No Joke (33 page)

  
4
. Ibid., 2.

  
5
. Ibid., 48.

  
6
. Stephen Potter,
The Sense of Humour
(London: Max Reinhardt, 1954), 54.

  
7
. Ibid., 51ff.

  
8
. Richard Raskin,
Life Is Like a Glass of Tea: Studies of Classic Jewish Jokes
(Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1992), 101–19.

  
9
. Ibid., 109.

10
. Saul Bellow, ed.,
Great Jewish Short Stories
(New York: Dell, 1963), 12.

11
. Ibid., 11–12. This joke may owe something to the quip attributed to Austrian satirist Moritz Saphir: “When I was a Jew, God could see me but I could not see Him. When I became a Catholic, I could see God, but He could not see me. Now that I am a Protestant, He can't see me and I can't see Him.”

12
. Leo Rosten, “Groucho: The Man from Marx,” in
The Many Worlds of Leo Rosten
(New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 14–20.

13
. Leo Rosten,
The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N
(New York: Harper, 1959), 58.

14
. Leonard Q. Ross,
The Education of Hyman Kaplan
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937), 90.

15
. Leo Rosten,
The Joys of Yiddish
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 93.

16
. Irwin Richman,
Sullivan County Borscht Belt: Images of America
(Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2001), 9.

17
. Joey Adams with Henry Tobias,
The Borscht Belt
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 63, 68.

18
.
“Red Buttons Roasts Frank,” video,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyO0VWdUfRo
.

19
. Philip Roth, George Plimpton interview on
Portnoy's Complaint
(1969), reprinted in
Reading Myself and Others
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

20
. Philip Roth,
Portnoy's Complaint
(New York: Random House, 1969), 185.

21
. From the 1975 film
Love and Death
.

22
. Roth,
Portnoy's Complaint
, 257.

23
. Roth,
Portnoy's Complaint
, 79.

24
. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds.,
The Big Book of Jewish Humor: 25th Anniversary
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Jokes attributed to, respectively, Jonathan Katz and Joel Chasnoff.

25
. See, for example, “Philip Roth and the Jews: An Exchange,”
New York Review of Books
, November 14, 1974. The piece reproduces in full Syrkin's original letter to the editor in
Commentary
, March 1973—a response to Irving Howe's famously negative “Philip Roth Reconsidered,”
Commentary
, December 1972. The exchanges between these Jewish intellectuals of the wartime generation and the U.S.-born writer trying to break new literary ground offer stark, poignant insight into the boundaries of humor among Jews themselves when they are separated by different historical experiences and cultural ideals.

26
. Roth,
Portnoy's Complaint
, 81.

27
. Ibid., 168.

28
. Ibid., 36–37, 111–12.

29
. Ibid., 76.

30
. Ibid., 274.

4. Under Hitler and Stalin

  
1
. Shimen Dzigan,
The Impact of Jewish Humor
[Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: Orly, 1974), 124. I benefited from John Efron's essay, read in manuscript, “From Lodz to Tel Aviv: The Yiddish Political
Satire of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher,” and Yuri Vedenyapin's dissertation “ ‘Doctors Prescribe Laughter': The Yiddish Stand-up Comedy of Shimen Dzigan,” Harvard University, 2008.

  
2
. Cited by Rudolph Herzog as a prime example of German Jewish humor in
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
, trans. Jefferson Chase (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011): 6.

  
3
. Max Weinreich,
History of the Yiddish Language
, trans. Shlomo Noble with Joshua A. Fishman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008): 1:181.

  
4
. All examples, except where indicated, are taken from Nachman Blumental,
Words and Expressions of the Khurbn-period
[Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Publishers, 1981).

  
5
. Cited in ibid., 163; Samuel D. Kassow,
Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 256–57.

  
6
. Kassow,
Who Will Write Our History?
256–57.

  
7
. Dzigan,
The Impact of Jewish Humor
, 183.

  
8
. Jerry Z. Muller, “Why Do Jews Succeed?” Web site Project Syndicate: A World of Ideas, March 29, 2010,
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-do-jews-succeed-
.

  
9
. Yosef Guri,
Lomir hern gute bsures: Dictionary of Blessings and Curses
[Yiddish] (Jerusalem, 2005), 106.

10
. Felix Mendelsohn,
The Jew Laughs: Humorous Stories and Anecdotes
, intro. A. A. Brill (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1935), 173.

11
. Many of these jokes are collected in David A. Harris and Izrail Rabinovich, eds.,
The Jokes of Oppression: Humor of Soviet Jews
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1988). See also works on Russian humor by Emil A. Draitser, including his autobiographical
Shush! A Memoir: Growing Up Jewish under Stalin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), and other referenced works in these chapters. Nowadays, collections and studies of Russian
anekdoty
are keeping pace with those devoted to Jewish humor.

12
.
Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Hope against Hope: A Memoir
, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 14.

