Published: 21 December 2017
Last updated: 4 March 2024
A Serious History
By Jeremy Dauber
364 pp Norton & Company. US$28.95.
Were Jews always funny? For most of their history they had a reputation, at least among their gentile neighbours, for being humourless and glum. But in 1978, Time magazine claimed that 80 percent of all stand-up comedians in the United States were Jewish. So either Jews got funnier, or they were just funny all along and nobody noticed.
There are plenty of theories to explain Jewish humour — most devised by Jews. Saul Bellow, channelling his inner Kierkegaard, thought Jewish humour combined “laughter and trembling.” Freud believed Jewish humour was a defence 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?”
In Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, the Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber skates through more than 2,000 years of material without ever settling on one overarching theory. Instead, in the manner of a field biologist, he lays out a detailed taxonomy of Jewish humour: seven categories to cover everything from the Book of Esther to Curb Your Enthusiasm, with one chapter devoted to each category.
FULL STORY Why are Jews funny?
