Jewish humor: characteristics, history, and cultural significance

Jewish

Both Chaim Bermant and Richard Raskin show how and why Biblical humor is Jewish humor. In What's the Joke? A Study of Jewish Humour Through the Ages, Chaim Bermant traces the evolution of Jewish humor from Biblical times and through the exodus until the modern and post-modern eras. While Jewish humor fermented in Eastern Europe, notes Bermant, its roots are as scattered as the Jewish people. Although Jewish humor does not follow a straight line from the Bible to the ghettos of Eastern Europe and onward to the United States, the development of Jewish humor does follow this rough pattern.

Jewish humor provides the means by which Jews have formed and reinforced a cultural identity in the midst of social and political oppression. Moreover, the nature of Jewish humor transcends time and geography. Humor is a common thread that links together the Jews from disparate places. Although much Jewish humor does depend on language, humor can also be a way from Jews of different linguistic heritages to recognize common cultural or ethnic bonds. This is because in spite of diversity within the Jewish community worldwide, there are some experiences common to all and which can be shared in jokes. Resistance to oppression, encounters with social norms, and astute analyses of the gentile political and social worlds are but some of the many bonds between Ashkenazi and Sephardic, between Lithuanian and Romanian, between American and Israeli Jews.

In Life is Like a Glass of Tea: Studies of Classic Jewish Jokes, by Richard Raskin, the author analyzes individual Jewish jokes in order to place them within a historical and cultural context. The analysis does not destroy the humor embedded in each joke. In fact, the rich analyses enhance the comedic value of the joke or maxim described in each of the seven chapters. In Life is Like a Glass of Tea, Raskin selects six individual jokes and for each describes the history and variants of jokes; interpretations of the jokes, interpretive properties of the joke, and history of publication. By focusing on jokes as a unique cultural artifact, Raskin contributes to a more comprehensive Jewish historiography.

Both Bermant and Raskin show how all Jewish humor, and for Raskin, individual jokes, can be traced to Biblical times in light of Talmudic and other Rabbinical writings. Raskin addresses rabbinic judgment, man vs. God, ethnic disparagement, and even the humor in the Ten Commandments. Jewish mother jokes cannot be ignored in any analysis of Jewish humor, and both authors address the role of Jewish mother jokes and how they can be traced to the Bible. Raskin discusses the original function of Groucho Marx's resignation joke and places it also within a historical framework that extends back in time to the Bible and forward to Woody Allen. The meaning of life is a rich topic of discussion in Jewish humor, traced through to the Bible and played out in variations of the joke of the dying Rabbi.