express card at home approached me asking me for spare change, and then suddenly, abruptly and vigorously, asked me, “What do you call an eight-day blow job?” The question caught my attention. I responded: “I don’t know. What do
you call it?” The street guy quickly shot back, “Hanukkah Lewinsky.”

  An older Jewish woman on an airplane, in first class, is seated next to an attractive younger woman. The younger woman looks at a ring on the older Jewish woman’s hand and cannot help but tell her how extraordinary and beautiful it is. “I’ve never seen a larger or more beautiful diamond!” she exclaims. “Yes,” the older Jewish woman says. She then confides, “It is worth nearly as much and is almost as big as the famous Hope Diamond. But just like the Hope Diamond, it carries a curse.”

  “A curse?” says the young woman fearfully. “What kind of a curse?”

  “It goes back many years. It is called the Plotnick curse.”

  “Who or what is Plotnick?”

  “Plotnick? He’s my effing husband.”

  Why the name Poltnick appears in a number of Jewish jokes will always be a mystery, but the lesson this joke conveys about money not bringing happiness is clear. It is also about how difficult it must be for certain Jewish wives to abide the overly affluent men they choose to marry. Bernard Madoff’s wife? Or Sheldon Adelson’s? I have no idea. But the significant element in this joke is the candid and cathartic confession of a Jewish wife who has to endure her husband in addition to dispensing advice to the younger woman who can learn an important lesson: don’t marry a rich man just for his money.

  A Jewish husband is seriously injured in a car crash and is bandaged from head to toe. His doctor tells him the worst news is that his penis has been completely severed from his body and could not be found in the wreckage. The man emits horrible sounds of sorrow and loss until the doctor, trying to reassure him, tells him that there is a new artificial penis that is as good as a real one and will not cost him anything. His insurance will cover the ten-thousand-dollar cost of the new penis as well as the necessary surgery. The only remaining concern, the doctor says, is the fact that there are only two models. One is five inches and the other is ten—but the insurance will pay for either. He only has to choose. The physician adds, “You obviously will need to consult with your wife. Five may be too small for her and ten too large. So ask her and be sure to tell her the insurance will pay for whichever.” A couple of days go by and the doctor revisits the Jewish husband. He asks him if he has had an opportunity to consult with his wife about which size penis to choose. The husband says, “Yes.” The doctor then asks, “The five or the ten?” The Jewish husband answers, “We’re getting granite countertops.”

  This is a classic whipped Jewish-husband joke. The man has no will of his own, even when he needs to replace his sex organ. The wife rules and the poor husband is apparently compelled to live a sexless life. These types of domineering-Jewish-wife jokes, once again, lampoon, hyperbolically, the strength and hegemony of Jewish wives and the extreme passivity of their husbands.

  A number of men who die enter heaven and are told to line up on the right if they did everything their wives told them to do and on the left if they didn’t. A Jewish husband dies, enters heaven, and is given the same instructions. He sees a long line of men on the right and one lone man on the left. He cannot contain his curiosity. Walking up to the lone man on the left, who is wearing a yarmulke, he asks, “How come all of the men here are in line on the right and you alone are on the left?” The man with the yarmulke answers: “I don’t know. My wife told me to stand here.”

  Jackie Mason tells of a Jewish husband returning home from a day at work as a big-shot lawyer or a much-respected doctor or CEO, only to hear his wife shout at him, “You schmuck! You forgot to take out the garbage!” Then Mason tells of an Italian husband coming home at three in the morning without explanation. His wife is stirring pasta and she says, “Hello, Tony. Please don’t beat me.” The henpecked Jewish husband versus the brutish Italian husband is not too difficult an opposition to deconstruct. Plus, the Jewish husband comes home straight from work while the Italian husband doesn’t appear until 3 a.m. His wife stirring pasta at that hour and pleading not to be beaten by him speaks volumes about the perceived differences in the ways in which these wives are presumably treated and behave. Of course this is all ludicrous, hyperbolic, and absurd, but the real essence of the joking is that a Jewish husband may be ridiculed by his wife for his passivity, but, by clear implication, who is the better husband—the Italian or the Jew? And which wife is more admirable by today’s feminist thinking—the tough bitchy one who calls her husband a schmuck or the passive, cowering one who lives in fear of him?

