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, chan...