Without knowing or understanding Yiddish, the convert joke, as well as the “No! Swimming Allowed!” joke, can be lost on the person hearing or reading it. With little if any grasp of the connotative power of Yiddish words and phrases, many jokes have a short shelf life. As an example, I think of my grandparents coming over in steerage from Russia, unwilling to allow anything unkosher to pass their lips, while my own children have gone on cruises and eaten shellfish, pork, and ham. How, I am often asked, can younger grandchildren and great-grandchildren ever understand the meaning of many of the older Jewish jokes, tales, or folklore, when they have never learned any Yiddish? How can they understand when they have never entered into what the literary critic Irving Howe aptly called “the world of our fathers”? Or, please, our mothers!
It is even difficult for many of today’s young Jews to realize that their parents or grandparents lived during a period of exclusive clubs that would not accept Jews as members. Not even to mention college quotas. My father could not get into medical school because of strict quotas. I could not be a member of nearly all of the non-Jewish fraternities on the campus of my southern Ohio alma mater. That was simply how things were, and for the most part, there was acceptance if not acquiescence. But even when Jews couldn’t all study at the top institutions or become doctors or lawyers because of quotas, there was, and still remains, rich, vibrant humor about Jewish distinctiveness. We see this in Groucho Marx’s famous quip after being told he would be admitted to an exclusive Gentile club only if he didn’t swim in the club’s pool. Groucho (who also once famously said he would not want to join any club that wanted him as a member) was said to have asked if his daughter, who was half-Jewish, could wade in the pool up to her knees.
When my younger daughter and her boyfriend went to see Old Jews Telling Jokes on Broadway, they were aware of being the only young couple in the audience. I’m sure younger people have attended that show, just as occasionally younger men and women have come to my presentations of Jewish comedy. But they are often brought along or urged to go by parents who want to expose them to the past for which they, the parents, are nostalgic. When older generations of Jews wax poetic either about the golden age of Jewish comedy—or, as a documentary film title heralds it, When Jews Were Funny—it suggests the onetime pervasiveness of Jewish comedians who had Jewish mind-sets and were not Jewish solely by DNA.
I once emceed An Evening of Jewish Humor that included a talented roster of comedy stand-ups including Steve Landesberg, Brad Garrett, Richard Lewis, and Rita Rudner. The only real Jewish link among them was their gene pool. Only yours truly, who opened the evening, and Robin Williams, who was not a Jew but came onstage at the end with manic spritzing as the surprise final performer, were summoning Yiddish words or deploying recognizable Jewish content.
I always liked Canadian-born comedian David Steinberg’s line about his father never getting to see his dream of an all-Yiddish-speaking Canada come true. The essential paradox of Jewish identity is that, as it becomes increasingly secular, the jokes reflect a greater need to preserve its values.
A Tel Aviv mother speaks to her children exclusively in Yiddish despite her friends and neighbors scolding her to speak in Hebrew. “Why are you so stubborn?” a friend of hers asks in exasperation. “It will do them no good to learn Yiddish.” “Perhaps,” says the mother. “But I don’t want them to forget that they are Jewish.”
Jewish cultural values are embedded in Yiddishkeit. Before the birth of Israel, Hebrew was only the language of prayer. But as the mother in the joke, set in the modern Hebrew-speaking city of Tel Aviv, is saying, Jewish identity is rooted in the mother tongue of Yiddish.
Consider a story told by Sam Levenson, a popular figure in television during the 1950s, in which a Jewish mother brags to her mahjongg group about her son spending so much time with his grandfather during summer vacation. “He even learned from his zayde how to count in Yiddish,” she proudly says to the other ladies. Whereupon she summons her boychick and asks him to show the ladies how he can count in Yiddish. The boy proceeds: “Eyns, tsvey, dray, fir, finef, zeks, zibn, akht, nayn, sven. Jack. Queen. King. Ace.”
The story has obvious charm. The grandson in it has formed an apparent bond with his zayde and has actually learned to count to ten in Yiddish. Though the context is card playing, a transgenerational joke like this is affirming.
