No Joke (29 page)

Freud sought freedom not from the repression imposed by Nazis and Soviets but rather from the restraints of Jewish civilization itself, which some, including Freud himself, have equated with bourgeois civility in general. He believed that persons “might be willing to renounce all the methods of satisfaction forbidden by society if only they could be certain that in return society will reward this renunciation by offering them permitted methods of satisfaction.” Freud personally sought some of that satisfaction in cigars and cocaine, but joking offered him headier release as part of a group. In a poignant passage, he confides that such satisfaction may not only be desirable but also
necessary
: “What these jokes whisper may be said aloud: that the wishes and desires of men have a right to make themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality.”
⁴
For those Jews who submit to the compounded constraints of their own arduous civilizing regimen and their requisite adjustment to Gentile majorities, the attribution
of
ruthlessness
to morality rings especially true. Joking becomes their bid for freedom, if only through the utterance of otherwise-prohibited truth.

Yet as the crowing of roosters and barking of dogs are transcribed variously in every alphabet, Jewish humor changes with language and circumstance. By dividing this book's chapters according to language and political region, I have tried to show that Jews joke differently in Yiddish than in English, differently among themselves than in the presence of non-Jews, and differently in constitutional democracies than in totalitarian states. When Heine quipped, “Wie es sich christelt, so jüdelt es sich”—“as go the Christians, so go the Jews”—he was making fun of the latter's overenthusiastic Europeanization. When a century later, George S. Kaufman punned, “One man's Mede is another man's Persian,” he was appropriating a maxim about individual taste (“One man's meat is another man's poison”) to make the lighter point that cultural differences exist in name only: Medes
are
Persians. The acidity of Heine's German aphorism contrasts with the sweetness of the U.S. pun, but typical of both men is their delight in the cross-cultural wordplay. What they most have in common is not the content of their wit but rather their reliance on wit.

Vagaries of Jewish Humor

To be honest, there was a time when I too might have tried to identify some essentials of Jewish humor that distinguish it from other comic traditions. For example, I once scanted slapstick
, rating the verbalizing Marx Brothers much higher than the physically antic Three Stooges—and in the comedy of the former troupe, Groucho's puns and double entendres higher than the elaborate pieces of visual hilarity like the stateroom scene in
Night at the Opera
or mirror scene in
Duck Soup
. I thought of slapstick as a Gentile specialty, a respite from the cerebral anxieties of Jewish joking. As my gold standard of Gentile humor, I took the “Make 'Em Laugh” routine in the 1952 musical
Singin' in the Rain
, in which Donald O'Connor treats his body as a mannequin of movable parts, perfectly illustrating Henri Bergson's view of comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living.”
⁵
As if to prove my point about the nature of its Gentile appeal, when the writers of the 2007 television series
Mad Men
conjured up the archetypal Protestant American suburban housewife of the 1950s, they imagined
Singin' in the Rain
as her favorite movie.

In fact, physical comedy did come later and slower to Jews than the cerebral and literary kind. Ancient Greek comedy and its imitators featured slapstick and bawdy humor that is nowhere celebrated in the ancient Jewish texts. In the Middle Ages, the precarious political arrangements of Jewish communities in Christian lands damped the carnival spirit that was periodically loosed all around them and that occasionally expressed its riotousness at the Jews' expense. In modern times, legal suppression in czarist Russia retarded the development of the start-up Yiddish theater, and staging inhibitions may have contributed to keeping it more verbal than physical. When Yiddish theater did erupt in London and New York at the end of the nineteenth century, its most popular entertainer
was the nimble improviser Zelig Mogulescu—until fashion changed and melodrama challenged comedy, forcing Mogulescu to memorize his lines.

But once Jews hit vaudeville and the movies, they swung for the fences, and their physical shtick competed with the best. To test this proposition, interrupt your reading of this paragraph to watch (on YouTube) the climactic scene of
The Court Jester
, and ask which is funnier—Kaye attempting to memorize “the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true” or Kaye poking his head out of his beheaded suit of armor in his joust to the death with the gigantic Sir Griswold. The physically challenged schlemiel in his ill-fitting coat of armor that has been magnetized by a stroke of lightning draws as many laughs as he's drawn with his tongue twister. Seinfeld's verbal comedy in the sitcom bearing his name would have been less funny without his ungainly neighbor Kramer regularly crashing through his door. As if to put paid to my theory of slapstick as strictly goyish, when Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jewish) was invited to host the popular television show
Saturday Night Live
, he performed in homage a dance routine modeled on O'Connor's “Make 'Em Laugh”—music and lyrics, I've neglected to mention, by Arthur Freed (Jewish) and Nacio Herb Brown (not).

In the same way that I once underappreciated the physical potential of Jewish comedy, I may have overestimated its refinement or, rather, the essential nature of its refinement. In a Yiddish joke on this subject, two Jews traveling by wagon along a narrow road see boulders blocking their path. They
stop to consider what to do, and as they sit there, a wagon approaches carrying two peasants. The Gentiles get out, roll up their sleeves, and shove the rocks away. “There's goyish thinking for you,” says one Jew to the other: “always with force.” Historically speaking, at the point in the road where Jews began to take the measure of themselves in relation to their neighbors, they were constrained to recognize invidious features of the comparison; the joke was on them if they expected to get anywhere without putting shoulder to the boulder. Yet in telling this joke, even as it pokes fun at Jewish impracticality, Jewish self-mockery registers pride in its subtler and keener nature. Jewish humor grew coarser only once Jews got out of the wagon to get the job done themselves.

