When I taught Michael Gold’s proletarian novel Jews Without Money, one of my black students, who would later become both a friend and a successful playwright, howled with laughter at the title. “There ain’t no Jews without money,” he exclaimed. I said to him: “You’re looking at one,” and then I went on to say how, yes, Jews had a piece of the American pie but there were still many, a surprising number, who were destitute. His response: “THEY GOT A MIGHTY BIG PIECE OF THAT PIE.”
Trust me. There are plenty of Jews still with neither books nor much, if any, money. They are often called schlemiels.
Two Jews stand in front of a firing squad are asked if they have a last wish. One says to the other, “How about if I ask for a cigarette?” The Jew next to him says, “Shush. Do you want to get us in trouble?”
The joke, probably right out of the shtetl, is also a schlemiel joke because meek Jews were often regarded as schlemiels. Even those Jewish characters who constantly badger and beg for money or goods, characters known as schnorrers, are not schlemiels because they can show moxie and assert themselves. But the fearful Jew, the Jew terrified of his own shadow, is as often as not relegated to schlemiel status.
Jewish humor can be scalding and aggressive or as astonishingly meek as the prototypical shtetl character Bontche Schveig (Bontche the Silent). A creation of the Polish Yiddish author I. L. Peretz, Bontche may be the ultimate passive schlemiel of all time since: whether out of fear or temperament, he does nothing to offend or displease anyone. In fact, he makes no mark at all in his journey through life, and is rapturously welcomed into heaven by Abraham and the angels for living a life of utter silence, anonymity, suffering, and loneliness. Never was there a cry or even a word of protest from poor Bontche while he was among the living, and as a result, he gets his final reward. He enters paradise with great fanfare for having lived a life so self-effacing that no one ever noticed his existence. With glittering jewels and a golden throne set for him to sit on, Bontche is put through a pro forma heavenly court trial. The prosecutor can offer nothing to say against him. Bontche is then told he can have whatever he wants. But all the meek Bontche can ask for, timorously, is a breakfast bun with butter. The prosecutor lets out a bitter laugh at the mordant humor of Bontche’s incredible wish. Silence may be golden and the way to paradise for Bontche, but in reality, he is a pathetic schlemiel; if he were to drop his buttered bread on the ground, he would no doubt see it land on the buttered side. The real point of the story is that the lowly schlemiel can be blessed with heavenly fanfare and paradise. This would never be the case for a schmuck.
An extraordinarily wealthy man is approached by a leader from the Jewish community’s welfare federation who seeks a donation. The solicitor brings to this Jewish moneybags’s attention that he has never donated so much as a dime. The rich Jew responds with a touching lament about his mother and father’s poverty and physical handicaps, and then says the same of his children and siblings. He concludes with: “If I won’t give any of them a cent, why do you think I would give any money to you?”
Those who know their New Testament may recall how it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. What does that have to do with Jews, you well might ask, since it is from the New Testament?
One of the cornerstones of Jewish values has always been tzedakah, or acts of charity, even from those who can ill afford to be charitable. Charity, for Jews, has for centuries been both a religious and a moral obligation. The earth’s fate depends on it, as we see in the religious (and folkloric) stories of the Lamed Vovnik, the thirty-six righteous Jews whose good deeds hold the fate of the earth in the balance.
Giving to strangers, the poor, or the disabled is also linked to rachmones, which roughly means compassion or a heart that pities others. But others can, of course, trip up even the best-intentioned mitzvah maker, as in the joke about the man who holds out a tin cup to an older Jewish woman and jangles the coins in it. Feeling pity for his apparent blindness, she reaches into her purse, removes every coin in it, and puts them all into the beggar’s cup. He thanks her, and as she walks away, he says: “I knew you were kind the second I laid eyes on you.”
The bogus beggar in that joke, like the rich man who refuses to give any money to Jewish charity, or even anyone in his immediate family, is a schmuck. And schmucks don’t have to be Jewish. The brilliant (a word I try to use sparingly) Steve Jobs was someone I liked. He used to say when he saw me, as he did on a couple of occasions when I visited Pixar, “You are supposed to be in my dashboard.” Good line. But despite his billions, he was notoriously stingy. I even asked his biographer, Walter Isaacson, who supposedly ferreted out all the darker sides of Jobs’s character—including how badly and mean he could behave toward employees or women—if he knew whether or not Jobs ever donated money to charity. I knew his wife, Laurene, supported a number of good causes. But what about Jobs? Maybe, I prodded Isaacson, he gave anonymously? Walter didn’t know. No one, in fact, seemed to know, though a close friend of his assured me that Jobs never had given or would give a dime to any cause. Conclusion? Steve Jobs was a great man, but he also was a schmuck.
A Jewish man goes to see his rabbi. He begins by reminding the rabbi that his father died just three weeks before. The rabbi says, “I know. Your father was a wonderful man. Everyone loved and appreciated him. I was at his shiva.”
“I know, Rabbi,” the man says. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course,” says the rabbi. “Did you need to talk to me about your loss?”
