No Joke (3 page)

Mensch mit menschlichen Gefühlen,
Mit erhobnem Haupt und Herzen,
Festlich, reinlich schier gekleidet,
Tritt er in des Vaters Halle.

[As a dog, thinking doggy thoughts,
he curs it all week long
through the filth and rubbish of this world,
while street urchins mock him.

But every Friday night,
as dusk falls, suddenly
the spell is lifted, and the dog
turns, once again, into a human being.

As a man, with a man's thoughts,
head and heart proudly uplifted,
dressed festively, cleanly and neatly,
he enters his father's house.]
¹⁵

The once-sovereign Jew who is now schnorring leftovers in other people's lands appears in the poem, “Princess Sabbath,” which spans the heights and depths of Jewish experience in a tragi-comic mix. Without ever naming the wizardry that
has cast its evil spell on the Jews, Heine deplores what he pictures as their everyday degradation in Europe, except for the interval of dignity they assume once a week in the privacy of their homes. This representation of the Jew fallen from ancient glory and exiled from ancient homeland came from deeper in the Jewish psyche than the competing Christian and anti-Jewish image of the Wandering Ahasuerus who has been doomed for the sin of denying Christ. Many laughed with Heine at his incongruous portrait—laughed ruefully, “with lizards,” as the Yiddish expression had it.

If the first chapter showcases Heine in the German sphere of Jewish humor, Sholem Aleichem follows as the central figure in the formation of Yiddish humor, drawing from intersecting streams of folk humor that converged wherever Jews lived, exploiting the wordplay of traditional sources and dialectical differences among speakers from various regions.

Once spoken by more Jews than have ever shared the same language at any time in Jewish history, Yiddish was treated by some as the mongrel of Heine's sabbath poem and charged with having stolen scraps from other languages. But the vernacular delighted in its hybridity. With little reputation to protect, Yiddish enjoyed flaunting what others considered its flaw—its mixtures and fusions—along with the tension between sabbath and weekday, or sacred and profane, that was implicit in the interplay between Hebrew and Yiddish. Yiddish, the subject of my second chapter, gave Heine's crossbreed the means to speak for itself—even to the point of mocking the culture of Heine. As if to illustrate that Yiddish allowed Jews to escape their caricature, the Yiddish and
Hebrew writer Mendele Mocher Sforim (acknowledged by Sholem Aleichem as his literary progenitor) wrote a Yiddish novel in which Heine's bewitched Jew, in the form of a mare rather than a dog, shames the reformer who tries to “civilize” her.
¹⁶
According to this version of the fable, Yiddish set the Jewish tongue free, and by allowing Jews to speak for themselves, restored them to human form.

“Now let us leave the princess and look in on the prince” is how Sholem Aleichem might have spoofed the transition from a chapter on Yiddish to one on humor in English. There was no need for Aesopian language in the lands and language of the free, because in Britain or the United States there was no political censorship of the kind that existed under the Russian czars. Discrimination against Jews abated to the point that Madison Avenue advised, “Dress British, think Yiddish.” Without obscuring the differences between England and its former colony, the chapter on Jewish humor in the English language traces its phenomenal rise and spread from the Borscht Belt to the comedy clubs, from Whitechapel to the Web.

Jewish comedy must go where the Jews go, into the concentration camps of Adolf Hitler and gulags of Joseph Stalin. The witticism that stands at the heart of this book was recorded in Yiddish in the Warsaw Ghetto: “God forbid that this war should last as long as we are able to endure it.” This saying pits the monomaniac obduracy of the “Final Solution” against the even greater stubbornness of Jewish survival, recognizing, however, that no such plucky stubbornness should ever have been required. By treating fascism and communism in tandem,
chapter 4
shows how freely humor under
oppression passed from one sphere to the other even as the humorists themselves remained trapped. Russian humor is much more abundant than German humor, but the repressive tactics of the two brutal regimes that are the targets of such jokes induced comparable and often identical humor among their Jews. One might say that modern Jews are known best through their humor and the Holocaust; while this book follows many others in celebrating the virtues of the former, it also explores correlations between it and the latter.

Finally, I approach what may prove the most lasting topic: emerging Jewish humor in the Land of Israel, where it was least expected to flourish, yet where it is by now as entrepreneurial as technology. Heine's mutt turned up early on, in unlikely form, in a novel,
Only Yesterday
, by S. Y. (Shai) Agnon (1888–1970), so far the greatest of Hebrew novelists, and there the dog runs amok—like the humor of which it forms an element. I will not trace the long and troubled path of the book's hero, Yitzhak Kumer, who arrives as a young settler in Palestine during the pioneering days, except to recall that by way of a joke, Kumer paints the words “mad dog” on the fur of a stray. Jokes have their consequences, and the dog Balak turns mad indeed and fatally bites the man who dubs him mad. That the dog also bears the name of a biblical enemy of the children of Israel invites the myriad interpretations that the book has received. According to Agnon, Heine's prince may now be restored to his homeland, but he remains in danger of self-transmogrification, of inadvertently doing damage to himself. I cite this famous episode from
Only Yesterday
merely to suggest how humor in Israel takes up the tradition into which it was born.

Yet the chapter on Israel also includes jokes that lack the angst of that tradition:

A rabbi dies and rises to the gates of heaven. As he waits for admission, an Israeli bus driver comes up beside him. Without a second thought, the admitting angel waves the bus driver through. The rabbi cries, “Hey! How come he gets in so quickly? He's a bus driver, while I'm a rabbi!” The angel explains, “When you delivered your sermons during the prayer service, the whole congregation fell asleep. When this man drove to Tel Aviv, all his passengers were praying to God!”

Like the joke about Mrs. Rosenberg inspecting the poultry, this one, too, with a little tweaking, could be transposed to an Irish Catholic context.

