Lably
Skip to content

Jewish humor

Wit and humor in Jewish culture

  • 22 min read
  • 3 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Holy Roman Empire, Time (magazine) and Satire

Lab · Class 7–9Ancient Indian EmpiresLab · Class 1Time – Reading the ClockLab · Class 2Time (Hours & Half-hours)Lab · Class 11Earth Through Time

During the nineteenth century, modern Jewish humor emerged among German-speaking Jewish proponents of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), it matured in the shtetls of the Russian Empire, and then, it flourished in twentieth-century America, arriving with the millions of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and the early 1920s. Beginning on vaudeville and continuing on radio, stand-up, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American comedians have been Jewish. Time estimated in 1978 that 80 percent of professional American comics were Jewish.

Jewish humor is diverse, but most frequently, it consists of wordplay, irony, and satire, and the themes of it are highly anti-authoritarian, mocking religious and secular life alike. Sigmund Freud considered Jewish humor unique in that its humor is primarily derived from mocking the in-group (Jews) rather than the Other. However, rather than simply being self-deprecating, it also contains an element of self-praise.

History

Jewish humor is rooted in several traditions. Jewish humor can be found in one of history's earliest recorded documents, the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Talmud. In particular, the intellectual and legal methods of the Talmud, which uses elaborate legal arguments and situations often seen as so absurd as to be humorous, in order to tease out the meaning of religious law. For example:

The Mishnah states: If a fledgling bird is found within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If it is found outside the limit of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it. ...

Rabbi Jeremiah asked: If one foot of the fledgling is within fifty cubits and one foot is outside of it, what is the law?

It was for this question that Rabbi Jeremiah was thrown out of the House of Study

-- Talmud (Bava Batra 23b)

A Sephardic tradition is centered on a Nasreddin-derived folk character who is known as Djoha.

A more recent tradition which originated in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe is an egalitarian tradition in which the powerful were frequently mocked subtly, rather than attacked overtly—as Saul Bellow once put it, "Oppressed people tend to be witty." Jesters known as badchens used to poke fun at prominent members of the community during weddings, creating a good-natured tradition of humor as a levelling device. Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, a scholar of Jewish humor, argued:

You have a lot of shtoch, or jab humor, which is usually meant to deflate pomposity or ego, and to deflate people who consider themselves high and mighty. But Jewish humor was also a device for self-criticism within the community, and I think that's where it really was the most powerful. The humorist, like the prophet, would basically take people to task for their failings. The humor of Eastern Europe especially was centered on defending the poor against the exploitation of the upper classes or other authority figures, so rabbis were made fun of, authority figures were made fun of and rich people were made fun of. It really served as a social catharsis.

After Jews began to migrate to America in large numbers, they, like other minority groups, found it difficult to gain mainstream acceptance and obtain upward mobility. The development of the entertainment industry, combined with the tradition of Jewish humor, provided a potential route where Jews could succeed. One of the first successful radio "sitcoms", The Goldbergs, featured a Jewish family. As radio and television matured, many of its most famous comedians, including Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, George Burns, Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, Jack Carter, Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, and Joan Rivers, were Jewish. The Jewish comedy tradition continues today, with Jewish humor much entwined with mainstream humor, as comedies like Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Woody Allen films indicate.. The series Difficult People, starring Jewish comedians Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner, incorporates elements of Jewish humor, as does Emma Seligman’s 2020 film Shiva Baby.

In his essay, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud analyzes the nature of Jewish jokes, among other things.

Sign in to keep reading

2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in History

Church of EnglandAnglican church in EnglandWhite HouseResidence and workplace of the US presidentFrench Third RepublicGovernment of France from 1870 to 1940Western cultureWestern culture, also known as Western civilization, European civilization, Occidental culEarly ChristianityHistorical era of the Christian religionOld NorseNorth Germanic language