  A Jewish man, sitting in a deli, notices a Jewish funeral. Two hearses go by with a man behind them walking a dog on a leash. A line of hundreds of men walk behind him. The Jewish man in the deli is curious. He walks toward the man walking the dog. When he reaches him, he tells him he has never seen a Jewish funeral with two hearses. The man with the dog tells him that one hearse is for his wife who yelled at him and was attacked and killed by the very dog he is walking. The second hearse, he says, is for his mother-in-law, who was attempting to help his wife, and was also attacked and killed by the same dog. The man from the deli offers his condolences and the two share a profound moment of male connectedness until the man from the deli asks if he can borrow the dog. The mourner replies, “Get in line.”

  Would you call that joke mean-spirited? Hostile? Dark? Misogynistic? Anti-marriage? Any one or all might apply. So might the famous words of Henny Youngman—“take my wife.” In the joke, the guy just wants his wife dead. Man’s best friend helps accomplish what the joke strongly suggests many married men (as seen by the long line of them) would like done. A single indignity is named—the wife yelled at her husband and the mother-in-law supported her daughter. Hence their joint fates.

  These type of jokes are built not only on aggression, but also on fantasies of male freedom from marital oppression. The jokes are lethal for Jewish wives, as we see in the one about the band of three armed, masked robbers who take over a bank, insisting that all customers get down on the floor. One of the robbers walks around brandishing his weapon while the others hold up the tellers and put bundles of currency into bags. The robber walking around accidentally knocks his mask off. He picks it up, puts it back on, and says to one of the customers lying on the floor, “Did you see my face?” The customer says yes and the robber shoots and kills him. The robber then asks a second customer lying on the floor if he saw his face, and when that man admits he did, the robber shoots and kills him. The robber proceeds to a third man and asks the identical question: “Did you see my face?” This man quickly responds. “No. But my wife did.”

  A surgeon, just emerging from the operating room into the waiting room, meets a husband, a close friend of his and a golfing buddy, with a somber and sorrowful face. “You know how dicey this surgery was,” the doctor says. The husband nods. “Well, we saved her. But the sad news is, she is a paraplegic for the rest of her life and will need constant care. Everything. Feeding. Eliminating. You’ll need to change diapers and move her body around to avoid bedsores. She is going to require full-time care.” The husband looks abject. Whereupon his surgeon buddy punches him lightly on the arm and says, “I’m just fucking with you. She’s dead.”

  Nevertheless, Jewish-women comics do strike back when it comes to jokes like these. Consider the line from Elayne Boosler, who said, “My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because, even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.” Or Roseanne Barr’s tinged-with-murder line: “The way to a man’s heart is through his chest.”

  A man named Lefkowitz has never transgressed even once in his life. He has performed countless mitzvahs. He dies and ascends to heaven. He is told by God’s chief angel that his mitzvahs and his sin-free life are laudable and remarkable but not human enough for admission to an eternal reward. “Humans by nature sin,” states the angel. In order to enter the kingdom of heaven, Lefkowitz will need to commit at least one single transgression. He will be extended a twenty-four-hour return to earth. Failing to sin at least one time will mean the gate
s to heaven will stay forever closed to him.

  So Lefkowitz returns to earth and hours pass with not even a fleeting opportunity to sin until a middle-aged woman passes by and gives him an approving come-hither look. It is clear to Lefkowitz that the woman is sexually interested in him, so he goes up to her and awkwardly begins a stilted conversation. She responds, and before he knows it, he has gone with her, at her invitation, to her apartment, where he winds up in bed with her. He completes the sex act and feels immensely relieved with the realization that the gates of heaven will now open for him until the woman says, “Thank you so much for making love to me. I’ve been feeling like an old lady lately and your lovemaking was a true mitzvah!”

  This is a joke reminiscent of today’s hookup culture, in which sexual relationships are initiated by the once-called “fair sex.” Women more often are now pictured in jokes as being sexually aggressive, as in the one about the Hasid who bumps into a stunning woman by accident at a train station. She is blond and voluptuous and suddenly, unexpectedly, says to him: “I have my entire life had a fierce attraction to Hasidic men. I have a studio apartment only a couple of blocks from here. I would love to take you there and lick your body from head to toe.” She goes on, with undisguised lust and ardor, to promise him whatever he might sexually desire. The Hasid looks her over, thinks about her offer of unbridled sexual pleasure, then asks: “What’s in it for me?”

  I don’t know if the woman in the joke is supposed to be Gentile. A blond woman in a Jewish joke often turns out to be decoded as a shiksa. That, aside from obvious self-interest and sexual naïveté, may account for the Hasid being suspicious. Nevertheless, the woman is the sexual aggressor as she ardently offers any sexual gratification his Hasidic loins might want. Yet the Hasid in the joke still wants to know what he can get out of the deal. Which makes him a schmuck. Not a villainous schmuck. Just a plain schmuck.