Let There Be Laughter

by Michael Krasny

  I remember telling my mother that Eugene O’Neill’s great Irish American tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, with all of its ambivalence, guilt, and blame, had parallels to our Jewish family. After she saw the play, my mother said, “Honey, we aren’t like those people. We don’t drink.”

  But Jews do love food and celebrate it with a good deal of humor. I managed to get the actor Alan Arkin to laugh uncontrollably when, during an interview with him, I asked him if he remembered an interview he did many years before on CBS when he was asked what his favorite role was. He couldn’t recall what he said. So I reminded him that his answer was “a kaiser roll.”

  A longtime Jewish woman friend of mine named Judith Rich tells the story of her mother’s sister on board a train with a lunch her mother had packed for her to eat. An old Jewish man was seated near her and the aunt offered to share her lunch with him. The old man said no until he saw some kichel (a Jewish cookie) and then said yes. When he tasted it, he said to her, “You must be Rivka Nevelson’s granddaughter.” She was.

  Okay. So maybe it’s more a story than a joke. But the line is thin between the two and sometimes nonexistent. Sharing your lunch with an older stranger is a good example of tzedakah, which, once again, is a mitzvah worthy of celebration. What beside generosity would motivate someone to do that? The story not only shows the closeness of a community, but the special pride in women being good balabostas (homemakers), especially where Jewish baking is concerned. Thus we have, in Judith’s family tale, an ascending order of values from the generosity of tzedakah to the importance of community to the strength of the memory of Jewish baked food—in this case, appropriately enough, a baked sweet.

  So let us go to another true tale from the wide world of Jewish humor. I mention it because it is indicative of what many Jews have celebrated as long as they have celebrated food and wine and the Jewish holidays

  I like to tell the story. It is about a boyhood chum from my Cleveland neighborhood whom we called Pissy. I went to visit him when we were both in college in Ohio. I drove up from Athens to the state capital in Columbus, where both Ohio State and Pissy were located. When I found his apartment, I parked my car in front and saw him run out. I assumed he was excited to see me, but as it turned out, he wanted to brief me, hastily and with obvious anxiety, about the fact that he had a live-in Christian girlfriend who didn’t know he was a Jew. He begged me, with great seriousness, not to mention, under any circumstances, his being Jewish. I gave him my solemn word that I would not say the words “Jew” or “Jewish.”

  When I met the young lady, who was amiable and, I should add, wearing a large cross, I asked her if she knew how talented Fred (Pissy’s real name) was at making kreplach for matzo ball soup. She looked puzzled. I went on. “Not only does he make a great kreplach, he is a master of charoset and all Pesach dishes and can bake a wonderful challah for an Oneg Shabbat.”

  Pissy was pissed! But I had kept my word and had not uttered the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” I felt he deserved my shtick with the Jewish food words for concealing his Jewishness. I don’t believe the young woman had much of an idea of what any of the Jewish food words meant or what culture they belonged to.

  These stories stay in my quiver like jokes, humorous when told and retold but also rooted in a sense of nostalgia and in my own Jewish identity. Most Jews have a staple of such stories that they tell and retell in ways that celebrate memory.

  Froggy, also my neighbor, and I were what my bubbie would have called a pair of paskunyaks, a great Yiddish word denoting evil or horrible, but used more often affectionately about bad-boy mischief makers. Froggy was getting bar mitzvah lessons from an itinerant rabbi whose name was Katz, whom we called Rabbi Katz-in-tuchas, meaning Rabbi Katz in the ass. A little man with a huge skull, the rabbi would park his old Studebaker blocks away on Shabbos. He would sneak over to Froggy’s house or to the homes of others in the neighborhood who he was tutoring at his hourly rate, making everyone believe he walked on Shabbos because driving was forbidden. Froggy and I one Saturday found his car parked and unlocked. We climbed in and planted ourselves across the seats, he in the front, and I in the back. We knew Katz-in-tuchas was taking his usual surreptitious route back, and when he opened the front door on the driver’s side, we popped up and greeted him in unison with “Gut yuntif, Rabbi.” Katz-in-tuchas clutched his heart. I honestly thought for a few moments we had killed him.

