No laughing matter

Jeremy Dauber takes a ‘serious’ look at the long, colorful history of Jewish humor.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER

DECEMBER 7, 2017 18:23

SHOLEM ALEICHEM at his desk in St. Petersburg in 1904 (photo credit: YIVO ARCHIVES) — SHOLEM ALEICHEM at his desk in St. Petersburg in 1904

(photo credit: YIVO ARCHIVES)

Explaining his perennial predilection for satire, Sholem Aleichem once wrote, “What shall I do when laughing is a kind of illness for me, God save us, from childhood on?”

For centuries, stretching back to the Bible, humor has been a distinctive characteristic of Jews. As recently as 2013, a Pew Research Center found that 42% of respondents declared that “having a good sense of humor” was “part of being Jewish in America today,” far more than those who singled out “being part of a Jewish community” or “observing Jewish law.”

In Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia University, and the author, among other books, of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, examines Jewish humor as an integral aspect of ancient, medieval, hassidic, and modern Jewish civilizations; literature and popular culture in the United States; and human behavior.

Dauber acknowledges that he has been selective rather than inclusive. He barely glances, for example, at the humor of Jews in Israel. Nor does he claim to have identified the essence of Jewish comedy. His book focuses on various forms of humor (bookish, ironic, raunchy, body-obsessed, folksy, and metaphysically oriented) as responses of Jews to persecution and antisemitism; social and communal norms; and “the blurred and ambiguous nature” of Jewishness itself.

Immensely knowledgeable about Jewish religion and culture, and theories of comedy, Dauber has filled his book with jokes, anecdotes, insights and analysis. Unfortunately, his prose is, at times, awkward. Many sentences step on themselves with parenthetical clauses, semicolons and dashes. The same term sometimes appears three times in a single sentence. Even short sentences are clumsy. “As a stand-up comedian,” Dauber writes, “[Woody] Allen was never far from the joke-writing sensibility he originated with.” Dauber cleans up several jokes in his chapter on vulgar, raunchy comedy, moreover, making it virtually impossible for readers to see the humor in them. And, rather than supply the appropriate etymological, rabbinic or talmudic context, he tells readers to trust his judgment that a passage he has just quoted is “a dead-on, hilarious parody.”

Nonetheless, Jewish Comedy is impressive, informative and engaging. In an evocative discussion of the song parodies of Mickey Katz and Allen Sherman, Mad Magazine, Borscht Belt monologists, Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, for example, Dauber deconstructs the “push pull between love and distance,” acceptance and resistance among assimilated Jews in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s. These performers, he points out, were also influential in inculcating a sense that you didn’t have to be Jewish to like jokes that mocked majority culture “in a particularly Jewish way.”

Even more intriguing is Dauber’s analysis of comedic manifestations that “seem to be Jewish, that clearly are, that illuminate the lived Jewish experience,” but are not explicit about it. Addressed directly in Franz Kafka’s letters and diaries, Dauber indicates, Jewishness is hidden in his fiction. If disguise is a central theme in the non-Jewish Jewish comedy, Dauber writes, “Who better to explore that than the author of The Metamorphosis?” After all, Gregor Samsa is a straight man negotiating an absurd world, “making studied attempts at normality in the face of weirdness.” When he wakes up and discovers he has turned into a monstrous vermin, Dauber points out, Samsa does not ask “What has happened to me?” He obsesses about being late for work. Kafka “scrupulously stripped” Jewishness from his short stories and novels, Dauber suggests, to make his statement about modernity. He also believed that Jews did not have the luxury “of acting out or acting big, whatever the provocation,” whatever the likelihood that they were about to be destroyed.

Less apocalyptic, but more typical, is the masking and unmasking in Marx Brothers movies. The names of the characters in Groucho’s oeuvre (Otis B. Driftwood, Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Rufus T. Firefly), Dauber suggests, are “the efforts of someone trying to pass, fearful he won’t, and knowing he doesn’t.” Witness, for example, Captain Spaulding’s nervous question: “Did someone call me schnorrer?” At the same time, if Groucho is pretending not to be a Jew, he also seems determined to have us find him out.

Dauber ends his “serious history” with serious, sobering questions. Does the relative absence of classic markers of Jewish comedy (engagement with Jewish texts, community, traditions, and even antisemitism) these days mark the end of an era? Are the best jokes now about Jewish success in the United States, not failure?

Whither Jewish comedy, one might also ask, in a postmodern world, more fragmented than coherent, prone to doubt and irony, in which the marginalized individual, the outsider, the schlemiel, forever questioning success, unable to take yes for an answer, has, to a certain extent, moved to the cultural mainstream?

Let’s hope for answers that are funny as well as serious.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.