13
. For illustrations of Sholem Aleichem, see Susan Tumarkin Goodman, ed.,
Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). The Jewish sources and subjects of Chagall's art are most thoroughly considered in Benjamin Harshav,
Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall's Art and Iconography
(New York: Rizzoli, 2006).

14
. These jokes and versions of others cited in this chapter can be found in David Brandenberger, ed.,
Political Humor under Stalin
(Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009), 3. This invaluable overview reminds us that study of the subject is still in its infancy.

15
. This joke and the following in Harris and Rabinovich,
The Jokes of Oppression
, 41, 46.

16
. James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds.,
Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 212. The editors cull their anecdotes from five sources, but many can be found in or are clearly adapted from earlier collections of Yiddish humor.

17
. Seth Graham,
Resonant Dissonance: The Russian Joke in Cultural Context
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 60.

18
. Ted Cohen,
Jokes
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), 22. Cohen attributes this to Rabbi Elliot Gertel, but I have found and heard it elsewhere.

19
. Harris and Rabinovich,
The Jokes of Oppression
, 126.

20
.
Di zelmenyaner hobn oysgearbet in meshekh fun doyres an eygenem reyakh—a min veykhn gerukh fun tsugelegenem hey mit nokh epes
. Moshe Kulbak,
The Zelmenyaners
, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 4.

21
. Ibid., 23.

22
. Ibid., 38.

23
.
Ibid., 144.

24
. Ibid., 265.

25
. Isaac Babel, “Di Grasso,” trans. Peter Constantine, in
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
, ed. Nathalie Babel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 699.

26
. Ibid., 700.

27
. Ibid., 702. A considerably soberer reading is offered by Gregory Freidin, “Fat Tuesday in Odessa: Isaac Babel's ‘Di Grasso,' ” reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed.,
Isaac Babel
(New York: Chelsea, 1987), 199–214.

28
. Isaac Babel, “Our Great Enemy: Trite Vulgarity,”
Pravda,
August 25, 1934. Reprinted in Isaac Babel,
The Lonely Years, 1925–1939
, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew and Max Hayward (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), 396–400.

29
. A total of about two hundred thousand individuals served time for this offense, according to Roy Medvedev. Cited in Graham,
Resonant Dissonances
, 8.

30
. Jurek Becker,
Jacob the Liar
, trans. Melvin Korfeld (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 92.

31
. Sigmund Freud,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 290.

5. Hebrew Homeland

  
1
. Joseph Telushkin,
Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say about the Jews
(New York: Quill, 1998), 173. This is an excellent guide to Jewish joking.

  
2
. Sholem Aleichem, “Chava,” in
Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories
, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987), 69.

  
3
. Theodor Reik,
Jewish Wit
(New York: Gamut, 1962), 26.

  
4
. Shimen Dzigan,
The Impact of Jewish Humor
[Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: Orly, 1974), 317.

  
5
.
Mentshele
, the Yiddish diminutive of
mentsh
, was widely used in Yiddish literature, popularized by the 1864 novel of Mendele Mocher Sforim,
Dos kleyne mentshele
[The little man]. The present wordplay, coined by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, follows the pattern of compression of Heine's “He treated me
famillionnairely
.”

  
6
. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds.,
The Big Book of Jewish Humor: 25th Anniversary
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 137.

  
7
. Shmuel Yosef Agnon,
In the Heart of Seas
, trans. I. M. Lask (New York: Schocken, 1947), 72.

  
8
. Ibid., 20–21. I have slightly modified the translation.

  
9
. Gershom Scholem, “S. Y. Agnon: The Last Hebrew Classic?” in
Commentary
67 (1966). The article was a review of Agnon's
A Guest for the Night
.

10
. S. Y. Agnon, speech, city hall, Stockholm, December 10, 1966,
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1966/agnon-speech.html
.

11
. Elliott Oring,
Israeli Humor: The Content and Structure of the Chizbat of the Palmah
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 180–81. Most of this collection is culled and translated from Dan Ben Amotz and Haim Hefer,
Yalkut ha-kezavim
[Hebrew: A pack of lies] (Tel Aviv: Metsiut, 1979). I have made slight changes to the translation.

12
. Oring,
Israeli Humor
, 156. For Oring's discussion, see ibid., 71.

13
.
Bemedinat Hayehudim
[In the land of the Jews: Israeli humor in the 20th century], directed by Gavriel Bibliyovits et al., eleven-part series (Tel Aviv, Matar Plus, 2006).

14
. See, for example, Edna Ofek and Ira Cahanman, “Humor as a Common Denominator in Immigrant Society” [Hebrew], in
Bikoret Ufarshanut
21 (December 1986): 69–85.

15
. Judges' statement,
http://cms.education.gov.il/EducationCMS/Units/PrasIsrael/Tashas/Hagashas/NimukeiAshoftimGashash.htm
. Professor Aliza Shenhar served as committee chair. For a coffee-table anthology of the comedy group's most popular
expressions, see Gavri Banai,
Az ma haya lanu sham?
[All-time favorite phrases of the Gashash] (Ben-Shemen: Modan, 2004).