The Jewish Joke
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Comedy is full of famously funny Jews, from Groucho Marx to Larry David to Sarah Silverman. This smart and funny book includes tales from many of these much-loved comics, and will appeal to their broad audience, while revealing the history, context, and wider culture of Jewish joking. The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, and yet still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as “funny”? And how old can a joke get? With jokes from Lena Dunham to Woody Allen, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho, mostly), Baum balances serious research with light-hearted humor and provides fascinating insight into this wellknown and much loved cultural phenomenon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baum (Feeling Jewish), lecturer in English literature and critical theory at the University of Southampton, considers the history of Jewish humor in this cursory study. She begins with a brief exploration of humor within the Torah, recounting that the Zohar ("the foundational text of Jewish mysticism") considered God's command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac "the biggest joke in the Hebrew Bible." In an attempt to explain that bizarre assessment, she refers to the last-minute substitution of a ram for Isaac as a "classic switcheroo" that Abraham "really fell for," and that showed God as "a prankster of the highest order." She effectively considers the roles Jewish humor has played as a response to oppression and as a way to mock hypocrisy about religious observance, but other efforts aren't as successful. For instance, her explanation of why Jackie Mason employed the simple repetition of the word "Jew" in his stand-up routine because, for Mason and his audience, there isn't "all that much of a difference between a Jew and a joke" is insufficient. Her reliance on personages tainted by accusations of sexual misconduct (such as Woody Allen and Louis C.K.) also distracts from many of her points. Readers interested in Jewish wit will be better served by Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy or anthologies aiming just for laughs, such as The Big Book of Jewish Humor.
