Let There Be Laughter

by Michael Krasny

  The Jewish comedian Billy Crystal turns death’s sting into humor in 700 Sundays, the poignant autobiography and one-man Tony Award–winning show about the death of his father when Billy was fifteen. He does this by mimicking the lisping voice of the funeral director who says, “My condolenchess to the family of the decheassed.” It prompts Crystal to complain, “My father is dead and I have to talk to Sylvester the Cat?” Suffering turned into a one-liner.

  Anti-Semitism, a source of great pain and suffering for centuries, can also be turned into a source of humor, as in the joke I relished as a young broadcaster about the Jewish guy who tries out for a job as an announcer and is not hired. When asked by an acquaintance why he thought he didn’t get the job, the would-be announcer says, “Anti-Ssssssemitism.”

  My sister, Lois, was having dinner in a Cleveland restaurant called the Wagon Wheel. People seated next to her were saying things that were downright anti-Semitic. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “They are so damn cheap” and “I can’t believe how clannish they are.” It was painful and distressing to her as the comments continued. Finally, when the dinner was over and the Jew haters were ready to leave, she swallowed hard, boldly went up to them, and said: “I couldn’t help overhearing what you were saying during dinner and it was disgusting. I want you to know that I heard it all and I am Jewish.” Whereupon one of the women, who had been seated at the table, piped up and said, “So are we!” And another added, “Yes. We all are.”

  Past stereotypes have been viciously used against Jews, even by their fellow tribe members. The chief source of Jew hatred may now be tied to Israel, but for centuries it was due largely to their rejection of Jesus as lord and savior. They were tortured and murdered for supposedly killing Christ—which, despite Mel Gibson’s film, they did not have much (if any) of a hand in. Yet even that libel can be turned into a kind of humor. My dad swore that when some hoods in his high school were after him, calling him a Christ killer, he said, “It wasn’t me. I was at the ball game.” The charge of being Christ killers has, of course, plagued Jews through the millennia even though Jesus was a Jew, which has been an ongoing source of humor—as in the joke about the group of Hasids who show up to the Catholic ceremony of a nun being wed to Christ. They sit in the front row claiming they are relatives on the groom’s side.

  Even the Crucifixion can be turned into humor. Like the joke about the Crucifixion of Christ taking place in modern times—by electrocution, not by order of Pontius Pilate. Would Christians then, the joke asks, wear a small electric chair on a chain around their necks rather than a cross?

  The famed comedian Lenny Bruce joked that the Jews should be let off the hook for killing Christ because of the statute of limitations. He also claimed, “We killed him because a party got out of hand” and “he didn’t want to become a doctor.” Bruce also claimed his family found a note in their basement confessing to their killing Christ and signed by Morty.

  If humor can be created out of the actual Crucifixion, then the possibilities, especially for humor of a darker nature, begin to expand nearly exponentially to many other once forbidden topics. A group of Jewish writers, including such early figures as Nathanael West (née Nathan Weinstein) of Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust fame, and later on, Jewish novelists like Joseph Heller (the author of Catch-22) or Bruce Jay Friedman (the author of Stern and A Mother’s Kisses) became associated with what was called black humor—which had nothing to do with Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, or, heaven forbid, Bill Cosby. It was (and remains) a kind of dark or gallows humor that, paradoxically, can act as a kind of balm for pain and suffering and was especially significant in works by a number of non-Jewish American writers like Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. The darker the humor the more comic writers began not only to welcome and love it, but even to celebrate it.

  Humor even has emerged out of the Holocaust. How can this event, the Shoah, be a source of humor? As the well-circulated line among Jews in the entertainment industry goes: “There’s no business like Shoah business.”

  Let’s remember Ricky Gervais presenting Kate Winslet a Golden Globe and saying to her, “Well done, Winslet. I told you, do a Holocaust movie and awards come, didn’t I?” Gervais, who is not Jewish, was pushing the envelope hard on the Jews-run-Hollywood cliché, which many see as an anti-Semitic canard. A year later, after hosting the Golden Globes, Gervais concluded with “shalom from me and Mel Gibson.”

