Such Small Portions
‘No Joke,’ by Ruth R. Wisse
Avco Embassy Pictures
Dick Shawn and Renée Taylor in a scene from Mel Brooks's 1968 movie "The Producers."
By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB
The New York Times Review of Books, May 31, 2013
From the praise heaped on it by some analysts of Jewish humor, one might almost think the chosen people were chosen for the quality of their jokes. Freud’s “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” which was published in 1905, drew almost exclusively on Jewish stories, because, he maintained, they were the funniest and the most interesting. Salcia Landmann, a scholar of Yiddish who died in 2002, argued that Jewish humor is “more acute, more profound and richer in expression than that of any other people.”
NO JOKE
Making Jewish Humor
By Ruth R. Wisse
Illustrated. 279 pp. Princeton University Press. $24.95.
Yet not so long ago, some European historians said one of the many shortcomings of the Jews is that they have no trace of humor. In 1893, Britain’s chief rabbi gave a lecture in London, gently defending his people against the oft-repeated charge of dullness. He compared a biblical episode involving the prophet Elijah to a scene from Molière. He cited many instances of rabbinical repartee, quoted cracks by the 18th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (who had such a sweet tooth that he wished his sugar could be sugarcoated) and likened the Jewish-born poet Heinrich Heine to two famous Anglophone wits, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift.
“No Joke,” a subtle and provocative new book by Ruth R. Wisse, who teaches Yiddish literature at Harvard, recounts the long history of Jewish humor and brings it up to date. She includes the effects of the Holocaust and Stalin on Jewish storytelling; she discusses American humorists from the borscht belt stand-ups of the 1940s to Larry David, and novels from Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” to Howard Jacobson’s “Finkler Question,” which won the Man Booker Prize in 2010. And she reviews the lively state of humor in Israel today.
This last item is a corrective to the view, defended by Landmann and others, that humor barely exists in Israel, as if Jews no longer need jokes once they have guns. For Wisse, humor is present in all phases of Jewish history, though in varying forms, and remains in every corner of Jewish life. Indeed, she has a nagging suspicion that there may now be too much of it: her concluding chapter is entitled “When Can I Stop Laughing?” Humor, Wisse appears to suggest, is sometimes bad for the Jews. Be that as it may — and I suspect that it isn’t, for the idea seems to rest on Freud’s questionable claim that Jewish humor is exceptionally self-denigrating — she is surely right to observe that Jews rely on humor to a degree that sets them apart.
But are the jokes different, or are there just more of them? In one sense, as Wisse argues, there is no such thing as specifically Jewish humor, just as there is, contrary to what some Nazis alleged, no such thing as Jewish physics, even though Jews have won a quarter of all Nobel Prizes in the subject so far this century. Consider the enormous diversity of humor to be found among 20th- and 21st-century American Jewish comedians alone. What does Danny Kaye — whose shtick, as Wisse writes, was “exaggerated innocence” — have in common with Lenny Bruce? Or Groucho Marx with Larry David? Woody Allen’s persona oozes self-dissatisfaction; Jon Stewart’s does the opposite.
Scientific studies of the psychology of humor rightly do not recognize the Jewish contribution as a category in its own right. The compendious college textbook on the topic by Rod A. Martin, of the University of Western Ontario (“The Psychology of Humor,” published in 2006), has no treatment of Jewish jokes. Jewish humor is instead studied in courses on Jewish history and culture. This past semester, the Jewish studies department at Rutgers University offered such a course, for which the instructor, be it noted, was one Professor Portnoy. I leave it to deeper minds to determine what sort of joke this is.
The association between Jews and joking has become so powerful that Jewish humor is now all too easy to detect even where it doesn’t really exist. This phenomenon should perhaps be named the Mrs. Morgenbesser Effect. Once, when asked how she was faring, the mother of Sidney Morgenbesser, a New York philosopher, is reported to have replied, “Not so good — thank God.” At first, this sounds like glumness mocking itself. But once you know that religious Jews of a certain vintage are apt to thank God more or less as a matter of punctuation, it is not so clear any sort of humor was intended. The potential for accidental comedy in Jewish speech is of course enhanced by the fact that Jews have often had to stumble in someone else’s language.