The joke about the grandfather who takes his grandson for a walk and then proposes a swim also unites generations—with an implicit meaning of a passing on of the past. The Yiddish grandfather provides his own interpretation of the prohibition against swimming—which he renders with a lively Yiddish inflection and rhythm.
We see again what is evidenced in many Jewish jokes, a preserving of the past unto a later generation. The preserving is less in learning Yiddish numbers or Yiddish inflections and rhythms than it is in the relationship of grandfather and grandson and in the idea of learning being passed down. In the words of my friend the novelist and pioneering psychiatrist Irwin Yalom, “We’re passing on something of ourselves . . . that’s what makes our life full of meaning.”
Most of the roots of Jewish humor we have come to know and love not only emerged from the Ashkenazi Jewish experience, but also became linked to other nations where Jews lived and thrived. Perhaps, as the novelist Saul Bellow once said, in discussing how Jewish and Irish humor are alike, “Oppressed people tend to be witty.” But Jews have not been oppressed for some time now in most Western countries. They’ve been discriminated against, disdained, and even despised, but not—as in the painful past of history—oppressed, tortured, or killed by government fiat for the crime of being Jewish. Still, many Jews remain painfully aware of the past, even continuing to feel marginalized or victims of anti-Semitism. This has become true in our own time with much wrath directed against Israel. But even that can be turned into a joke spanning generations, as in the one about the great-grandfather in Israel who points to a tree and says to his great-grandson, “I planted that tree.” Then he points to a house and tells his great-grandson, “I built that house.” The great-grandson asks, “Great-grandpa, were you an Arab?”
Or take the joke about the Jewish father in the twenty-first century who is walking with his son when he is stopped by a passerby who tells him how handsome the boy is. He proudly thanks the stranger, who then proceeds to ask the boy’s name. “Shlomo,” the father replies. “Shlomo?” says the passerby. “What kind of name is Shlomo?” The father answers: “He’s named after his dead grandfather whose name was Scott.”
I love that joke. It has within it the seeds of hope for a renaissance in Jewish tradition in generations to come. Most Jews continue to name their children after the dead and often use the first letter of the name of a deceased loved one with a more assimilated name (like Scott). The man’s son in the joke is given an S name right out of Yiddishkeit, a name far away from the contemporary.
What is especially archetypal about Jewish humor is the tie it almost always has to differentness, separateness, chosenness, and loss. Yiddish can embody all of that. Consider Jon Stewart’s hilarious bit “Faith Off,” in which he claimed to be getting personal, focusing on Passover versus Easter. He dramatically entreats his fellow Jews, calling them mishpocheh, the Yiddish word for family or extended family, and pleads with them to bring Passover up a notch for the sake of keeping Jewish children Jewish, including his own half-Jewish kids. Stewart takes out an Easter basket and points to the chocolate and bunnies in it, asking his fellow Jewish parents how they can possibly compete—comparing a basket of goodies and bunny rabbits to a traditional Passover plate, replete with horseradish and a bone from a dead baby lamb.
Jewish youth of today need more than a transfusion of Yiddish to claim their Jewishness and heritage. In what could easily be seen as an assimilation joke, my brother Victor tells a tale of working at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center when a young Jewish member, reading an announcement that the center would be closed on the two Jewish
holidays of Succoth and Shavuot, asked him: “What does closing the center have to do with suck it and shove it?”
Jewish jokes often reveal loss of faith or lack of understanding of Judaism itself, as in the joke about the young Jew who goes to see an Orthodox rabbi to ask for a barucha, or blessing, to be said by the rabbi over his new Mercedes. The Orthodox rabbi is outraged and says he has no wish to say a barucha over a German car and tells the young car owner to go to the Conservative rabbi down the block. The young Jew goes to the Conservative rabbi and asks for a barucha only to be told by that rabbi that he knows no baruchas for cars. Perhaps, he advises, the young man might want to see a Reform rabbi in a synagogue nearby. The young man finds the Reform rabbi and asks him if he can say a barucha over his new Mercedes. The Reform rabbi informs the young man that he, too, has a Mercedes, and asks what model of Mercedes and how many miles it can get to the gallon. Then the reform rabbi asks: “What is a barucha?”
