FUNNY YOU DON'T LOOK JEWISH!

  

European Jewish humor in its early form developed in the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, with theological satire becoming a traditional way of clandestinely opposing Christianization.

Modern Jewish humor - emerging during the nineteenth century among German-speaking Jews of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) - matured in the shtetls of the Russian Empire. It then flourished in twentieth-century America, arriving with the millions of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and the early 1920s.

Beginning with vaudeville, and continuing through radio, stand-up comedy, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American, German, and Russian comedians have been Jewish. Time estimated in 1978 that 80 percent of professional American comics were Jewish!

There are plenty of theories to explain Jewish humor — most devised by Jews. Saul Bellow, channelling his inner Kierkegaard, thought Jewish humor combined “laughter and trembling.” Freud believed Jewish humor was a defense mechanism: a form of sublimated aggression that lets victims of persecution safely cope with their condition. Or as Mel Brooks put it: “If they’re laughing, how can they bludgeon you to death?”

Listen to Jackie Mason: “A normal person wouldn’t become a comedian. The egomania, the neurosis, the need to overcompensate, the feeling that life is meaningless without stardom – it’s too much suffering.”

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way you can deal with the world is to laugh – because if you don’t laugh you’re going to cry and never stop crying. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

A unique feature of Jewish humour is primarily derived from mocking of in the in-group (Jews) rather than the “other”.  [The town of Chełm decided to build a new synagogue. So, some strong, able-bodied men were sent to a mountaintop to gather heavy stones for the foundation. The men put the stones on their shoulders and trudged down the mountain to the town below. When they arrived, the town constable yelled, "Foolish men! You should have rolled the stones down the mountain!" The men agreed this was an excellent idea. So they turned around, and with the stones still on their shoulders, trudged back up the mountain, and rolled the stones back down again].

Tevye, one of the most delightful creations of the Yiddish humorous writer Sholem Aleichem, and the star of Fiddler on the Roof, explained that Jews always wear hats because they never know when they will be forced to travel. But what is more important is that they always made sure to have something under their hats  and inside of their heads – because physical possessions could be taken from them - but what they accumulated in their minds would always remain the greatest “merchandise” a Jew possesses.