A decisive challenge to my association of refinement with Jewish humor came with the 2006 movie
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
, in which the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen stars as an anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, brutish Kazakh television reporter sent to report on life in the United States. A running in-joke of the film is Borat's Hebrew—the language he speaks with his fellow Kazakh producer Azamat Bagatov, who answers him in Armenian—which identifies this comedy as not simply “Jewish” but indeed learnedly so. Brooks had done something similarly incongruous when he had the American Indians of
Blazing Saddles
exchanging dialogue in Yiddish. But whereas Yiddish was the Jewish vernacular, and was still widely known to American Jews, Hebrew in a non-Israeli film is the language only of Jews who acquire it through study. This intimate signal to the educated
Jews in Cohen's audience had the effect of reassuring some of them that the filmmaker was a member of the tribe—and hence that all of Borat's anti-Semitic slurs, including that Jews caused 9/11, are there to expose the anti-Semites who hold such views.

By the same logic of comedy, the film's vulgarity is meant to expose vulgarity—and its
slapshtick
to make fun of slapstick. Borat and Azamat, arguing over the charms of a woman, fall into a naked wrestling match that exceeds in its loutishness any physical comedy ever filmed for a commercial feature film. If pornography uses nudity for sexual arousal, this anti-porn goes beyond impropriety and mere indecency, spoofing homoeroticism in the same way that Borat's anti-Semitism mocks anti-Semitism. Rude anti-Jewish behavior becomes a new form of Jewish comedy for viewers who are no longer bound by inhibitions of physical modesty.

Yiddish wit once mocked the illiteracy of Jewish culture in the United States—“If a
hazan
doesn't know Hebrew, they call him a cantor”—and the inauthenticity of its faith—“To us, it's a miracle if God does what the rabbi wants; to you, it's a miracle if the rabbi does what God wants.” One might simply note in this connection that more so than other branches of culture, humor is a referendum on the actual. Abroad or in Israel, declining Jewish literacy (and observance) left Jewish comic writers with less indigenous material to work with. Whereas Jewish comedians of the Borscht Belt once delivered punch lines in Yiddish (not necessarily at its highest literary levels), the progressive evaporation of the language yielded only the thinnest residue of rude terms like putz, klutz, and
schmuck. Analogously, whereas the comedians of the thirties and forties tried to keep the audience's mind off the genocide that was consuming their relatives in Europe, nowadays that genocide massacre is merely comic fodder. Hence Sarah Silverman's skit about her lesbian niece who “loves Hebrew school” and comes home with the information that Hitler killed sixty million Jews. When Aunt Sarah interjects, “I think you mean six million,” the niece shrugs: “Whatever.” Big laugh follows. Ostensibly intended to ridicule the contemporary Jew's miseducation, routines like these make it hard to distinguish the degeneracy of the mocker from the mocked.

Coping with Political Correctness

To be sure, vulgarity may also function as a mask from behind which it is safe to defy the norms of political correctness. Intimations of this turn in Jewish humor came to me one day in the late 1990s when a Harvard student of Yiddish literature told me that he had become a writer for
Beavis and Butt-Head
. I was incredulous. That animated television show features a pair of teenage goons whose all-around offensiveness exceeds the bounds of even bad taste. The student was an observant Jew, as far removed from coarseness as kosher cuisine is from pork. I asked him how he came to write for a show like that. He replied: “I was at Rabbi [Shlomo] Riskin's yeshiva in Efrat [Israel], and figured that writing at breakfast would not be considered
bitul Torah
.” Translated as “neglecting the study of Jewish law,” bitul Torah, or rather the avoidance of
it, is an important precept of Judaism, and though obviously applied with different degrees of stringency to persons at different stages of life, is paramount for yeshiva students who come to master Jewish sources. The student explained how he had found the only time of day when Talmudic study could be briefly suspended without offending the priority of learning to which the institution was devoted. He did not think it necessary to account for
how come
a student of Torah would simultaneously be writing for that show, taking for granted what I found preposterous—namely, that a sensitive Jew and student of Torah might want to write dialogue for insensitive boors.

Originally associated with totalitarian societies that block dissenting views, political correctness leaches into democratic culture when the latter tries to impose a comparable conformism. “We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists, or fascists,” wrote the U.S. Nobel Laureate Bellow in 1994, after being denounced as all of the above when he tried to make the point that only highly literate societies could have produced literary masterpieces: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him.”
⁶
The outrage that greeted Bellow's quip suggests that anti–political correctness humor cannot speak freely in its own name but instead is more safely consigned to a mild racist like Archie Bunker in the television sitcom
All in the Family
. That show's condescension to Bunker is what allowed him to sound off against “spics,” “Commies,” and even “coloreds” with a frankness that would otherwise have been forbidden to any writer of the
show. Beavis and Butt-head are likewise agents for unpopular views.