No Joke (2 page)

Most of its aficionados take a positive view of Jewish joking. “Incidentally,” writes Freud, one of its devotees, “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.”
²
He writes this approvingly, adducing an example of Jewish self-deprecation:

A Galician Jew was traveling by train, and had made himself really comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. [The regional designation here signifies traditionalism and lack of deportment.] Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Galitsyaner promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the
pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the other: “Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur?” “Oho!” said our traveler, putting his feet up on the seat again as he answered.
³

Freud thinks this anecdote conveys the Jews' democratic mode of thinking, “which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs, but also, alas, upsets discipline and co-operation.”
⁴
The joke reinforces the stereotype of the uncouth traditional Jew that exists in the mind of Gentiles, but redeems the indictment through the egalitarian spirit it uncovers among the Jews themselves. One may say the same of the analyst telling the joke. Freud, too, is relaxing, putting up his feet, indifferent to the impression he is making because he assumes that the others in his “compartment” of listeners or readers resemble him in finding it funny. (Regarding this intimacy, Theodor Reik, a member of Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, recalls the quip of a fellow member at the appearance of Ernest Jones, one of the only non-Jews in their circle: “
Barukh atoh adonoy
, here comes the honor-Goy.”)
⁵

But Freud's contemporary Arthur Schnitzler treated Freud's joke much more guardedly. In Schnitzler's novel
Der Weg ins Freie
(The road into the open), published in 1908, three years after Freud's book on joking, the Gentile protagonist Georg von Wergenthin is engaged in conversation with Jewish friends in his Viennese circle, among them the playwright Heinrich Bermann:

Heinrich laughed. “You know the story about the Polish Jew who sat with a stranger in a railroad car, very
politely—until he realized from a remark of the other that he was a Jew, too, whereupon, with a sigh of
azoy
, he immediately put his legs up on the seat across from him?”

“Very good,” said Georg.

“More than that,” continued Heinrich forcefully. “Deep. Deep like so many Jewish anecdotes. They offer an insight into the tragicomedy of contemporary Judaism. They express the eternal truth that one Jew never really gets respect from another. Never. Just as little as prisoners in an enemy country show respect for one another, especially the hopeless. Envy, hatred, sometimes even admiration, in the end even love can exist between them; respect never. For all emotional relationships take place in an atmosphere of familiarity, so to speak, in which respect is stifled.”

“Do you know what I think?” Georg remarked. “That you are a worse anti-Semite than most Christians I know.”
⁶

Both versions of this joke feature the same discourteous Galician or Polish Jew, but what Freud celebrates as creative interdependency, Heinrich deplores as self-contempt. In Schnitzler's scenario, the Jew does not tell the joke expecting to elicit a laugh; he knows that the most he can expect from the Gentile Georg is comprehension—the approbation of his “Very good.” He does not tell the joke to reinforce Jewish familiarity but rather to protest the imprisoning ghetto in which it thrives. Georg, in turn, knows himself excluded by this joke about Jewish intimacy and grasps how much it owes to the anti-Semitism that calls it forth.

Freud and Schnitzler, Jewish contemporaries in Vienna, use Jewish joking to different ends. Freud delights in Jewish jokes and relays them for a general public in the same open spirit that they were told. He cheerfully pours out his evidence in a context of scientific investigation, extrapolating general principles from Jewish particulars without bothering about their provenance and ignoring that they are often antithetical to the traditions of German culture.

In contrast, Schnitzler's novel investigates the context of Freud's joking and questions its effects. Intelligent people pay attention to the social climate and don't strip naked before a frigid audience. They take into account the relation of cause and effect: Jewish joking is the product of an intricate culture, conceived in a Jewish language or idiom, drawing on Jewish memory, and responsive to shared experiences, especially of the deleterious kind. A reinforcement of collective identity, such joking necessarily calls attention to the difference between Jews and non-Jews, and even when explained, the fact that it requires explanation. The better the joke, the more it separates Jews from those it excludes. If Jews are “prisoners in an enemy country,” to use Heinrich's comparison, they might do better to try to reach
der weg ins freie
, “the road to greater freedom,” than to channel their humiliation into laughter. Schnitzler appreciates the humor no less than Freud, but uses it to dramatize the danger it harbors.

Just to bring the Viennese joke up to date, here is a more recent one on the relative civility of Jews and Gentiles:

A flight to Israel in late December is about to land. “This is your captain speaking. This is the culmination of El Al
flight 761, and we welcome you to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Please remain seated with your seat belts fastened until the plane is at a complete standstill and the seat belt signs have been turned off. [Pause.] And to those of you who are still seated, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
⁷

How do we think
this
joke would fare in mixed company? The enormous differences in culture and politics between 1908 Austrian Vienna and Cambridge, Massachusetts, a century later make it all the more curious that sympathetic listeners in both—Georg there and Samantha here—should point alike to injurious strains in this favored Jewish pastime. The laughter invoked to offset anti-Jewish hostility concedes enough of that hostility to be mistaken for the thing itself. What Jews make fun of in their own character reflects to a perilous degree what others object to. Just as inoculations can make you ill if they are too powerful, self-deprecation that is too clever, too constant, too “deep,” may highlight the deformity it is trying to overcome.