  Just the name Katz can make me laugh. I went to Hebrew school with a funny troublemaker named Teddy Katz. The teacher, a volatile and short-tempered man, once ordered class-disrupting Teddy to stand in the corner. As Teddy stood there, he suddenly, audibly, began to sing the lyrics to “Jesus Loves Me,” which actually caused our wildly incensed Hebrew teacher to froth at the mouth.

  I certify both Katz stories are true. The memory of either or both, to the present day, can make me laugh. As much as a good Jewish joke.

  A bus filled with dedicated Hadassah ladies is traveling through the Southwest and goes off a cliff, instantly killing everyone on the bus. All of the women ascend to heaven, where they find a young intern is filling in for St. Peter. St. Peter appears, hours later, back at his post at the entrance to heaven and God shows up a couple of days later asking where the Hadassah ladies are. It turns out that the young intern made a dreadful mistake and sent all of them, every one of them, to hell. When God hears this, he gets on the emergency phone to Satan and tells the devil right off that a bevy of Hadassah ladies were sent by mistake straight to hell. “I know,” says Lucifer. “Already they’ve raised enough money to air-condition this place.”

  Actually, I wanted to end this chapter with this particular joke because many wonderful Jewish women have devoted their adult lives to organizations such as Hadassah, my mother being one of them. Because of economics and two-worker marriages, the number of these women, who are well worth celebrating, has declined. Over the years I have noted how their ranks, once so large in number, have thinned. But the joke speaks volumes about the admirable dedication and zeal of Hadassah ladies and their ability to get things done.

  When the Oscar-winning film director Barry Levinson lived in Marin County, where I lived for many years, we periodically saw each other for lunch. He got me one day to tell Jewish jokes nonstop to Dustin Hoffman, who loved hearing them, when they were filming Michael Crichton’s Sphere in Vallejo, a film my dad would unhesitatingly have branded with the Yiddish “from cockin,” meaning from shit. As my dad would say, and I would agree, Levinson made far better films: Diner; Avalon; Rain Man; Good Morning, Vietnam; Bugsy; and many others.

  Levinson and I enjoyed each other’s company and talked a good deal about politics and current events. He told me a lot of Hollywood stories. When he told me one day he was going back to his hometown of Baltimore and, thanks to his mother, would be addressing hundreds of Hadassah ladies there, he wanted to know if I knew any Jewish jokes that would be appropriate for the occasion.

  I told Levinson the perfect joke. The one about the Hadassah ladies in the bus. He told me afterward the joke went over well.

  But I want to tell you about my own experience with a far smaller number of Hadassah ladies in Marin County. The chapter’s president had been after me for months to give a pro bono talk. As I said, I have always admired the work Hadassah women do. My own experience talking to the Marin Hadassah is a story for the ages.

  The chapter president, who had pleaded with me to be their featured speaker, showed up with a couple of other women to greet me. One of them, let’s call her Mrs. Zaftig, grabbed hold of me by my arm and said, “It’s my favorite talk-show host, Michael Krasnell.” I realized she was pulling me away from the others, actually woman-handling me, so to speak, urging me to meet her husband, Al, who suddenly appeared looking as if he had been airlifted straight from Miami Beach—he was wearing an open shirt with white chest hair and a huge gold chai poking through, white shoes, and white hair with a panama hat. “You gotta meet Al. You gotta meet Al,” she
kept squawking as Al just stood there, immobile, staring at me with a dumb frozen smile. “Al is a big fan, too,” she assured me.

  Next thing I know I’m giving my talk. I’m not going to play false modest. I give good talks—animated, energetic, and engaging—but this one was distracting. There was a young couple seated in the front row of the auditorium, and the young woman was babbling to the young man seated next to her from the moment I began speaking. This couple stood out because everyone else in the crowd was older. I kept talking, but finally I could not restrain myself and nicely and politely asked the young woman if she would be considerate enough to stop talking. “If you need to talk to the gentleman next to you,” I added, I thought graciously, “perhaps you might want to talk outside.” I thanked her and she stopped talking. But only for a minute or two. Her yakking to the young man next to her continued right up to the end of my talk, at which point the woman who had pleaded with me to give the talk came running over. I assumed she was going to thank me for what I felt certain was a good talk. Instead, she said, “How could you talk to my daughter-in-law so insultingly? You have no idea how hard I had to work to get her to come today. And she’s not even Jewish. But I taught her how to make gefilte fish and she makes it great!”

