Funny, You Don't Look Funny
Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
Across generations, humor has been a place for American Jews to explore the relationship between Jewish identity, practices, and history.
In this comprehensive approach to Jewish humor focused on the relationship between humor and American Jewish practice, Jennifer Caplan calls us to adopt a more expansive view of what it means to "do Jewish," revealing that American Jews have turned, and continue to turn, to humor as a cultural touchstone. Caplan frames the book around four generations of Jewish Americans from the Silent Generation to Millennials, highlighting a shift from the utilization of Jewish-specific markers to American-specific markers.
Jewish humor operates as a system of meaning-making for many Jewish Americans. By mapping humor onto both the generational identity of those making it and the use of Judaism within it, new insights about the development of American Judaism emerge. Caplan's explication is innovative and insightful, engaging with scholarly discourse across Jewish studies and Jewish American history; it includes the work of Joseph Heller, Larry David, Woody Allen, Seinfeld, the Coen brothers films, and Broad City. This example of well-informed scholarship begins with an explanation of what makes Jewish humor Jewish and why Jewish humor is such a visible phenomenon. Offering ample evidence and examples along the way, Caplan guides readers through a series of phenomenological and ideological changes across generations, concluding with commentary regarding the potential influences on Jewish humor of later Millennials, Gen Z, and beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This perceptive debut from Caplan, a Judaic studies professor at the University of Cincinnati, examines how "Jewish satire and American Judaism have interacted over the last half century." Unpacking the works of Woody Allen, Rachel Bloom, and Nathan Englander, among others, Caplan argues that some Jewish authors of the Silent Generation, exemplified by Joseph Heller, displayed in their fiction an irreverence toward the faith while figures such as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth demonstrated concern with Jewish people's ambivalence about their heritage. Baby boomers, Caplan contends, served as a bridge between these sensibilities and those of Generation X, who tend to be skeptical of Jewish identity, as illustrated by Larry David's depictions of the faithful as "liars and hypocrites" on his TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The discussion of millennial Jewish humor is more disjointed and offers fewer takeaways, among them the observation that younger Jewish people "are moving away from Israel and the Holocaust as the touchstones" of Judaism. The wide-ranging analysis skillfully synthesizes cultural themes from novels, films, and tweets, while the insightful takes illuminate what it means to be Jewish in America. The result is a discerning perspective on the recent evolution of American Jewish identity.
