No Joke (31 page)

If the Jewish kind of laughter is truly wholesome, it ought to become universal fare. Until such time, Jews would do well to reexamine their brand and appreciate what it portends. One side laughing is not as harmless as one hand clapping.

Acknowledgments

My late teacher Uriel Weinreich identified anonymity as a distinguishing characteristic of folklore. Scholarship demands attribution, but folklore, a category emphatically embracing humor and joking, is a geyser that spouts for anyone with a handy pail. In this book I owe much to humorists whom I cannot identify; nor can I hope to credit all those whose ideas and information I have ingested.

Some thanks are straightforward. Harvard's libraries, and especially Widener's Judaica division headed by Charles Berlin, contain so much more relevant material than I was able to integrate that my gratitude for daily access to its treasures is riddled with anxiety over how much more might have been included. The National Yiddish Book Center and constituent units of the Center for Jewish History provide welcome access to documents and sources via the Internet. Special thanks to Jacob Wisse, director of the Yeshiva University Museum, for making the museum's resources available to me.

Among the kinds of materials I consulted are general studies of humor and humorists, specialized studies and anthologies of Jewish humor, studies of humor in other cultures with which Jews interacted, works on authors and texts discussed in this book, works on the emergence of comedy as a modern
profession, and visual material, including art and photography, comics and caricature, film and video. Excepting English, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and German, I am dependent on translation, so I owe special gratitude to those who have rendered into English the delights of other languages. My most humbling scholarly source in this project was Dov Sadan, the first professor of Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who served in his own person as a veritable Jewish encyclopedia. Once, overwhelmed by his erudition, I asked how he succeeded in knowing so much; he replied that he gained at least two hours a day by not being able to read English.

I had help from former and present colleagues, including James Kugel, Jay Harris, Shaye Cohen, Bernard Septimus, Marion Aptroot, and Irit Aharony; excellent editorial advice from Werner Sollors; guidance from Hana Wirth-Nesher, Michael Brenner, Saul Morson, and Yossi Prager; jokes from Menahem Butler and Allan Nadler; and research assistance from Tom Connolly and, longer ago, Kyle Berkman. I borrowed from the cartoon collection posted on the office door of my Harvard colleague Jon Levenson, and drew inspiration from Bill Novak and Moshe Waldoks's tasteful
The Big Book of Jewish Humor
, which—dare I say?—rivals Nathan Ausubel's
Treasury of Jewish Folklore
(1948) and
Treasury of Jewish Humor
(1951). Moshe and Bill shared their experiences with my classes at Harvard on “The Comic Tradition in Jewish Culture,” as did members of the Friars Club and the ever-generous Saul Bellow. Among my fellow professors of Yiddish, I owe special thanks to Justin Cammy and Jeremy Dauber, whose work on humor has been a great help to mine. It is my good
fortune to have for a brother David G. Roskies, who shares my excitement over Yiddish and Jewish literature, suggests new directions, and inspires by creative example.

Heartfelt appreciation to graduate students and teaching fellows who contributed to this project over the years, including Debra Caplan, Ofer Dynes, Jessica Fechtor, Jennifer Heilbronner Munoz, Kelly Johnson, Alberto Ribas Casasayas, Sasha Senderovich, Miriam Udel, Asya Vaisman, Yuri Vedenyapin, and Sunny Yudkoff—with special thanks to Eitan Kensky and Dara Horn for their continuing feedback. I am hardly less grateful for the papers and insights of undergraduates in my classes, some of whom have gone on to distinguished careers in comedy. Ross Arbes kindly introduced me to the inner sanctum of the
Harvard Lampoon
, where I learned, what should not have surprised me, that its most fabled alumnus is my friend George Rohr.

Bellow's contribution to Jewish humor far exceeds its citations in these pages; I am grateful to Janis Bellow for her generous supervision of his legacy. Thanks to Ann Charney for constant encouragement, to Lida De Fougerolles for the trip to Prague, and to Gita Rotenberg and Jennifer Roskies for their funds of material. I am as fortunate in my friends as I am in family, and thank each in turn.

Since Fred Appel of Princeton University Press was the first person I proposed this project to years before I began writing the book, I was delighted that it landed in his capable hands. It has been a true pleasure to work with him along with Sarah David and everyone at the press. Inexpressible thanks to Arthur Fried, Mem Bernstein, and Roger Hertog for their publishing
and cultural initiatives, including the Tikvah Fund's Library of Jewish Ideas, of which this volume forms a part.

Neal Kozodoy, editor of the Library of Jewish Ideas, oversaw the progress of this book from proposal to publication. Those who have enjoyed his editorial supervision will take me at my word when I credit him for everything sound in it; my book's shortcomings betray that he could only do so much. I could not have written this without his friendship.

