Why Are Jews Funny?
JEWISH COMEDY
A Serious History
By Jeremy Dauber
364 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $28.95.
Were Jews always funny? For most of their history they had a reputation, at least among their gentile neighbors, for being humorless and glum. But in 1978, Time magazine claimed that 80 percent of all stand-up comedians in the United States were Jewish. So either Jews got funnier, or they were just funny all along and nobody noticed.
There are plenty of theories to explain Jewish humor — most devised by Jews. Saul Bellow, channeling his inner Kierkegaard, thought Jewish humor combined "laughter and trembling." Freud believed Jewish humor was a defense mechanism: a form of sublimated aggression that lets victims of persecution safely cope with their condition. Or as Mel Brooks put it: "If they're laughing, how can they bludgeon you to death?"
In "Jewish Comedy: A Serious History," the Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber skates through more than 2,000 years of material without ever settling on one overarching theory. Instead, in the manner of a field biologist, he lays out a detailed taxonomy of Jewish humor: seven categories to cover everything from the Book of Esther to "Curb Your Enthusiasm," with one chapter devoted to each category. There's a chapter for humor about anti-Semitism; one for satirical humor; one for highbrow wit and wordplay; another for theological or philosophical humor; and a vaguely defined catchall subgenus, the comedy of disguise, that somehow covers all the work of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, the Marx Brothers and Jerry Seinfeld.
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Franz Kafka Credit Imagno/Getty Images
Instead of a chronological history, Dauber's systematic approach samples Jewish history from beginning to end in each chapter, with illustrations from the Bible, 18th-century Yiddish drama and Lena Dunham's "Girls." Then he rewinds the tape for the next chapter, and starts again. Seven times. It makes for frustrating and repetitive reading. "The Bible," as Dauber eventually confesses, "is not funny," but that doesn't stop him. Is the Book of Esther amusing enough to warrant seven different exegeses? Funny you should ask. What starts out as a quirky conceit rapidly devolves into an annoying tic. Because of all the circling back, Dauber tries to keep readers oriented with awkward phrases like "as we've mentioned earlier," "we've already spoken about," "we've already encountered Rabbi Gamaliel in an earlier chapter," or this: "Considering Jews and space leads us back to Woody Allen."
Nonetheless, this narrative straitjacket doesn't keep Dauber, a serious scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, from making original points along the way. There are thoughtful mini-essays on Philip Roth and Kafka, for example. On Kafka, Dauber argues that his subversive comedy is distinctly Jewish because it mocks the pretensions of scientific certainty that papers over the irrational forces controlling our lives. Kafka's stories convey "the monstrously misunderstood distortions peeking out, in a way so horrible that you just have to laugh."
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Lena Dunham Credit Craig Blankenhorn/HBO, via Associated Press
Dauber's preferred subject, though, is contemporary Jewish-American film and television comedy. Larry David's work gets more attention than Kafka or Roth. Unfortunately, most of the commentary on figures like David, Jerry Lewis, Mike Nichols and Judd Apatow is not particularly new or original. He's better when he sticks to the areas where he holds a scholarly advantage. The fascinating but too-brief sections on 18th- and 19th-century Yiddish drama are startling. Who knew how much German-Jewish comedy was focused on mocking the more pious Jews of Eastern Europe, ridiculing them as foolish, corrupt and sexually perverse country bumpkins. The Jewish minority in Berlin were betting on assimilation and acceptance, trying to distance themselves from their more alien landsmen to the east. Though, in retrospect, who were the bigger fools?
This is where the absence of any grand unifying theory feels like a cop-out. Dauber is more comfortable with the triumph of Jewish-American comedy than with the dreary denouement of the European branch. He quotes Freud's sly observation, "I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of their own character," but he's reluctant to dig too deeply into this masochistic strain in Jewish humor. You'll find more nuance in Ruth Wisse's book, "No Joke: Making Jewish Humor," which covers the same ground, but with a greater willingness to probe the ways in which Jewish humor made too much of a virtue out of weakness and passivity.
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"What shall I do when laughing is a kind of illness for me?" the great Yiddish humorist Sholom Aleichem asked. He embraced Zionism, partly as a way out of the trap, and certainly the Jewish state is a test for most theories of Jewish humor. What happens when Jews are no longer a persecuted minority? Can a well-armed majority still be funny?
Yet there are only a few pages about Israel here, mostly unenthusiastic. No mention of classic bits by Arik Einstein and Uri Zohar, or the political satire of contemporary television shows like "Eretz Nehederet" and "Hayehudim Baim" (check out their take on the Book of Esther on YouTube!). He ignores the recent Israeli hit film "Zero Motivation," a comedy about bored young women in the Israel Defense Forces (optioned for American adaptation by Amy Poehler), and skips younger authors like Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron, whose 2014 novel, "The Hilltop," is a remarkably dark and sardonic portrait of the settler movement.
But if Dauber is as worried as he claims to be that as American Jews assimilate, Jewish-American comedy will become less distinctively Jewish and more generically American — something he warns of in his concluding pages — all the more reason for a serious scholar of Jewish comedy to turn east.
Mark Horowitz is a former editor at Wired magazine and The New York Times.
A version of this review appears in print on December 3, 2017, on Page BR63 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Laughter and Trembling. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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