“Well, Rabbi, I need to tell you that my father left me millions.”
“I know,” said the rabbi. “He was a remarkably good and successful businessman and he wanted you and your family to be well provided for.”
“I know, Rabbi. But what you don’t know is that the week after my father died, my maternal uncle passed away and he, too, left me millions. Then, just last week, my first cousin Bernie died of liver cancer and he also willed me millions of dollars.”
“Well,” said the rabbi, “all of those losses are terrible. You have my deepest condolences. I know how sad you must be. You are obviously understandably depressed. But all that money left to you shows how much your family members loved you and there is so much good you can do with the money.”
“No, Rabbi. You don’t understand. I’m depressed because, so far this week, NOTHING!”
Even a joke about a Jewish villain or a greedy Jewish schmuck will highlight the character’s distinctiveness, as in many of the jokes about schmucks. You may not have to be Jewish (like the old Levy’s bread ad said about loving their product) to be a schmuck, but if Jews are ruthless, villainous, cheap, or greedy, they are going to stand out. Think, for a moment, of the insatiable schmuck who obviously cannot be happy with any amount of money, and compare him to the schlemiel, who may also be unhappy but not out of a hunger for money or anything else in life. Schlemiels, for all their faults and mishaps, tend to be portrayed as resigned to what life metes out to them, often accepting their fate and failures as they stumble through.
I was visiting my elderly father at Menorah Park, a Jewish home for the aged in Cleveland, and a couple of old Jews were watching the television show American Greed, which profiles thieves, scoundrels, and con men. One of the older fellows said to a man sitting next to him, “Why are a lot of the schmucks on this show Jews?” He went on, philosophically, to tick off an impressive list of Jewish humanitarians and Jews of lofty achievement, and then, raising his voice, added, “Why do we have to see Jewish schmucks?”
Pride among Jews in fellow Jews who are schmucks? No. More mortification and, yes, too, concern over what the goyim might think.
A wife is furious at her husband and finally, after many years of a tumultuous and discord-filled marriage, she explodes, telling him she is leaving him and calling him a schmuck. “You were a schmuck when we first met and you’ve been a schmuck to me our entire married life. You are the s
econd-biggest schmuck on the planet!”
The husband logically asks, “If I am such a schmuck, why am I only the second-biggest schmuck?”
His wife screams at him, “Because you’re a schmuck!”
This is one of those jokes that is meant to be told rather than read, but its meaning is clear and it reveals how loaded and powerful the word “schmuck” can be. The wife is so exasperated at her husband for being a schmuck to her for so long that she won’t allow him the consolation of being the worst schmuck of all schmucks.
The joke, more than most, reveals the power of a single word, “schmuck,” when spoken aloud. A large part of Jackie Mason’s shtick was in his delivery. A former rabbi, Mason was funny in large part because of the inflections and tone of voice he deployed. When I interviewed him on the air, I began by saying how impressed I was with his timing, and I added that I assumed he must have had to work as hard as any actor at perfecting it. His response, in the voice many love to imitate but few can replicate, was, “This is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me. That you should think a man of my great comic gifts and genius should have to work as hard as an actor to do what I do without a single flaw.” That line was delivered with the sarcasm and mockery of pretension that had become the successful hallmark of Mason’s humor. When the interview ended, I thanked Mason and told him I was grateful for having had him on the air. Here, again, he responded with his customary tone, saying, “Of course you’re grateful. You got to be with me for an hour. It didn’t cost you a cent.”
Jackie Mason could use his voice like an instrument in order to be funny. He could make good jokes great just in the telling.
A Jewish man, who has been happily married for over fifty years, is alone for the first time after his wife is called away to help sort out her recently deceased sister’s estate. His adult son has known for many years that his father would love to have a beautiful young sexual partner give him sex at least one time before he passes on. Whenever the father would see a lovely, shapely young woman on television or in a film, he would sigh and say, in Yiddish, “A maidel mit vara!” Which, translated, means, “A girl with the goods.”
The son well understood and empathized with his father’s yearnings and attractions to younger women, especially since it was clear to him that his mother had put way too much weight on and was covered with the road maps of varicose veins and the flabbiness, drooping, and wrinkles of age. So the son took it upon himself to send a young nubile beauty, a hooker, to his father, the aging Jew, for the thrill of a lifetime.
The father is home alone and the doorbell rings. A scantily clad beauty with a figure many women would kill for ardently grabs hold of him, kissing him wildly, and saying, repeatedly, “I am yours!” He is excited beyond measure.
The two head, hand in hand, right to the bedroom. This is exactly what the old Jew had imagined, dreamed of. “Soon,” he thinks, “I will be schtupping this unbelievably gorgeous young woman, a dream come true.”
Except he cannot perform. He is saddened and apologetic, but there, clearly, is nothing to be done. He sends the young beauty off and simply resigns himself to having flopped.
Two days later, his wife returns. She goes into the bedroom, the same one he could not perform in, to change her clothes, and he looks at her as she undresses and realizes he is fully aroused. He stares at his erection and, in spite of himself, blurts out: “SCHMUCK! NOW I KNOW WHY THEY CALL YOU A SCHMUCK!”