The joke is also told featuring a young Jew seeking a mezuzah for his Ferrari. The Reform rabbi asks, “What’s a mezuzah?”
In either form, the joke is really about the anxiety over the loss of Judaism’s essential meaning as it becomes more secular—and about materialism supplanting traditional Jewish values. It demonstrates, too, how young Jews can misunderstand or misapply something as sacred as a barucha. And it alludes to the commonly held belief (also a Jewish joke itself) that the three branches of Judaism can never agree, with the Reform movement appearing especially adrift from traditional Jewish practice.
Three modern rabbis are arguing about which of the three is the most progressive.
“I am definitely the most progressive,” says the first rabbi. “We allow smoking during services.”
“That’s nothing,” replies the second rabbi. “We serve pork spareribs during Yom Kippur.”
“Not bad,” replies the third rabbi. “But I have you all beat. During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we post signs at my temple—closed for the holidays.”
Jewish comics have drawn from their own lives to highlight assimilation humor. Woody Allen once spoke of his rabbi being so Reformed he was a Nazi. Jackie Mason, too, did a riff on a Jew refusing to buy a Mercedes because it is a German car. Mason joked that other German-made goods, especially if offered at bargain prices, seemed to get a pass. The stand-up comic London Lee, née Alan Levine, once said he had a German shepherd as a pet until it found out he was Jewish and bit him.
But the barucha joke may also be yet another kind of crowing over Jewish prosperity. It simultaneously draws our attention to the success of Jews who can actually afford a Mercedes or a Ferrari, while harshly criticizing, through humor, how much Jews, especially young Jews and Reform rabbis, have migrated from Judaism to materialism.
Material success can, indeed, be the measure of success for refugees. It can, too, even include anti-Semitism. As in the joke about the two Jewish refugees who make their way to America and vow to meet at the same place in a year. They make a bet over who will do better materially and who will become the more assimilated. They meet. The first Jew says, “I made my first hundred thousand dollars and my wife is in the PTA. My kid is in Little League. We eat regularly at McDonald’s and barbecue every weekend. What about you?” The second Jew gives him a cold stare and says, “Fuck you, Jewboy.”
It is illuminating to note that I heard the same joke, years later, with the refugees being Muslims from an Arab country and the one calling the other a camel jockey.
A wide range of Jewish jokes about the loss of Jewish identity are also about what Nietzsche called “eternal return” and what we might call the shadow of the past. When the black entertainer and Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr. converted to Judaism, a joke went around that Sammy tried to get on a bus in the Jim Crow South and was ordered by the bus driver to get to the back of the bus. “But I’m Jewish,” Sammy pleaded. Whereupon the bus driver said, “Get off the bus.”
That joke was especially popular when Jews were in vogue in America and “philo-Semitism” (the opposite of anti-Semitism) was at its summit. Not only Sammy Davis, but a number of other Hollywood icons, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, converted to Judaism. (Lenny Bruce got big laughs on Steve Allen’s old television show simply by announcing that he would attend Elizabeth Taylor’s bat mitzvah.) At heart, both the joke about the barucha-seeking Mercedes or Ferrari owner and the one about Sammy Davis on a segregated bus in the South are variations on the same theme: anxiety about being Jewish.
A couple of landsmen, fellow Jews, see a sign offering a hundred dollars to any Jew who will convert. One of the two Jews, Murray, decides to investigate and asks his friend, Harry, to wait for him. Murray is gone a long time, and when he finally returns, Harry asks, “Well. Did you get the money?” Murray says, “Why is that the first thing you people think about?”
In this joke, there is anxiety over loss of Jewish identity. Many Jewish jokes, such as the one about the conversion and the goyishe kop, are about this fear, and about the need to relinquish Jewish identity in order to make it financially. This was especially true in harsher times, like the Depression, when there were actual quotas and formidable barriers standing in the way of Jews making progress. The great German writer Heinrich Heine converted from Judaism to Christianity and called his conversion a passport to acceptance. Many Jews in the United States felt the need to change their Jewish-sounding last names in order to advance or gain acceptance. Even Jews who retained names like Shapiro, Levine, or Katz gave their names more English-sounding pronunciations. Of course there were many permutations of Jewish-sounding names as years went by. Ralph Lifshitz, for example, became Ralph Lauren. Jonathan Leibowitz and Lorne Lipowitz became Jon Stewart and Lorne Michaels. According to my friend Phil Bronstein, his father knew a man named Green who came from Europe and decided he wanted an American-sounding name. He changed his to Greenberg. Now, that’s funny! Jewish jokes are often about some vestige of Jewishness that cannot be covered up, discarded, or lost.