  Early in his career, after the notorious Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann had been captured, put on trial in Jerusalem, and executed, Woody Allen said they found his (Woody’s) name and phone number in Eichmann’s pants pocket. Jack Benny, in a similar vein, said he agreed with Will Rogers that he never met a man he didn’t like, then added, “Well, maybe Eichmann.”

  The movie director Judd Apatow, who gave us such films as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, for years wanted to do stand-up. He showed up on The Tonight Show with a routine after the release of the Amy Schumer film Trainwreck, which he directed. With Jewish self-deprecation, he compared a perfect drawing of himself to Nazi propaganda.

  I heard Harvard Yiddish professor Ruth Wisse tell a Holocaust joke, apparently quite popular in Israel during a rash of suicide bombings. Morbid or gallows humor? Yes. But think of the irony! The joke is about a suicide bomb going off in a Jerusalem café near the home of relatives of an American Jewish family. The concerned American relatives call and are assured that everyone in the house is safe. They ask about the teenage daughter, Hodel, who they knew hung out at that particular café. They are told, “Hodel is fine. She’s safe. She’s at Auschwitz.”

  Built out of the ashes of concentration camps like Auschwitz, Israel had become a deadly place for Jewish children, while Auschwitz, which many young Jewish students continue to visit, had turned into a safe place!

  The fact is, Holocaust humor, like humor about Anti-Semitism, is mostly no longer forbidden, especially if the jokes come from Jews themselves rather than someone like Ricky Gervais or, much worse, Mel Gibson. It can be a touchy question as to who tells such jokes and gets a pass and who does not. The real subtext of the humor, however, is simple and direct. Out of suffering, humor can emerge.

  Years ago I introduced Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Holocaust survivor and author. After Wiesel had given a talk, a man came up to him. The man turned out to have been with him in Auschwitz. It was an incredible unforeseen reunion. After hugging and crying, they began to talk about the SS Nazi guard who beat them. Each summoned memories of how violent and sadistic the guard had been. Then, as they compared remembrances, they suddenly began to talk about his peculiar and bizarre personal habits and then, uncontrollably, they began to laugh. It was an extraordinary sight to witness and showed me how humor can emerge many years later even from terrible suffering.

  In America and other developed countries, Jews were at last free of persecution, pogroms, and genocide. All of that suffering became grist for the humor mill, even in a controversial joke like the one Joan Rivers told on Fashion Police about German supermodel Heidi Klum’s neckline-plunging gold dress. Rivers was condemned for the remark by the Anti-Defamation League and refused to apologize for saying, while on the red carpet, “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the ovens.” Rivers defended the joke, saying that many of the members of her husband Edgar’s family were killed in the Holocaust and she would never apologize for reminding people of it.

  In an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry’s father’s friend Solly, a survivor of the death camps, meets Colby Donaldson, a young fellow who had been on the television show Survivor. An argument ensues about who had a more difficult time, who suffered more. “But I was in Auschwitz,” Solly finally exclaims, after hearing the TV survivor kvetch about having to walk long distances, wear thongs, run out of tasty snacks, and put up with mosquitoes.

  Thanks largely to Jewish comics, jokes about the Holocaust and
Nazis, for better or worse, have become part of popular culture. Larry David could even joke about the notorious death camp murderer Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, who was responsible at Auschwitz for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and who performed deadly human experiments on prisoners. In an old stand-up bit, which ridicules his own vanity, David said, “If he’d given me a compliment, Josef Mengele and I could have been friends—‘Larry, your hair looks very good today.’ Really? Thank you, Dr. Mengele!”

  What remains off-limits? David, also the co-creator of Seinfeld, came up with a character on that series called the Soup Nazi.

  Jews feel comfortable enough in America to joke even about Christ in ways that can only be described as over-the-top—such as in the Christmas Day episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry thought he was eating animal cookies from a miniature zoo when he actually ate representations from an artificial manger. He discovers, from his Gentile wife, Cheryl, and her family, that he had consumed the baby Jesus and the holy mother Mary.

