Books: It sounds better in Yiddish

Humor helps Jews navigate the modern world while clinging to ancient traditions, Ruth Wisse writes.

By ELAINE MARGOLIN
seinfeld cartoon 370 (photo credit: MCT)
seinfeld cartoon 370
(photo credit: MCT)
Thinking about Lenny Bruce or Larry David or Jackie Mason, or even Jon Stewart and Sarah Silverman, it was hard for me to imagine Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, already 77, wanting to fraternize with this group of rebellious hipsters who embrace life’s contradictions and hypocrisies.
But she fooled me and has produced an excellent treatise about Jewish comedy in all of its forms, focusing her gaze on how it has changed and responded to the shifting landscape of Jewish powerlessness. Wisse believes much of Jewish humor serves as a vehicle for the modern Jewish person attempting to navigate the secular world while still clinging to ancient cherished traditions.
Wisse’s early life was tumultuous.
Born in 1936 in Czernowitz, Romania, she was able to escape the Nazis with her parents and older brother, and the family settled in Montreal in 1940. Her mother, according to her brother’s memoir, Yiddishlands, was a difficult and emotionally intense woman. Wisse explains that her parents struggled to make a living in Canada and adjust to their new circumstances, leaving young Ruth to pursue her studies, which she did with enthusiasm. She recalls feeling “fortunate to be nudged by our parents into a society that still was a little reluctant to welcome us.”
The insecurity of these early first years feels present in all of her writing.
In No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, Wisse dissects Jewish jokes, examining their potential ramifications with regard to Jewish identity, pride and fear. She looks at jokes that deal with the Jewish preoccupation with fitting in, as well as jokes about Jews who are afraid they will be found out. She studies the comic tales Jews tell to one another about other Jews, and the funny stories they share about gentiles.
She looks at the witty barbs aimed at the religious, and at those who have left the faith. She shares her concerns about the repeated stereotypes that appear in Jewish humor, such as Jewish mothers, JAPS, henpecked husbands, and nebbishes, and she worries about the long-term effects these jokes might have on our children, as well as in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Her book covers a large swath of territory, touching on everyone from Heine and Freud to Sholem Aleichem and Kafka, from Isaac Babel to Philip Roth and a host of other luminaries involved in the world of humor, irony and satire.
She also dissects the work of many contemporary comedians, including Joan Rivers, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, as well as the more recent work of Israeli comedian Shimon Dzigan and comedy trio Hagashash Hahiver.
She begins her book by recounting a joke she told her colleagues that accidentally offended her gentile secretary Samantha, who was dating a Jewish man and didn’t like the “anti-Semitic” tone of the story. The joke went as follows: Four Europeans go hiking together and get terribly lost. First they run out of food, then out of water.
“I’m so thirsty,” says the Englishman. “I must have tea.”
“I’m so thirsty,” says the Frenchman. “I must have wine.”
“I’m so thirsty,” says the German. “I must have beer.”
“I’m so thirsty,” says the Jew. “I must have diabetes.”
Wisse was troubled by her secretary’s distressed reaction, but it forced her to ask herself whether Samantha had a point.
“Samantha seems to me like the kindly bystander who worries about the health of smokers,” she writes. “She wants to protect Jews from anti-Semitism, which she associates with whatever sets them apart. In her eagerness to draw us all together, she may fail to understand why we should accept, reinforce and celebrate our peculiarity.
So does Samantha have a point? Is it appropriate to wonder why Jews should enjoy laughing at themselves? Why joking acquired such value in Jewish society, or why Yiddish – the language of European Jewry, whose culture I teach at the university – is thought to be inherently funny?” She reminds us of Freud’s famous comment about Jews and their predilection for joke-telling. “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character,” he said.
Wisse recognizes Sholem Aleichem as a revolutionary figure who was able to create Jewish characters who could laugh their way through repeated crises. She believes he used Yiddish as a perfect medium to express the angst felt by Jews who were forced to live outside their ancestral territory and were dependent on others for language and literature.
She also offers a stunning analysis of Roth’s Portnoy, who was willing to insult gentiles rather than make fun of other Jews. She refers to a particularly provocative passage in Portnoy’s Complaint, where the title character screams, “Let them (if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or shmutzig or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape meat and skunk if they like – a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. All they know, these imbecilic eaters of the execrable, is to swagger, to insult, to sneer, and sooner or later to hit.... You stupid goyim! Reeking of beer and empty of ammunition, home you head, a dead animal (formerly alive) strapped to each fender, so that motorists along the way can see how strong and manly you are.”
Wisse is impressed with Roth’s bravado and the fearless rant he channels through his beloved Portnoy, but is concerned that it goes so far afield it might ultimately thwart his bid for liberation from what the gentiles think and reveal instead his own still persistent sense of helplessness.
She takes on Larry David, too, talking about how his hit HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, has subverted traditional definitions of Jewish humor. She points out that the show has none of the charm of David’s earlier incarnation Seinfeld, but is instead a story about an obnoxious man who lashes out at everyone he can think of: the disabled, homosexuals, bald people and stutterers.
Nothing is sacred. In one episode he invites a Holocaust survivor to come to dinner to meet a “survivor” from the reality television show of the same name, and encourages the two men to argue about who has suffered more.
David, clearly playing some exaggerated version of himself, is rich and has influence, and he takes pleasure in offending others without regard for the tenets of any moral universe. Wisse believes this is an unusual and new Jewish character, the antithesis of the typical Jewish schlemiel who was ridiculed but remained morally intact.
She finds this a disturbing occurrence.
Although she clearly enjoys sharing her exploration of Jewish humor with us, Wisse ends her book with a stern warning about whether the excess and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor can go too far and backfire in the process.
“If Jews truly consider humor to have restorative powers, they ought to encourage others to laugh at themselves as well,” she writes. “Let Muslims take up joking about Muhammad, Arabs satirize jihad, British elites mock their glib liberalism, and anti-Semites spoof their politics of blame.... 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.”