With What Do We Eat It?

This book's inquiry into the varieties of Jewish humor in different languages and under diverse conditions hopes to advance our understanding of its various parts along with our appreciation of the whole. There is no denying that humor, the consummate insider's sport, has flourished among Jews, prompting us to ask
why
this activity should enjoy such widespread popularity. The subject begins to interest us at the point that humor is identified by others and Jews themselves as a Jewish specialty, a pursuit disproportionately associated with Jews. That this occurs only at certain points of intersection between tradition
and modernity helps us arbitrate the dispute between those who want to trace its origins back to biblical times, and others who insist on its contemporaneity. Jewish humor obviously derives from Jewish civilization, but Jews became known for their humor only starting with the Enlightenment. As this book will show, it responds to conditions of Jewish life, but only where it becomes the response of choice.

This focus on Jewish humor at the point that the phrase begins to trip off the tongue accounts for what some readers may resent as the Eurocentrism of this book. Comedy and laughter are common to all cultures, and for most of Jewish history, humor was no more observably associated with Jews than with other religious or ethnic groups. In some parts of the Jewish world, this remains the case. The Ladino folktales of the Jewish trickster Joha bear a close resemblance to the Arabic ones of the Muslim trickster Juha and his Turkish counterpart Nasreddin, but recent collectors of these tales do not claim they were any more prominent among Jews than their analogous versions among other peoples of Yemen, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, or Morocco. Jewish humor in Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish, or Judezmo (Ladino), generated no treatises about the schlemiel or schlimazel, and no theories about parody as compensation for powerlessness. Jews laughed in Casablanca as they did in Kraków, and maybe at some of the same things, but though there are scarcely five hundred Jews left in Kraków, its bookstores still carry Polish collections of Jewish humor, whereas today's Casablanca, with more than ten times as many Jews, has no such Arabic equivalent. Jews of Arab lands appeared to have acquired no comparable
reputation
for humor.

The Yiddish expression,
mit vos est men es
? (With what does one eat this?) means something like, “Please explain to me why this matters?” or, “How does this apply?” That Jewish humor becomes prominent at a certain point does not yet address its significance or functions. How and why does it explode at the point when ghetto doors are breached, and as Jews begin mingling with fellow Europeans who also are being granted new rights and freedoms? Suppose we establish that it gains momentum among Jews who lose divine justification for their exceptionalism and now face the world stripped of the authority of the covenant in whose name they were Jews. Suppose we see its escalation in times of threat—which are nothing new in a history replete with massacres, expulsions, and inquisition, but are now experienced for the first time without the perceived protection of God in whose name Jews are being threatened. Suppose we can demonstrate that Jewish humor erupts at moments of epistemological and political crisis, and intensifies when Jews need new ways of responding to pressure. Does this mean that humor compensates them for the absent security? Does it work to their benefit or detriment? Does it become a secular expression of their identity? And what do these findings tell us about the universal significance and functions of humor?

To be sure, Oring's cautionary note about the chief rabbi of London reminds us that not everyone savored Jewish humor to the same degree. Observant Jews who kept their cultural distance from Gentile society, whether in Christian or Muslim lands, did not all take up the Jewish sport with the same enthusiasm as those who relished contradictions between the foundational
idea of Jewish
chosenness
and the historical record of persecution. At the other end of the religious spectrum, young people dedicated to socialist or nationalist political action did not appreciate ridicule of their goals. “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” “That's not funny!” Ideologues do not welcome levity. Joking flourishes among those who sustain contrarieties, tolerate suspense, and perhaps even relish insecurity. Many writers featured in this book are situated—none put it better than Franz Kafka—with their posterior legs still glued to their father's Jewishness, and their waving anterior legs finding no new ground. But other Jews preferred to seek out steady, level land.

As for Jewish humor's genealogy, scholars are certainly justified in tracing its roots to its sources in the Bible and Talmud. One might locate the seeds of Jewish skepticism in Sarah's laughter when she is informed in Genesis 18:12 that she and Abraham, at their very advanced age, will conceive a child. “Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?' ” Joking frequently exposes unauthorized truths, and Sarah's trust in biological probability over divine prophecy is an early example of the cognitive independence that Judaism encourages. Biblical challengers to authority often outdid even the boldest of moderns in daring, and the Talmudic record of disputation supplies incontrovertible proof that Abraham and Job invited emulation on the part of generations of rabbis. Yet the Bible confirms that Sarah
did
bear Isaac, and duly named her son
Yitzhak
, signifying a laughter of joy more than cynicism; Abraham's challenge to God over His intention
of destroying Sodom is finally quashed by the wickedness of that condemned city. In each case, the Bible's claim of divine authorship guarantees the predominance of the Lord's point of view. Modern humorists, in contrast, challenge authority without conceding its supreme authority.

Similarly, while Jewish tradition offers occasions of merriment and templates for humor, these are part of an ultimately, if not at all times, well-ordered universe. Jews everywhere celebrated the feast of Purim that recorded the improbable political victory of their ancestors Esther and Mordecai over their archenemy Haman in Persia. On that day of merrymaking, the Talmud encourages drinking to the point that one can no longer distinguish “cursed be Haman” from “blessed be Mordecai.” Some communities of eastern Europe got into the spirit of inversion by appointing a Purim rabbi to upend homiletics for a day. But in the 1930s, as we will see, a Yiddish writer forging his own rendition of the Purim story felt it necessary to add a jilted lover and failed assassin to the cast of characters to represent the disastrous realities of Jewish politics that stood in ironic contrast to the victory recorded in the Book of Esther. Rather than celebrating the exception, he reintroduced the more likely failure, reversing the reversal, recording what the Jews of Europe were actually experiencing in his time.