  The past may be prologue, but anxiety about the past and its way of marking Jews is still distinctive. However, popular culture, especially in the United States, has changed the calculus from fear of something appearing too Jewish to Jewish identity that goes often to the other extreme. This can be seen in the contrast between two of the most popular comedy TV shows of all time—Seinfeld and The Jack Benny Show.

  One of America’s most popular comedy entertainers, Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kublesky) was an audience favorite in both radio and television from the 1930s to the 1970s. A pioneer of the sitcom, he, along with his wife, Mary Livingstone (née Sadie Marks), became fixtures in the homes of millions of Americans. Like Henny Youngman, his trademark was the violin, but his signature persona was of a lovable skinflint, always and in every way cheap. His Jewishness was never revealed. Rather than being cheap, Benny was actually a generous soul, concocting the cheap Scrooge role for laughs just as he and his good friend Fred Allen made up an ongoing feud between them. When, in 1948, Benny’s character was held up and given the option “Your money or your life,” he was able to use his brilliant sense of comic timing in what would become his signature skit, saying, after a pause, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

  I may be flirting with a thesis here that others will find a stretch. But it has always been striking to me that Benny felt he had to keep his Jewishness entirely under wraps while, a couple of decades later, Jerry Seinfeld would include not only Jewish characters, but a regular lampooning of Jewish themes and stereotypes.

  Many Jews, who were well aware of Jack Benny’s Jewish identity, believed that the joke underneath the joke, the subtext of much of Benny’s humor, was his Jewishness. Yet, with episodes of The Jack Benny Show built around Christmas, there was never a hint of anything identifiably Jewish. Nothing! Except perhaps his violin.

  It was no secret to Jews all over the world that nearly all of the world’s greatest violinists were of Jewish descent. The names continue to rise to the stratosphere of musical achievement—Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Yitzhak Perlman, and Isaac Stern. Perhaps no other field except medicine (and, of course, comedy) has contained so many stellar figures who were Jewish. Jack Benny, like Henny Youngman, was no master of the instrument, and his violin playing was a kind of inside Jewish joke. The latter never became explicit because Jack Benny, by necessity, remained, alas, closeted as a Jew. To the present day, he can be seen more as an everyman figure, an American really. That was the aim of Jewish entertainers and writers of all stripes immediately following the Second World War. This is the reason, I believe, why Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman was never identified as being Jewish. The play appeared in 1949, the year after the your-money-or-your-life Jack Benny episode. Though recognizably Jewish, even in idioms and locutions, Willy Loman, created by a Jewish American playwright, remained unidentifiable as a Jew. Young people of today, Jewish or otherwise, would have a hard time detecting any Jewishness either in Jack Benny or Willy Loman. In large part out of the fear of anti-Semitism, concealing Jewishness was deemed necessary so soon after the Holocaust, even, and perhaps particularly, by Jews themselves.

  The Jewish executives who green-lighted Seinfeld, the popular television show “about nothing,” voiced concerns over its being too Jewish. However, Jerry Seinfeld stepped out of the closet and played an openly Jewish character in what was destined to be one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. The creators and most of the writers were Jews, and the New York style of the sitcom gave life to the Lenny Bruce quip that if you were from New York you were Jewish. The character of George was supposed to be only half-Jewish, but both his parents fit the roles of stereotypical Jewish caricatures. Overt Jewish themes were taken on by the writers, including episodes with rabbis, a mohel, and the one about Elaine’s “shiksappeal.” There were episodes in which Jerry gets fixed up with a young woman named Donna Chang, who turns out to be a Caucasian Jewish blonde from Long Island whose family name is Changstein. There is Dr. Wattley, Jerry’s dentist, who converts to Judaism and feels it gives him license to freely tell Jewish jokes, prompting Jerry, who announces himself a Jew, to inform on the ex-Catholic Wattley to a priest in a confession booth. The priest asks, “Are you offended as a Jew?” and Seinfeld answers, “No. I’m offended as a comedian.” We are a long way from Jack Benny.