Although
No Joke
exposes the threat of a hilarity that impedes effective communal self-protection, it also celebrates the Jewishness into which I was born and raised, and the joys of a Jewish home—ours—that has been an incubator of Jewish humor. Our children inherited the talent from their father, and have imported it into their own adult lives and acquired families with reciprocal give-and-take. I hope that Billy and Suzanne, Jacob and Rebecca, Abby and Ben reap as much joy and laughter from their children as they have brought to Len and me.

This book is dedicated with timeless gratitude to our adored grandchildren, Sonia, Maddy, Resa, Nate, Pearl, Camilla, and Claire, and to our step-grandson, Benjamin.

Notes

Introduction

  
1
. Immanuel Olsvanger, ed.,
Royte Pomerantsen: Jewish Folk Humor
(New York: Schocken, 1947), 3. This book and its companion volume,
L'Chayim
(New York: Schocken, 1949), are superior collections of Yiddish humor. Consisting of transcriptions of Yiddish originals into the roman alphabet, they also make effective teaching tools and invaluable guides to regional differences in pronunciation.

  
2
. Sigmund Freud,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 133.

  
3
. Ibid., 95.

  
4
. Ibid., 134.

  
5
. Theodor Reik,
Jewish Wit
(New York: Gamut Press, 1962), 136. The phrase
Barukh atoh adonoy
, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord,” is the opening formula of most Jewish blessings.

  
6
. Arthur Schnitzler,
The Road into the Open
, trans. Roger Byers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 113.

  
7
. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds.,
The Big Book of Jewish Humor: 25th Anniversary
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), xxv.

  
8
. Graham Turner, “Understanding the Jews,”
Daily Telegraph
, April 10, 2001.

  
9
. Novak and Waldoks,
The Big Book of Jewish Humor
, xlv.

10
.
Davies treats this aside as a categorical conclusion and “demonstrates” its “error” by citing self-critical joking among Scots in the late nineteenth century—without, however, comparing its proportion in the two cultures. See Christie Davies, “Undertaking a Comparative Study of Humor,” in
The Primer of Humor Research
, ed. Victor Raskin (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 175; Christie Davies,
The Mirth of Nations
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 51–75.

11
. Elliott Oring,
Jokes and Their Relations
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010), 116. The footnote cites Hermann Adler, “Jewish Wit and Humor,”
Nineteenth Century
33 (1893): 457–69.

12
. Leonard J. Greenspoon, ed.,
Jews and Humor
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011).

13
. Hillel Halkin, “Why Jews Laugh at Themselves,”
Commentary
121, no. 4 (April 2006): 47–54.

14
. Ariela Krasney,
The Badkhan
[Hebrew] (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1998).

15
. Heinrich Heine, “Prinzessin Sabbat,” translated literally, with insightful discussion, by S. S. Prawer in
Heine's Jewish Comedy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 554–55. For a versified translation, see, for example, Heinrich Heine, “Princess Sabbath,” trans. Aaron Kramer, in
The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine
, ed. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), 264.

16
. See Mendele Mocher Sforim,
Di kliatshe
, trans. “The Mare,” in Joachim Neugroschel,
The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult
(Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1986): 545–663.

17
. Lee Berk and Stanley Tan, interview in
Humor and Health Journal
(September–October 1996). Based on Lee Berk and Stanley Tan, “Neuroendocrine Influences of Mirthful Laughter,”
American Journal of the Medical Sciences
298 (October 1989): 390–96.

18
. See “Laughter Is the Best Medicine,”
http://helpguide.org/life/humor_laughter_health.htm
.

19
.
Sholem Aleichem, “The Haunted Tailor,” trans. Leonard Wolf, in
The Best of Sholem Aleichem
, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979), 36.

20
. Albert Goldman,
Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!!
(New York: Random House, 1974), 106.

21
. Isaac Babel, “Gedali,” in
Collected Stories
, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1994), 118.

1. German Lebensraum

  
1
. Theodor Herzl,
Old-New Land
, trans. Lotta Levensohn, preface Jacques Kornberg (Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener, 1997), 12. I have retained the spelling of names, minus the umlaut, in the quoted text.

  
2
. Ibid., 173.

  
3
. Sigmund Freud,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 74–75, 137–38, 134. The last of these jokes appears as an episode in
King of the Schnorrers
(see
chapter 3
).

  
4
. Ibid., 55.

  
5
. Ibid., 133.

  
6
. Freud proposed the English title “Man's Discomfort in Civilization” for
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
, translated by James Strachey as
Civilization and Its Discontents
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1961). That Freud owed nothing to Herzl in his understanding of anti-Semitism is clear from this discussion of people's instinct for aggression:

The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness…. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most
useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts. (Ibid., 61)

  
7
. “Heinrich Heine is one of the most controversial figures in the history of German literature, some would argue
the
most controversial,” observed George F. Peters (
The Poet as Provocateur: Heinrich Heine and His Critics
[Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000], 1).

  
8
. Heinrich Heine, “Ein Fichtenbaum,” in
Sämtliche Gedichte
, ed. Bernd Kortlander (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun, 1997), 94. For alternate translations, see Web site of Ralph Dumain,
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/heinepoem.html
.