This joke is actually rather sweet. In spite of the father’s wish to cheat on his wife, and despite the ravages of time, he is faithful to her and cannot rise to the occasion with the prostitute. But he is also angry and uses the word “schmuck” to let his own schmuck (his penis) know how angry he is at its inability to perform. As the old saying goes, a hard-on may have no conscience, but in this joke a flaccid penis apparently does.
The founder and owner of Goldberg’s nail company decides, for the first time in his life, to go on a vacation. He heads to Miami Beach. He entrusts the running of his beloved company to his trusted, long-time assistant, Finkelstein, and his son Mark, a recent MBA graduate from Harvard. After a couple of days away in Florida, Finkelstein calls him and tells him he must return home immediately. When he repeatedly asks why, Finkelstein simply and mysteriously says, “You will know as soon as you are back on the highway. This is an emergency and you must return.” So the old man stoically travels back north and hours later is in a rented car heading back to his nail factory, gravely concerned and obviously uncertain about what this is all about. At this point, he sees, on the highway, a huge billboard with a graphic picture of Jesus Christ on the cross and the unmistakable caption they used goldberg’s nails.
The old man is horrified. He is beside himself. Years of working to create good public relations with the community he established for his company seem annihilated and he knows this must be the handiwork of his Harvard MBA son. He is distraught. By the time he makes it to the factory, he is also incensed, and when he sees his son, he rips into him with fury. “How could you be so stupid? Where was your judgment? This is what I paid for you to go to Harvard to learn about running a business? You’ve set us back so badly we may never recover. How could you do this to me? To us?”
The son swears he will make it up and do right by his father and the company, and claims he knows exactly what to do. “Don’t worry, Dad,” the son says. But his father goes off cursing and brooding, wondering how they can repair the damage. The billboard comes down. But the next day a new billboard goes up. On it is the cross with Jesus in a hunched, fetal position. Beneath the cross and right below it is the caption they didn’t use goldberg’s nails.
This, of course, is a generational joke. It is also a joke about a son who is a schmuck and who, despite an expensive Ivy League education, has no saichel. (Saul Bellow’s son Gregory claimed that when he was a child, his famous Nobel laureate father told him to point to his behind and then to his elbow and then said to him, “Now you know as much as a Harvard graduate.”) It is, too, a joke that shows the comfort level Jews have in America, suggested by the son who is not in the least perturbed about using Christ to sell his family’s manufactured wares.
Let us conclude with the tale of a young Jew who is obsessed about the dearth of compassion in the world. He broods to the point where he finally is convinced by his parents to consult with the rabbi. Even though the rabbi has always seemed pompous and autocratic to the boy, “a real schmuck,” as many of the boy’s fellow Hebrew school pupils describe him, the lad makes an appointment and goes to see him. The rabbi’s peremptory, brusque manner puts the boy off, but he ventures forth and says, “Rabbi. I want to understand. Why are so many people so apathetic and uncaring?” The schmuck rabbi looks directly at the kid and says, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
IV.
Yiddish, Generations & Assimilation
“A goyishe kop!”
It is the Depression. An older married Jewish couple are barely getting by. They see a sign in a store window that says we convert jews. one hundred dollars cash. They agonize. They are hungry and poor. Doesn’t the Talmud teach us, they reason, that we, made in God’s image, must first and above all else care for ourselves? They decide, with trepidation and uncertainty, to go into the store and be converted, and following a baptismal immersion, Christian prayers, and signs of the cross, they are welcomed as converts into the religion of Jesus. The next morning the man wakes up, and as he has done his entire life, he begins to put on tefillin, the ritual phylacteries wound around the arms and placed on the forehead by pious, observant Jews. His wife sees him doing this and says, “What are you doing? Don’t you remember? We are Christians now.” Whereupon the man slaps his forehead and groans, “Oy! Already I have a goyishe kop!”
A grandfather takes his grandson for a walk. They stop in front of a small lake with a big sign saying no swimming allowed in large block letters. Below these words, the warning is repeated in even larger letters, with exclamati
on marks. The grandfather takes his grandson’s hand and says, “Come on. Vee going to go for a svim.” The grandson is incredulous. “But, Grandpa,” he says, “it says no swimming allowed. It says it twice.” The grandfather replies: “No. It says. No swimming allowed? No! Swimming allowed!”
The joke about the couple who convert is rich in Jewish chauvinism, as so many modern Jewish jokes are, and serves to put Jews in a category separate from Gentiles. Neither obtuse nor forgetful, as the words goyishe kop imply, Jews are smart and blessed with Yiddish kops (brains). The important motif to note in the joke is that even with assimilation through conversion, some essence of Jewishness is retained.
Goyishe kop gives the joke its concluding comic lift—ideally recited with gusto and, at conclusion, a good slap to the forehead. The Yiddish words serve to connect Jews to the past and to their identity, while also suggesting that Jews do not easily give up their Jewish identity.
Let There Be Laughter Page 8