  If you examine nearly any episode of Seinfeld having to do overtly with Jews or Jewish identity, you will find ridicule. Which is why, though the relationship of Seinfeld to Jews and Jewishness has had many ardent defenders, there are those who insist a number of episodes are self-hating. But, as Woody Allen’s character, Harry, in the film Deconstructing Harry, said on being called a self-hating Jew: “I may hate myself but not because I’m Jewish.”

  When I attended a fund-raiser for a PBS Jewish humor documentary, Jerry Stiller (father of Ben and George’s father on Seinfeld) was emcee. He told a story about the famed Jewish actor Walter Matthau going to visit Auschwitz with his wife. The couple had been fighting the night before and the next morning were still fuming. When the tour ended, Matthau’s wife, her eyes streaming with tears, said to her husband, “That puts everything in perspective and ought to make both of us realize how foolish our fighting was.” Matthau, according to Jerry Stiller, gave his wife a cold look and said, “It’s too late. You ruined Auschwitz for me.”

  Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench. One looks at the other and says, “Oy.” The other looks back and says, “Oy.” This is repeated again and again until the first older man says, “I thought we weren’t going to talk politics?”

  A good joke teller can do marvelous and even brilliant things with just the sounds of “oys” that the printed word cannot equal; but the word alone, “oy,” whether uttered or seen on the page, creates a rich stream of associations with kvetching and the suffering of the Jewish past. “Oy” evokes suffering in ways, more than likely, no other two-letter word in any language can. As they say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single “oy.”

  Why is the “oy, vas I thirsty” joke funny? Even when the old Jew’s thirst is quenched, he kvetches about it. The joke is ridiculing a Jewish inability to let go of the past.

  A good number of Jewish jokes, like that one, are built on suffering. But in them, too, is a clinging to the idea of separateness, which also can be celebrated. In the diabetes joke, members of every other identity group want liquor except for the Jew. The need and thirst for alcohol may suggest dependence, if not addiction, but the joke also tells us Jews are quick to assume the worst. Centuries of suffering can and do breed pessimism.

  An old Jew, who prays at the Western Wall, is known to have been going there to pray every day, many times a day, for many years. An enterprising young American reporter is told about the old man and his hours of daily praying. Believing it might make a good human-interest story, the reporter goes to the wall and, sure enough, there is the old man bent i
n prayer. After watching the old Jew pray for about an hour and a half and then seeing him slowly walk away, cane in hand, the reporter approaches him and asks him his name. The old Jew answers that his name is Irving Rabinowitz. The reporter then inquires how long Mr. Rabinowitz has been praying at the Western Wall and Rabinowitz answers, “Sixty-seven years.”

  “That is remarkable,” says the young reporter. “What do you pray for?”

  Rabinowitz says that he prays for peace between Jews, Muslims, and Christians and for the love of human beings for their fellow humans. He adds that he also prays for politicians to be honest.

  At this point, the reporter asks, “So what has it been like for you praying all these years?”

  Rabinowitz answers, “It’s like talking to a fucking wall.”

  The joke became quite popular and was even turned into a cartoon. Its meaning is obvious—prayer, even at the Western Wall, is unlikely to be answered, especially if the prayer has anything to do with peace or producing honest politicians. Such prayers have gone unanswered through the millennia. The old man represents the passive Jew who keeps praying even though his response to the reporter is an aggressive one directed at God himself.

  The trajectory of a lot of Jewish humor winds up, especially after the Holocaust, with aggression directed at the almighty himself. Lenny Bruce said, “If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer.” And recall that Lewis Black called God “a prick.” The implication of much of these types of jokes is the question: Where was God when he was really needed? Where was God when Jews were suffering most? Where, too, was his mercy and justice? Yet Jews remain passive and pray. The humor rests in the paradox.