Michael Krasny has a popular radio interview show on the NPR affiliate in San Francisco and is a university professor of English and American literature. Out flogging books of my own, I have twice been on his show and know him to be highly intelligent, cultivated, and good at his job. I’ve also met William Novak, who, along with being a collector of jokes, is, if an oxymoron be allowed, a well-known ghostwriter. He wrote the autobiographies of, among others, Lee Iacocca, Nancy Reagan, Oliver North, and Magic Johnson. Around the time I met William Novak I mentioned to my editor Carol Houck Smith that he was working on the autobiographies of Tip O’Neill and the Mayflower Madame. “Dear me,” she said, “I hope he doesn’t get his galleys mixed up.”
Both Messrs. Krasny and Novak’s books are filled with excellent jokes. I might wince slightly at the rare oral sex joke in Die Laughing, but, as Novak remarks after telling one such joke, “Too crass? You should see the ones I left out.” Michael Krasny has a weakness for name-dropping. He mentions, among several other drops: “Steve Jobs was someone I liked”; “my sweet friend Rita Moreno”; “my friend the novelist Isabel Allende”; and recounts an afternoon on which he kept Dustin Hoffman in stitches with Jewish jokes at a meeting with him and the director Barry Levinson. Myself the author of a book on snobbery, perhaps I am unduly sensitive to name-dropping, as I remarked over lunch the other day to my good friend the Pope.
Yet Michael Krasny and William Novak are men of good sense who wish only to bring pleasure to their readers, and both do. Novak doubtless shares with Krasny the latter’s wholly commendatory conservatory hope that the jokes and humor he loves “will remain an ongoing part of many lives for, well, at least the next few thousand years.”
The problem is in the nature of their enterprise: the recounting of one joke after another. Krasny, to be sure, interlards his jokes with anecdotes from his personal experience and offers occasional interpretations of his jokes. Novak introduces his separate joke categories with brief and unfailingly amusing essays. Still, as a character in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story says, “You can have too much even of kreplach.”
In our meetings, I have no recollection of exchanging jokes with Michael Krasny or William Novak, and I’m glad of it, for as Jokey Jakeys, as I think of habitual Jewish joke-tellers, things might have gotten competitive, and hence mildly abrasive. Jokey Jakeys like to hear a swell joke, but not as much as they love to tell one.
Here is a joke that appears in neither Michael Krasny’s nor William Novak’s book:
Sam Milstein is told his wife, now in the hospital, is dying. When he arrives, she asks him, in the faintest whisper, if he will make love to her one last time. He mentions the unseemliness, not to mention the awkwardness of his doing so—the wires, the tubes, and the rest—but she insists, and so he goes ahead. Lo, that same evening, mirabile dictu, Sylvia Milstein’s vital signs rise; the next day she is taken off her respirator; and three days later she returns home in full health. Her family throws a party to mark her miraculous return to normal life. Everyone is delighted and immensely cheerful, except her husband Sam, who is clearly depressed.
“Sam,” a friend says, “your beloved wife has returned from near death. Why so glum?”
“You’d be glum too,” Sam replies, “if you could have saved the life of Eleanor Roosevelt and you never even lifted a finger.”
That joke is immitigably, irreducibly, entirely Jewish. Sam cannot be Bob, nor the Milsteins the O’Malleys. As for what is so Jewish about it, I should answer, in a word, everything: the politics, the depression, even the sex.
A question Michael Krasny asks but doesn’t quite fully answer is, Why are Jews so funny? They have what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster.” Optimism is foreign to them. They find clouds in silver linings. If they do not court suffering, neither are they surprised when it arrives. They sense that life itself can be a joke, and one too often played upon them. They fear that God Himself loves a joke.
Adam, alone in the Garden of Eden, brings up his loneliness to God.
“Adam,” the Lord says, “I can stem your loneliness with a companion who will be forever a comfort and a consolation to you. She, this companion—woman, I call her—will be your friend and lover, helpmeet and guide, selfless and faithful, devoted to your happiness throughout life.
“But Adam,” says the Lord, “there is going to be a price for this companion.”
When Adam asks the price, the Lord tells him he will have to pay by the loss of his nose, his right foot, and his left hand.”