Many of us experience ourselves successively or simultaneously as insiders and outsiders. That morning in the main office of Harvard's Semitic Museum—originally erected in tribute to the common origins of the three “Abrahamic” religions—telling a joke was a way of creating and enjoying camaraderie among Jews. Its unforeseen consequence was the momentary separation of us in the department along lines other than those of function (academic and nonacademic staff) and gender (males and females). Thanks to Sam's initiative, the
momentary separation between Jew and Gentile was overcome. She may someday shrink it further by marrying the student she is dating. But for the moment, let us note that the discomfort to Sam is also how we know that it was a Jewish joke. You know it is vinegar when you see it separating from oil.

What to Expect

Jewish humor
rolls cheerfully off the tongue, like
French cuisine
and
Turkish baths
. “Jewish humor is one of the wonders of the world,” declares the London
Daily Telegraph
. “No other community can compete with the range and subtlety of Jewish jokes.”
⁸
Estimates of the proportion of Jewish professionals in U.S. comedy sometimes ran as high as 80 percent. “Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what would remain of American humor in the twentieth century without its Jewish component.”
⁹
The same has been said of Berlin in the 1920s and Russia during the seventy-five years of Bolshevik rule.

Almost as daunting as the corpus of Jewish humor is the supply of scholarship and commentary that threatens to overwhelm it. In the late 1960s BSE (before search engines), when I wrote my dissertation on the comic figure of the schlemiel as hero of modern Jewish literature, some Jewish psychoanalysts—Freud, Reik, and Martin Grotjahn—seemed the only ones apart from Yiddish literary critics who had thought deeply about the subject. Today, organizations like the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, founded in 1987, and the International Society for Humor Studies,
founded in 1989—there is also a (fictitious) Canadian Association for Therapeutic Humour—sit atop an ever-expanding field of scholarship interested in Jewish humor. A bibliography on a subject like the schlemiel would by now fill its own book.

This burgeoning field of study puts every general claim about Jewish humor to the test. Freud's observation, cited above, that there are few other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character, has been modified by Christie Davies's comparison of Jews to Scots, who appear to have a higher proportion of self-deprecating jokes, although not in the same absolute numbers or of the same quality.
¹⁰
Elliott Oring takes exception to the assumption that Jews are “the people of the joke,” pointing out that as late as 1893, the chief rabbi of London, Hermann Adler, found it necessary to defend Jews against the charge that they were a humorless people.
¹¹
Oring argues that Jewish humor as we know it is a late invention. In turn, the conference volume
Jews and Humor,
which traces the subject from the Bible through Talmud and midrash to modern times, though with an admitted emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, challenges Oring's contention.
¹²
Hillel Halkin finds the beginnings of modern Jewish humor in the Hebrew geniuses of medieval Iberia.
¹³
Some believe that it starts with the rise of the wedding jester, or
badkhen
.
¹⁴

I cheerfully confess that theories about humor interest me less than the evidence they offer of folk creativity—jokes being the only surviving form of “folklore” that is not protectable by copyright. From the late eighteenth century onward, we have some record of the Jewish humor that bubbled up
from below as well as whatever came from writers and intellectuals. Of all the arts, humor depends the most on its immediate context, which makes it hard to generalize about this body of wit shaped variously by different surroundings and circumstances. Getting jokes is usually the hardest stage of acculturation, and the languages in which they joked separated as much as they united Jews in modern times.

In place of a general theory, I therefore intend to offer a descriptive map of some of the centers where Jewish humor thrived and where it still prospers, drawing examples from literature and mass culture that acted on one another. These comparative instances of Jewish humor in various languages should caution against overly facile generalizations about its provenance and nature. Laughter may be universal, but we will benefit from looking at some of the market conditions governing its production and consumption.

Since books have to begin somewhere, my point of departure will be Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose impact on Jewish humor was stronger than anyone's until Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich, 1859–1916), born three years after Heine died. It was Heine who set the tone for Yiddish humor magazines on the Lower East Side of New York in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than did Sholem Aleichem, who shared the language of those magazines. No image of the Jew has exerted stronger influence than Heine's of the Jewish people as a bewitched prince:

Hund mit hündischen Gedanken,
Kötert er die ganze Woche
Durch des Lebens Kot und Kehricht,
Gassenbuben zum Gespötte.

Aber jeden Freitagabend,
In der Dämmrungstunde, plötzlich
Weicht der Zauber, und der Hund
Wird aufs neu ein menschlich Wesen.