  Is that a Jewish story? Or does it sound eerily similar to a Jewish joke?

  All Jewish holidays can be described in nine words. Those nine words? THEY TRIED TO KILL US. WE WON. LET’S EAT.

  I call the nine-word summation of the Jewish past a great joke because it brings to the fore associations with Jewish holidays and eating, whether after fasting on Yom Kippur or sitting through a Haggadah service before a seder meal. It also serves to link Jews to their history, all set against the impatience of the non-Orthodox Jews of the contemporary period, who, like my father, rushed through seders to get to the meal. (If you listened to the comic Jackie Mason you would assume all Jews want to do is eat while all Gentiles want to do is drink.)

  Notwithstanding one year, in the early seventies, when friends introduced feminist Hagaddahs to their seder—which brought a lot of bad jokes about bra burning—traditional seders, just like eating and being fed, are identified with Jewish women, who, until the most recent wave of feminism changed traditional roles, did all of the work and preparing. The novelist Cynthia Ozick once quipped that the exodus may have freed Jews from pharaoh’s slavery, but it did not free Jewish women from the slave work required of them to prepare the home for Passover and cook for the seder.

  Embedded in the nine-word joke, too, is the joy associated with the communal Passover experience reflected in those last two words: “Let’s eat.” What is lost in tradition is made up for in the present with speed and abundance. The real essence of the joke is in the juxtaposition of the Jewish past with the immediacy of wanting to eat. Most major Jewish holidays, with the exceptions of Hanukkah and Purim, are, in fact, not about others trying to kill all of the Jews. In fact, in the ancient past, which is hallowed at Passover seders, it is God who does the killing—of the Egyptian firstborn. Thanks to God parting the Red Sea and Moses leading the children of Israel, the Bible teaches, Jews managed to escape to freedom. I remember one Passover seder when I first heard the quip that points out the real difference between Christianity and Judaism: JESUS SAVES. MOSES INVESTS. And, speaking of Moses, remember, too, that Woody Allen in Love and Death says if only he could witness a miracle, like the parting of the Red Sea by God or Moses talking to the Burning Bush or his uncle Sasha picking up a check.

  Of course we have come to a point where the entire story of the Jews being enslaved in Egypt has been questioned by lack of archaeological evidence and the story of Passover posited as merely a myth. Fast-forward from pharaoh’s time to 1967, and the making of Funny Girl and the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt. The film, under William Wyler’s direction, faced serious obstacles brought on by the fact that Barbra Streisand’s leading man was the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. Streisand’s Jewish mother was quoted as saying, “My daughter isn’t going to work with an Egyptian.” When a leading Egyptian newspaper, discussing Omar Sharif’s being cast as Streisand’s leading man, screamed out the headline egypt angry!, Streisand said, “Egypt angry? You should hear what my aunt Sarah says.” The movie got made and Egyptians, furious at their native son Sharif, spoke for a while of taking away his citizenship for kissing a Jewish woman. Though both were married, Streisand and Sharif allegedly fell in love on the set. In 1992, Streisand would do a memorable walk-on as herself during a Saturday Night Live skit where three cartoonish middle-aged Jewish mothers played by Mike Meyers, Madonna, and Roseanne Barr all claim to be farklempt over her not winning an Oscar for The Prince of Tides.

  Naches over Streisand’s Jewishness is, of course, another clear example of Jews celebrating the success of one of their own. Will Jews ever celebrate having one of their own as the first Jewish American president of the United States? A singular fact separating Jews in America from Gentiles remains the fact that only Gentiles have been presidents. In spite of all the Jewish mothers, including mine, who told their sons any boy could grow up to be president, no Jewish boy ever has.