“That’s very steep,” says Adam, “but tell me, Lord, what can I get for a rib?”
That joke is of course entirely unacceptable today; it is anti-woman, misogynist, politically incorrect. Michael Krasny brings up political correctness in passing, but in our day political correctness, in its pervasiveness, is the great enemy of joke-telling and of humor in general. Consider a simple joke Henny Youngman used to tell: “A bum came up and asked me for 50 cents for a cup of coffee. ‘But coffee’s only a quarter,’ I said. ‘Won’t you join me?’ he answered.” Today there are no bums, only homeless people. As soon as one sanitizes the joke by beginning, “A homeless person came up to me . . .” the joke is over and humor has departed the room.
Pervasive though political correctness has become, it, like affirmative action, does not apply to the Jews or to Jewish jokes. Anti-Semitic jokes abound, not a few told by Jews. All play off Jewish stereotypes, some milder than others. The four reasons we know Jesus was Jewish, for example, are that he lived at home till he was past 30, he went into his father’s business, he thought his mother was a virgin, and she (his mother) treated him as if he were God. Fairly harmless. But then there are the world’s four shortest books: Irish Haute Cuisine, Great Stand-Up German Comics, Famous Italian Naval Victories, and—oops!—Jewish Business Ethics.
What we need is not more anti-Semitic jokes, but more jokes about anti-Semites:
A Jew is sitting in a bar, when a man at the other end, three sheets fully to the wind, offers to buy drinks for everyone at the bar, “except my Israelite friend at the other end of the bar.” Twenty minutes later, the same man instructs the bartender to pour another round for the house, excluding, of course, “the gentleman of the Hebrew persuasion at the end of the bar.” A further fifteen minutes on, the man asks for one more round for everyone, “not counting, of course, the follower of Moses who’s still here, I see.” Finally exasperated, the Jew calls down to the drunk, “What is it you have against me anyway?” “I’ll tell you what I have against you. You sunk the Titanic.”
“I didn’t sink the Titanic,” the Jew says, “an iceberg sunk the Titanic.”
“Iceberg, Greenberg, Goldberg,” says the drunk, “you’re all no damn good.”
Michael Krasny remarks that the standard source ascribed to Jewish humor is “located in a kind of masochism but also in suffering. It is self-deprecatory and self-lacerating, and it sees Jews as outsiders, marginal people, victims.” A good definition, that, of the comedy of Woody Allen, with psychoanalysis and jokes added. But Krasny also sees in these Jewish jokes “a strain of celebration,” and cites Jewish American Princess, or JAP, jokes as an example. A brilliant JAP bit I know is that performed by the comedian Sarah Silverman, impersonating a faux Jewish American Princess, in which she invents a niece who claims to have learned in school that during the Holocaust, 60 million Jews were killed. In her best ditzy JAP voice, Silverman corrects the child, saying that not 60 but six million Jews were killed, adding, “60 million would be something to worry about.”
A few categories of superior Jewish jokes failed to find their way into the Krasny or the de-Judenized Novak volume. Jewish waiter jokes are, for one, missing. Allow me to supply merely the punchlines of a few: “Vich of you gentlemen vanted the clean glass?” “You vanted the chicken soup, you should’ve ordered the mushroom barley.” Another missing category is jokes about German Jews
, or yekkes, as they are known, for the formality that did not allow them to remove their suit jackets in public. “What’s the difference between a yekke and a virgin?” one such joke asks. The answer is, “A yekke remains a yekke.” And in the category of out-of-control Jewish wifely extravagance the winner is Rodney Dangerfield’s “A thief stole my wife’s purse with all her credit cards. But I’m not going after him. He’s spending less than she does.”
Of the endless category of synagogue jokes, Michael Krasney tells the superior joke about the rabbi who rid his shul of mice by luring them onto the bimah with a wheel of cheese, and while there, bar mitzvahing them all, whereby they never returned. I wonder if he knows my friend Edward Shils’s favorite joke in this, the synagogue category:
A peddler, just before sundown, arrives at the study of the rabbi of the shtetl of Bobrinsk. Three men are in the study at the time. The peddler asks the rabbi if he will keep his receipts over Shabbat, when an observant Jew is prohibited from having money on his person. The rabbi readily agrees.