Strip out the intonation and vocabulary, the rabbis and the matzo ball soup, and many Jewish stories can be repurposed into gentile ones. This is more or less what happened to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” which was originally written with a Jewish protagonist, according to Wisse. And, contrariwise, with the right cues it is not hard to see goyish humor as something Jewish. Consider “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.” If Lewis Carroll had been the pen name not of the Rev. Charles Dodgson but of the Rebbe Chaim Dobrin, we might be parsing the verbal horseplay of Tveedledum and Tveedledee as the Talmudic disputes of yeshiva bochers. (You may also have noticed the Mad Hatter never goes bareheaded.) Or take Tony Soprano. His endlessly embittered and despairing mother, the paramount value he attaches to family meals, and his evident, though faltering, enthusiasm for therapy suggest that only a little tweaking would have made the HBO series a Jewish show. “The Sopranos” could easily have been “The Cantors.”
NO JOKE
Making Jewish Humor
By Ruth R. Wisse
Illustrated. 279 pp. Princeton University Press. $24.95.
But maybe this line of thought can be taken too far. Judaism is a religion, even if many Jewish humorists don’t practice it, and its Scripture sometimes expresses an outlook that is saturated with paradoxes. Insofar as these contradictions are the seeds of Jewish fun-making, there is perhaps some validity to the idea of a theologically Jewish style of humor, even if that style is not of any special interest to psychologists. The Book of Ecclesiastes teaches us that life is short and veined with futility — yet also to be celebrated, for what else is there? The same lesson is expressed indirectly by the Jewish joke about a local restaurant: the food is awful — and such small portions.
For another example of cosmic darkness lighted by an inextinguishable smile, consider the old tale of the seven-year trousers. A traveler arrives in a Galician town and orders trousers from a Jewish tailor; when the traveler has to leave, they are not yet ready. Seven years later, he returns, and the tailor finally delivers. The customer remonstrates, “God made the world in seven days, yet you take seven years to make a pair of trousers!” “Yes, but look at the world,” the tailor ruefully replies. “And,” he beams, “look at my trousers.” Perhaps a tradition of study that prizes verbal agility can also help to account for the resilient wit associated with Jews. As a Mrs. Goldberg once said when prescribing a little chicken soup for a corpse, it can’t do any harm.
Before she kicks him and leaves, Naomi, a strapping Israeli redhead, tells Portnoy — Roth’s antihero, that is, not the Rutgers professor — that his constant self-denigration is stupid. That’s not classic Jewish humor, she says, but ghetto humor, and she links it to the attitude that led Diaspora Jews to go unresistingly into the gas chambers. Wisse never explicitly defends the idea that Jewish humor tends to be masochistically self-deprecating. But her worries about Jewish joking assume that it is. She writes: “What Jews make fun of in their own character reflects to a perilous degree what others object to. . . . Self-deprecation that is too clever, too constant, too ‘deep,’ may highlight the deformity it is trying to overcome.” No doubt it can — one can have too much of anything, perhaps even of chicken soup — but is this really what Jewish humor is all, or even mostly, about?
The extent to which humor among Jews is even about Jews at all can easily be exaggerated, thanks to the illusion created by anthologies of “Jewish” jokes, which began to appear in print in the 1920s. As Dan Ben-Amos, a folklorist at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out, the humor of Jews does not consist only of the sort of mockery that qualifies for inclusion in a collection of Jewish jokes. An anthology of Scottish jokes may well contain only stories about Scots, but that doesn’t mean no Scot ever jokes about anything else. Freud’s study is based not on any kind of objective research, but rather on his treasured private collection of the stories that most appealed to him.
Even when one Jew does mock another kind of Jew, this is self-deprecation only in a loose sense of the term. Jewish children mock Jewish mothers, the laity mock rabbis, those without an accent mock those with a heavy one, the tailor mocks the matchmaker, and so on. Are they denigrating their community or celebrating it? Even our beggars and fools are wise, some of the old Yiddish tales seem to say. Much has been written about the self-hating Jew, but what about the self-loving one? When a gentile Englishman says he has achieved nothing and is really rather useless, he is usually just making conversation, and may well be quite pleased with himself. Surely the same can be true of Jews. You may have noticed that running himself down almost always gets Woody Allen the girl.
It is not clear what Wisse wants us to do with the thought that too much humor may be dangerous for the Jews. She ends with a plea that Jews “ought to encourage others to laugh at themselves as well.” Yet the success of Jews in the comedy business suggests they are already doing their share to help the world go merrily around. Sure, more harmony and tolerance would be nice, but hasn’t much been asked of the Jews already?