  When Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman was nominated to run with then vice president Al Gore, the thought occurred to many Jews that there might one day be a Jewish president. Eliot Spitzer, once a New York governor and a tough Wall Street prosecutor, was considered a possibility to become the first Jewish president until, as I told him bluntly in an interview I did with him after a scandal with a hooker killed his political career, “You blew it, Governor.”

  Soon after Vermont senator Bernie Sanders announced his run for the presidency, I asked him which he thought would turn away more voters—his being a socialist or a Jew. Bernie answered immediately, “A socialist,” though he added that he was a Democratic socialist like those in Scandinavia. Which is why some wag suggested Bernie should run instead for president of Denmark or Sweden. A photo of Sanders went viral after he announced his run for the 2016 presidency with the caption, “They tell me Bernie Sanders can’t win because America won’t vote for a Socialist Jew/I tell them America celebrates a Socialist Jew every December 25.”

  Responding to criticism of being anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic, President Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American chief executive, according to what his confidant and adviser David Axelrod told me, said,” I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.” In You Could Live If They Let You, by the Jewish American novelist Wallace Markfield, the stand-up comic protagonist says: “The time is at hand when the wearing of a prayer shawl and a skullcap will not bar a man from the White House—unless, of course, that man is Jewish.”

  That day when a Jew sits in the Oval Office may one day come. But in the meantime, as many Jewish jokes reveal, there is much to celebrate. Perhaps most of all is celebration of chai, the Hebrew word for life, oddly enough often associated with Elvis Presley, who habitually wore a gold chai on a chain around his neck. The word is tied most of all to the life force and the tree of life, which is to say to God the creator. Sheldon Harnick’s lyric in Fiddler on the Roof is key. Tevye sings, in his toast at his daughter’s wedding, “Here’s to our prosperity. Our good health and happiness. And most important, to life. L’chaim!” In life there can be laughter and in laughter there is life worth celebrating.

  VI.

  Suffering

  “No Business Like Shoah Business.”

  An old Jew is kvetching about being thirsty. “Oy, am I thirsty,” he moans. He says it over and over again. “Oy, am I thirsty.” Finally, someone hands him a glass of water. He gulps it down. Then he says, “Oy, vas I thirsty.”

  Following an especially arduous hike, the Russian says, “I’m tired and I’m thirsty. I must have vodka,” while the German says, “I’m tired and I’m thirsty. I must have beer,” and the Frenchman says, “I’m tired and I’m thirsty. I must have wine.” The Mexican says, “I’m tired and I’m thirsty. I must have tequila.�
� The Jew says, “I’m tired and I’m thirsty. I must have diabetes.”

  Most of the Jewish jokes that have endured in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel derive from the Ashkenazi experience and are concerned with the gulf between past and present. As the Christian theologian Paul Tillich once remarked, Jews are a people of time. Or, to frame it in a joke that Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize–winning Yiddish novelist, once told me: “Jews suffer from every disease except amnesia.”

  Yiddish, perhaps more than any other language, is rife not only with curses but with words of lamentation: words like tsuris (trouble, misery, or aggravation) and verbs such as kvetch (to complain) and geschrei (to wail). All of these words go snugly with “oy,” a word that includes a vast range of aches, pains, and suffering.

  Philip Roth’s Portnoy memorably said he wanted to put the oy in goy and the id in Yid. In other words, for Gentiles to be the ones to have to suffer and feel guilt, as Jews do, and for Jews to be guilt-free and unbridled in pleasure seeking. Portnoy also wanted, he told his shrink, Dr. Spielvogel, his people to take their suffering and shove it.

  Even suffering is turned by Jews into jokes. A doctor tells his patient he has bad news: the patient has cancer and a serious heart condition. But there is also good news, the doctor enthuses: “You aren’t a hypochondriac.” According to a Jewish headstone, “I told you I was sick.” Jewish humor, with its irony and wit, can extend to the finality of death and even beyond, as in the allegedly true tale I read in a book on sports trivia by Larry Stone, about the fan who took his grievances and disappointment with the perennially losing Cubs to the grave. Buried near Wrigley Field in Chicago, the man requested three words in Yiddish on his gravestone, words that translate to “the Cubs stink.”