Next day, after sundown, the peddler appears in the rabbi’s study to collect his money. The same three men are there.
“What money?” the rabbi asks.
“The money I gave you to hold for me last night,” the peddler says. “These men were there. They will remind you.”
The rabbi turns to the first man. “Mr. Schwartz, did this man leave any money with me yesterday?” “I have no recollection of his having done so, rebbe,” Schwartz says.
“Mr. Ginsberg,” the rabbi asks, turning to the second man, “do you recognize this man?” “Never saw him before in my life,” Ginsberg says. “Mr. Silverstein, what do you think about this?” “The man’s a liar, rebbe,” says Silverstein.” “Thank you, gentlemen,” says the rabbi. “Now if you will excuse me I shall deal with this man alone.”
After the three men depart, the rabbi goes to his safe, removes the peddler’s money, and hands it to him.
“Rebbe,” says the peddler, “why did you put me through all that?”
“Oh,” answers the rebbe, “I just wanted to show you the kind of people I have in my congregation.”
When Edward told me this joke, which he much enjoyed, I assumed that he had in mind, as analogues to Messrs. Schwartz, Ginsberg, and Silverstein, his colleagues on the Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud wrote, “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character [as do the Jews].” I myself cannot think of any. Who but the Jews joke about their mothers, their religious institutions (“Reform Judaism, isn’t that the Democratic Party platform with holidays added?”), their own attitudes of compromise and resignation, their nouveau riches, their domineering wives, their uxorious husbands, the way their enemies think of them, and more? The Irish joke about themselves—an Irish friend not long ago told me that the famous Irish charm is inevitably lost only on the Irish themselves—but nowhere near so thoroughly as do the Jews, who find almost everything about themselves a source of humor.
“How odd of God to choose the Jews” runs a ditty composed by an English journalist named William Norman Ewer, to which various responses have been offered, perhaps the most amusing among them being “because the goyim annoy him.” Chosen the Jews may have been, but the everlasting question remains: chosen for what? If pressed to come up with a single theme playing through the Old Testament, that theme would be testing, the relentless testing by God of the Jews from Abraham through Saul, David, and Solomon to Job and beyond. God submits the Jews to tests and trials of a kind that no other religion, so far as I know, puts its adherents through, including, some in our day might say, unrelenting anti-Semitism. Might it be, to revert to an earlier point, that a key reason there are no serene Jews is that every Jew somewhere in his heart knows that, no matter how well off he is or how righteously he has lived, further tests await.
Freud felt all jokes at bottom had for their purpose, however hidden, either hostility or exposure—all jokes, in other words, for him are ultimately acts of aggression or derision. I don’t happen to believe that. Michael Krasny quotes Theodor Reik, in Jewish Wit, remarking that all Jewish jokes are about “merciless mockery of weakness and failing.” I don’t believe that, either. What I do believe is W. H. Auden saying that the motto of psychology ought to be “Have you heard this one?”
Jewish jokes are richer and more varied than any single theory can hope to accommodate. In No Joke, her excellent study of Jewish humor, Ruth Wisse notes that “Jewish humor at its best interprets the incongruities of the Jewish condition.” That condition has imbued Jews with a style of thought when faced with received opinions and conventional wisdom. Among their grand thinkers, and their everyday ones, are, or ought to have been, those trained by life to think outside the box—or, as the Jew in me, having written out that cliché, needs to add, outside the lox. Jewish jokes are a victory over thoughtlessness.
Maury Skolnik tells his friend Mel Rosen, “Two Jews, each with a parrot on his shoulder, meet outside their synagogue, when . . .”
Rosen interrupts: “Maury, Maury, Maury, don’t you know any but Jewish jokes?”
“Of course I do,” Skolnik replies. “It’s autumn in Kyoto, two samurai are standing in front of a Buddhist temple. The next day is Yom Kippur . . .”
