Jewish Humor Sigmund Freud Understood

Jewish Humor

Sigmund Freud understood that jokes speak the language of the unconscious mind. The trigger point of laughter starts from impulses buried deep, stemming from ancestral memories. It was Freud who recognized and articulated the unique quality of Jewish humor that is best defined as self-abnegating, self-deprecating, or self-disparaging.

To poke fun of the self and mock the self, especially poking fun of stereotypes, alleviates the pain of disenfranchisement and social stigma. The essence of American Jewish immigrant experience during Freud's day was that of social isolation. Therefore, humor became the means by which Jews transformed negativity into laughter. In the same way African-Americans have re-appropriated and thus transformed the N-word, so too did American Jews capitalize on the hatred and stereotyping to create what is essentially Jewish humor.

The self-abnegating quality of Jewish humor, which is specifically Eastern European and Ashkenazi, corresponds to Freud's theory of the unconscious. In particular, masochism was the unconscious theme that originally and still does drive self-abnegating Jewish humor. Ziv explains the roots of Jewish humor in terms of essential masochism, in terms of Jewish theology. "The suffering of the Jews is, after all, like everything else in the world, an outcome of God's will. Since man cannot be angry at God and show aggression towards him, this aggression is directed inward, that is, towards ourselves," (Ziv 7).

One of the key qualities of Jewish humor is its making fun of self-hatred. When the Jew makes fun of himself or herself, lamenting her suffering, she is being Jewish. Rodney Dangerfield, for example, became an emblem of Jewish humor because of his continual barrage of jokes centering on the catch phrase "I don't get no respect." With the phrase, Dangerfield is redirecting anger, pain, and self-pity and transmuting those uncomfortable emotions into humor. Other mainstays of original American Jewish humor like Henny Youngman also capitalized on self-abnegating one-liners like "take my wife, please!" This type of humor, which Freud sought to understand, has roots in the Bible. "Inner-directed mockery, Jewish self-satire, and self-criticism are found in the Pentateuch itself, as when the Children of Israel look up at Moses just before the parting of the Red Sea and say, "Are there no graves in Egypt, that you have taken us to die in the desert?" (Ex. 14:11, cited by Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Wex).

Laughter becomes a healing salve, which is uniquely human. Freudian views of Jewish humor are among the richest and most accurate interpretations of the phenomenon of masochism because Freud was unafraid to explore the darkness of the human experience. Jewish humor is "dipped in tragedy," ("Laugh and the World Laughs With You" 2011). As Ben-Amos states, "The current conception of Jewish humor originated, as many modern ideas have, with Sigmund Freud," (112).