Dauber - Jewish comedy: a serious history

Jewish
Comedy

A SERIOUS HISTORY

Jeremy Dauber

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

LONDON NEW YORK

For Ezra
Whose laughterlike everything else about himis a delight.

Y OU CANT START A BOOK ON JEWISH HUMOR WITHOUT A JOKE. So heres one:

You want to hear a joke? Ill tell you a joke. Whats green, is nailed to the wall, and whistles?

... I give up.

A herring.

A herrings not green!

Nu, you can paint it green.

But its not nailed to the wall!

You could nail it to the wall. If you wanted to.

... But a herring doesnt whistle!

All right, fine, so it doesnt whistle.

Or: I just threw in that part to confuse you.

Or: All right, all right, so its not a herring.

Or: What am I, some kind of herring expert? And on and on.

Is this joke, with its multiplicity of potential punch lines, a Jewish joke? And if so, why? Is it the syntax, with its faint Yiddish overtones? The slightly smart-ass sensibility? The comfort with its meta-jokiness, or, put another way, the subversive, near-parodic jab at the jokes very form? Is it the particular refusal to provide the closure of a punch line, which could be taken, by an overzealous interpreter, as a metaphor for a Jewish historical consciousness ever in wait for messianic redemption? Or is it just a joke about herring?

While you think about that, heres a story about telling Jewish jokes. Its an old story, a tale of the Preacher of Dubno, an eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi famous for his apt and witty parables. Asked by an admirer how he always managed to find such an appropriate parable for each and every sermon, he answered, not uncharacteristically, with another parable. He told the story of a general visiting his troops who was struck by the results of their target practice: while most of the chalk circles drawn as makeshift targets on the wall revealed your regular variety of hit or miss results, one showed nothing but bullseyesdead center, every shot. Gasping, the general demanded to see this marksman; he was even more surprised to discover the shooter was a Jew, a conscript forced to serve in the Tsars army. He asked the Jew the secret of his success at arms. The Jew looked at the general as if he were cockeyed and responded: Well, its very easy. First you fire the gun, and then, once you see where the bullet hole is, you draw a circle around it. This had always been his technique, the Maggid concluded: find a good joke or story, then figure out the larger point to draw from it.

A joke, a story: a statement of the problem, an approach to solving it. The problem, of course, is how to define and describe Jewish humor as its appeared in all its vast and variegated forms, from antiquity to yesterday. Its hardly a new enterprise: there have been previous efforts, especially over the last few decades, and especially in America, where for a while it seemed like Jewish humor was American humor, or at least a pretty central part of it. Steve Allen, who should know, referred to American comedy in 1981 as a sort of Jewish cottage industry, putting Jewish participation in the field at approaching 80 percent. Some, though by no means all, of the approaches advanced in those effortsarguments focusing on language, on sensibility, on historyare hinted at above.

But Jewish comedy tends to resist any single explanation. For every argument thats been advanced as to what it really is, a bit of thought immediately reveals all sorts of exceptions and counterexamplesso much so that other equally perspicacious critics have thrown up their hands and suggested any attempt to define a specifically Jewish humor is doomed to futility. Whats more, the counterexamples themselves arent just indicative: theyre almost as vast and numerous as Jewish history itself, which covers a lot of ground, of both the actual and metaphorical variety. Writing a book that tries to touch on all of it, even representatively, as well as offer some explanatory power, is a pretty tall order.

Still, someone ought to do it.

The first time I walked into a Columbia University classroom to teach a course on Jewish comedy, Seinfeld had just gone off the air and Lena Dunham was entering high school. Judd Apatow was a respected television producer who no one outside the industry had ever heard of; and The Producers was still a movie, though there was talk of taking it to Broadway. I was a little nervousa wet behind the ears twenty-seven-year-old assistant professor, lecturing to the largest class Id ever had (apparently this was the kind of course that could attract a crowd), and I looked down at my notes to focus myself.

Jewish comedy is serious business, Id typed across the top. And so it is.

Over the last fifteen years or so of teaching the subject, lots of things have changedalthough, thanks to the magic of syndication, Seinfeld never really did go off the airand my syllabus has changed with it; but the top line hasnt, along with the two central realizations that accompanied it.

First: The story of Jewish comedy was almost as massive in scope, as meaningful in substance, as Jewish history itself. In fact, I realized as I refined and developed the class, I was looking at a tradition. One with a history that could, and should, be studied. The story of Jewish comedywhat Jewish humor did and meant for the Jews at different times and places as well as how, and why, it was so entertainingis, if you tell it the right way, the story of American popular culture; its the story of Jewish civilization; its a guide to an essential aspect of human behavior. The fact that it also happens to be immensely entertaining to read, talk, and teach about is something of a bonus.

But second: You cant include everything. Or even close. And so what you did include, I realized, had to work not just as a catalog of Jewish comedic production, but as an argument about what precisely Jewish comedy consists of. But even before you get to the cataloging and taxonomizing, there has to be some defining. Some inclusion and exclusion. Is the raw stuff of Jewish humor so capacious that it includes anything written by a Jew that might raise the faintest scintilla of a smile? Well, no. That would be, if not entirely ridiculous, at least ridiculously unhelpful. And literature is littered with brilliant comic thinkers who have warned against trying to define comedy too precisely: Samuel Johnsons Comedy has been unpropitious to definers is the most famous, though I kind of prefer Swifts rhyming couplet that What Humour is, not all the tribe/ Of logic-mongers can describe. But this logic-monger would like to set two conditions nonetheless.

First: Jewish humor has to be produced by Jews. Maybe this is obvious, maybe it isnt, but its part of our ground rules. How someone defines their Jewishness is a notoriously tricky subjectand, counter to some peoples thinking, has been since the beginning of Jewish historybut anyone who defines themselves as Jewish in any way is potentially part of our subject; others, even if sometimes mistaken for Jews (Charlie Chaplin, looking at you), are out. This said, comedyespecially in performance mediais of course often collaborative, and oftentimes a great work of Jewish comedy is crafted in concert with non-Jews; this material is very much included.

The second, trickier condition: Jewish humor must have something to do with either contemporary Jewish living or historical Jewish existence