Jews on the Loose
(2016)
Fame is when a caricature of you requires no caption. Fame is when everyone understands it is you when only your first name is mentioned: Marilyn, Frank, Hillary, Michael (Jordan and Jackson). Fame is also when a mad person imagines that he is you, though this criterion, granted, is more difficult to establish. Groucho Marx surely qualifies on the first two criteria, and, though I don’t know of anyone who imagined that he was Groucho, more people have probably dressed up as him (it was George Gershwin’s favorite outfit at costume parties) than any other comic. Still, even great fame has its limits. Not long ago, when I called Barnes & Noble to order a copy of The Groucho Letters, the sales clerk inquired, “How do you spell Groucho?”
A Gallup Poll taken in 1941 asking people to name their 15 favorite comedians found the Marx Brothers finishing 13th, behind Red Skelton, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Durante, Arthur Godfrey, and others. While these comedians have now fallen from public interest, the Marx Brothers have held on. If anything, they have stepped higher up the slippery ladder of renown, and are today firmly embedded in that charmed circle of movie comics granted immortality that includes Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, and Laurel and Hardy.
At first glance, the attraction behind the Marx Brothers is not self-evident. They offer three rather homely men who specialize in the creation of havoc. One doesn’t speak, but, honking a horn, wolfs after women, makes grotesque faces, drops silverware from his sleeve, extracts blowtorches, axes, and teacups from under his raincoat; he is a pit bull in a blond wig who does too lengthy solo numbers on a harp. Another speaks, but in a preposterous Italian accent, wears the clothes of an organ grinder’s monkey, and plays a fast piano, occasionally shooting the keys with his index finger as if with a pistol. The third, the main man, wears greasepainted eyebrows and mustache, glasses, keeps a cigar going at all times, and walks like a caged gorilla with shpilkes. The speech of this third fellow is restricted to puns and put-downs, non sequiturs and sexual innuendos, all uttered in the tone of a relentless wise guy.
Antic, zany, madcap, anarchic, the Marx Brothers were successful first in vaudeville, then on the Broadway stage, and finally, most emphatically, in the movies. Their act resembled nothing so much as a comic strip brought to life. In fact, the names of the brothers were bestowed on them by a vaudeville comic named Art Fisher, who had been inspired by a popular series of comic strips by Gus Mager about monkey-like characters with names like Knocko, Sherlocko, and even Groucho. In order of birth, Leonard became Chico (ori
ginally Chicko) for his woman-chasing, Adolph became Harpo because he played the harp, and Julius became Groucho because of his innate glumness and cynicism. Milton, who played the straight man in the early days of the act, became Gummo, because of rubber-soled shoes he wore. Herbert, who replaced Gummo in 1925, became Zeppo, though it is not entirely clear why.
What the brothers did on stage and screen was far from adult and sometimes less adolescent than childish. Grown men in clownish costumes, they palavered and cavorted. Some of their humor was cruel, little of it victimless. If the Marx Brothers’ movies have a collective underlying message, it is, surely, that respectable life is a sham, a scam, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. Why did people enjoy this coarse cavalcade of uproarious disruption and denigration?
That the Marx family was in its origins German-Jewish, given the image of German Jews as irretrievably formal, is a touch surprising. The boys’ father, Samuel, was from Alsace, and their mother, Minnie, was the daughter of an entertainer from Dornum, Germany. Sam Marx was handsome, an inept tailor, and devoted to the skirt chase, the only trait he seems to have passed on to his sons. Minnie was the brains and motor force of the family. (An old joke: When the boy told his mother he was to play the Jewish husband in a school play, she instructed him to return to school to tell the teacher that he wanted a speaking part.) Her brother was Al Shean, of Gallagher & Shean, a famous vaudeville comedy team that eventually appeared in Ziegfeld Follies. A stage mother to the highest power, she ran her home like a raucous vaudeville boarding house, and made sure show business was her sons’ fate.
With the exception of Zeppo, none of the brothers completed high school. Only Groucho, who departed school in the seventh grade, seems to have found this troubling. He had literary aspirations, not to say pretensions. In the 1920s, he took an occasional seat at the famous Algonquin Round Table. (Harpo, befriended by the critic Alexander Woollcott, found himself more comfortably seated there.) In the 1950s, Groucho entered into a correspondence and distant friendship with T. S. Eliot. His occasional magazine pieces resembled minor Robert Benchley or James Thurber or sub-par S. J. Perelman, though it all came out sounding like a fellow named Groucho:
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