A couple try for years to get entrance into an all-WASP country club that will not accept Jews as members. Finally, Morris and Rose gain membership in the club because Morris, or Moishe, as he is known to his Jewish friends, agrees to donate a couple million to a capital campaign, which will mean a whole new building for the previously restrictive club. Now that they are members, Rose is eager and excited to be there and she dresses up for a grand entrance to the evening’s dinner for all club members. Rose appears with a full-length mink coat and her finest and most expensive, gaudy jewelry. Upon entering, she immediately sees modestly and underdressed women with only the most tasteful and not at all conspicuous or flashy jewelry. She realizes how out of whack her appearance is compared to these WASP women and she cannot suppress the single word that escapes her mouth. Loudly and audible to all around her the word tumbles out. “GEVALT,” the Yiddish word that is an exclamation of shock or alarm. She looks swiftly around at the placid and aloof and modestly dressed WASP women and says, “Vatever dat means.”
Do younger Jews understand the feeling of exclusion integral to such jokes, an exclusion once commonplace? If they are not familiar with their people’s history, extending back a couple of generations, these kinds of jokes can fall flat. They need only talk to older Jews in their family or watch a film like Gentleman’s Agreement, a 1947 movie in which Gregory Peck plays a reporter posing as a Jew and encounters widespread anti-Semitism.
The comedian Jack Carter once said his favorite Jewish joke was the one that takes us back to the era of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was the in-your-heart-you-know-he’s-right conservative Republican from Arizona who ran for president against Lyndon Baines Johnson. He was scion of a well-to-do, once-Jewish family whose name was originally Goldwasser.
A man named Schwartz calls up a man named Goldwater and complains to him. “How come, Goldwater, I can’t get in the club and you got in?” Goldwater responds: “Mr. Schwartz. My name is Goldwater. It is not Goldwasser. It is not Gol
dvasser. I am an Episcopalian. My father is an Episcopalian. My grandfather, alav ha-shalom, he was an Episcopalian.”
Even in the face of conversion or assimilation, the customary Yiddish (and Hebrew) words for the dead, alav ha-shalom, are uttered.
Both the Goldwater joke and the gevalt joke are really about Jewish identity seemingly lost yet in some form remaining. Schwartz may not get into the club, but Goldwater may not really belong either, despite being a member. The gevalt lady, Rose, and her husband, Moishe, finally make it into the restricted club through Moishe’s extravagant donation, but, again, the manner in which she dresses up and the one single Yiddish word she utters set her apart. Both jokes seem to say that Jews retain distinctiveness, even if they social-climb to become Gentile club members. Traces of Yiddish, which humorously expose the bloodline, remain. They never truly can be goyim!
Much of the Jewish past and Jewish identity has, of course, become eroded by time and assimilation. Identity somehow remains, however—as in the story of the Jew who converts to Catholicism and becomes a priest. He presents his first sermon in a cathedral to a large number of devout Catholics. He begins the sermon with: “My fellow goyim.”
I recall feeling a small sense of exclusion myself one evening, when, as a young professor, I attended the birthday party of a Gentile friend at his private and swanky club with no other Jews in sight. The friend who invited me was a Harvard WASP, and I was seated with friends of his, all young WASP types who were comparing notes on where they lived when they were at Harvard. “Weren’t you in Quincy House?” one of them asked. “No, I was in Mather House.” “Oh,” said a third, “I was supposed to be in Mather House but I wound up at Adams.” And so it went. Until, as if realizing the need to be civil, one of them finally turned to me and asked, “You weren’t at Harvard, were you?” I said, deadpan, “No. I was in Hillel House at Ohio University.”
Let There Be Laughter Page 9