Just the other day something very funny happened to me on my way to work. And it wasn’t long ago that I heard a great joke. How about that really humorous movie I saw last month? I guess that I can admit it: I’m pretty good at identifying—and appreciating—humor when I hear it, or see it, or read it. Perhaps, nobody enjoys a good joke as much as (or even more than) I do. None of this makes me a particularly funny person or a humorous one (if there is a distinction between the two). However, it does...

Understanding the world of the Bible can seem daunting for those of us who live in the twenty-first century. Not only are we confronted with an ancient language radically different from modern, especially Western tongues, but we also face a bewildering assortment of customs and cultural conventions that often leave us puzzled. And the content of biblical literature is so very serious. In its pages, we are reading about Almighty God, trials of faith, sin and punishment, truth and justice, heaven and earth. It is understandable that few people turn to the Bible for really good jokes.

But once in...

In the 1930 movieAnimal Crackers,Captain Spaulding, played by Groucho Marx, regales the audience with his adventures in Africa:

The principal animals inhabiting the African jungle are moose, elks, and Knights of Pythias. Of course, you all know what a moose is. That’s big game. The first day, I shot two bucks. That was the biggest game we had. As I say, you all know what a moose is? A moose runs around on the floor, and eats cheese, and is chased by the cats. The Elks, on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the...

The following joke is told in some Jewish circles:

Moses is standing at Sinai and God says to him, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Moses asks, “So are You saying that we shouldn’t eat milk and meat together?”

God replies a little impatiently, “I said: You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Moses, still puzzled, says, “Do you want us to wait six hours after a meat meal before eating dairy foods? Is that what you mean?”

God, a bit more impatiently this time, reiterates, “I said: You shall not boil a...

My focus in this essay is on what Iregard as a very striking example of classical rabbinic Jewish humor—namely, “ Masekhet Purim,” or “Tractate Purim,” a medieval parody of the Babylonian Talmud. There are a number of different approaches one could take for analyzing this remarkable work. One approach, of course, is to look at it as a very clever and well-informed piece of literature. Another way to think about this document is as an example of the larger genre of religious parody literature, a phenomenon that was remarkably widespread within the surrounding Christian community of the Middle Ages....

Joseph Telushkin, a rabbi and author of the bookJewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say about the Jews,observed that “Jewish humor reveals a great many truths about Jews, but no one great truth.”¹ One obvious fact is that Jewish humor mirrors the Jewish condition. It has served as a coping mechanism for a people confronted with their minority status in an often hostile environment. As a mode of communication, humor also expresses the nature and intricacies of interethnic relations. The religious status of Jews’ “Chosenness” and their role in society evoked antagonism among gentiles and contributed to...

To begin with the straightforward statement that “laughter is universal; humor is local” is to assert that humor is an area in which cultural resonances feature quite prominently. However, although cultures do have humor, and although humor is not exclusive to the Jews, within the Jewish cultural system, and specifically within the Ashkenazi Jewish cultural polysystem, humor is Jewish. One important incarnation of this humor is the joke. There is, of course, much to say about jokes, and in surveying some of the writing on this notoriously slippery genre, I will focus on a subject that receives relatively shorter scholarly...

During the mid-1930s the Marx Brothers became the darlings of a particular set of American intellectuals, who in turn set the tone for the Marx Brothers’ reception within the wider worlds of criticism and ideas. Dorothy Parker, Haywood Broun, Alexander Woolcott, Harpo Marx, and others, some with one foot still in the big city ghetto, traded quips at Algonquin Hotel luncheons (mostly on the house) and wrote for magazines likeVanity Fair and The New Yorker.¹ Sarcasm, badinage, and wit combined with an outsider’s perspective on mainline American life and politics to produce a critical, cynical, and antiideological style that...

From a purely an American viewpoint, people might think Jews became “funny” in this country or perhaps in relatively modern times. But such has not always been the case. As we know from documented studies, Jews and other minorities have borne the brunt of jokes for a long time. However, only in the post-World War II decades have Jews really been permitted to enjoy, if not enthusiastically contribute to, these entertainments.

Naturally, this presupposes that there is either a unique subgenre of Jewish film or at least Jewish comedic film. Over the past twenty-five years, American Jewish popular culture has...

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the bawdy humor of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott, a trio of working-class Jewish stand-up comics, enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States. Today largely forgotten or dismissed, they released bestselling LPs known at the time as “party records,” which, though intended for respectable, middle-class consumers, were often sold under the counter and banned from radio airplay. With their earthy, old-world sensibility and strategic use of Yiddish, these middle-aged performers railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well behaved, and sexually passive. During the period in which these...

“Let the fat girl do her stuff!” yelled the audience one night as a young Sophie Tucker came on stage. Even then, Tucker knew that size didn’t matter “if you could sing and make people laugh.”¹ Tucker is one of six veteran comedians profiled in the Jewish Women’s Archive’s documentary film,Making Trouble, who used not only her body but her subversive Jewish wit to make people laugh. Of the group, only writer Wendy Wasserstein didn’t go on stage herself, but joins the other funny women in this film by dint of her legacy of thoughtprovoking, trouble-making female characters. Like...

The biblical book of Job has troubled Jewish thinkers for more than two millennia. The story of the righteous sufferer has resonated even more strongly for its readers since the Holocaust. The book and its title character appear not infrequently in the creative oeuvre of Woody Allen, especially in his 1974 essay “The Scrolls.”² This article explores two issues: first, is there reason to take Allen’s rewritten story of Job seriously, and second, if so, what does Allen’s exegesis of the biblical tale offer the post-Holocaust reader? Not to give away the punch line, but an exploration of his explanation...

Much has been made of Mel Brooks’sThe Producers(both film and Broadway musical),¹ yet little critical attention has been paid toTo Be or Not To Be(1983),² which Brooks produced and in which he played the leading role of Frederick Bronski. It has most often been (mis)understood as a mere remake of the Ernst Lubitsch 1942 classic of the same title. Wes D. Gehring comments, for example, that Brooks’s version “followed Lubitsch’s original nearly scene for scene,” and he quotes film critic Pauline Kael’s assessment that the remake “has nothing to take the place of that . ....

For the past three decades or more, it has been difficult not to be aware of the name of Kinky Friedman, a Texan country singer of controversially humorous lyrics, the first full-blooded Jew to have sung at Nashville’s Grand Ol’ Opry, the leader of a country band offensively named The Texas Jewboys, a successful novelist whose detective stories portray himself as a transplanted Texas cowboy wise-crackingly solving crimes in New York City, a failed candidate for public office in Texas, and an essayist whose first-person pieces include a mixture of eyebrow-raising humor, common sense, and often thoughtful and thought-provoking wisdom....

American Jews have often articulated their ethnic identity in relation to African Americans. At times—such as during the socialist movements of the 1930s or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s—this has manifested itself through Jewish identification with the oppressed status of African Americans and resulted in cooperation between the two groups.¹

Often, however, Jews participated in the subjection of African Americans as a means of making their own claim upon assimilated white identity. One of the most fascinating occurrences related to this phenomenon is the Jewish donning of blackface makeup. In the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy was...