American Humor; Jewish Humor

I remember a summer evening in 1989. My wife and I had just finished watching the first episode of a new sitcom. We had thoroughly enjoyed it. I turned to her, and said something like: “It won’t last. Who’s going to get it, besides New Yorkers and Jews?”

Well, my predictive powers have never been terribly good, and Seinfeld went on to make TV history. Over the years, I’ve reflected on the reasons for the wild success of a show so closely tied to place and culture, and done a little research of my own.

My thinking about American humor was stimulated a few weeks ago by an op-ed written by Pamela Druckerman in The New York Times. The topic was French humor, or rather the lack of it. (These are, after all, the people who gave Jerry Lewis a career.) Druckerman is a good and thoughtful writer, and it turns out there is more French humor than one would imagine. But her premise is that the French lack a stand-up culture. They don’t, as she puts it, “share your inner neurotic,” a trait she attributes to Americans. Nor do they engage in much “self-revelation,” or like to joke about how “miserable” they are. Instead, what appears to get a belly-laugh is a line used by a Chinese-French comic in a joke about the Holocaust: “’Six million?’” he asks. ‘In China, that’s a bus accident.’” Wow. ‘Nuff said about that.

But not really. Because all of these threads are of a piece, a piece that helps to explain why Seinfeld was such a hit (and why a joke like that could get such a positive audience reaction). American humor is Jewish humor. There are almost no Jews in France. End of story.

Now, before you object that there are wonderful American Black comedians (Ms. Druckerman mentions a couple), Asian and Latino comedians, and some funny ordinary white people, all you need to do is to spend a little time looking at the history of modern American humor. Stand-up itself is largely a Jewish invention, nurtured in the Catskill hotels. And standup translates into sitcoms, movies, Broadway musicals, and the like. A show like Mel Brooks’ Get Smart was basically a series of standup gags. So was Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hlilbillies, and pretty much all of American TV, including Seinfeld. Sure, the “situations” are funny, and there are plots. But the situation rapidly loses its novelty, and plots of 30 minutes (including commercial breaks) just aren’t that complex. It’s all about the gags.

And the gags? Neurotic, miserable, self-revealing. Seinfeld! Not a surprise there, either. Yiddish, a language with which I have some familiarity, has more words for emotions than the Eskimos are said to have for snow. Self-deprecating (another thing Ms Druckerman points out the French are not)? Jewish humor is grounded in self-deprecation, and Yiddish is replete with self-deprecating terms and phrases, terms and phrases which have traveled from the Lower East Side and the great Yiddish theater into American musical theater, comedy, movies, and TV. American? Yes, but Jewish. Compare the writings of that classic American humorist, Mark Twain, with those of Woody Allen. Twain makes us smile. Allen makes us laugh.

It’s interesting that the French comedians Ms. Druckerman identifies as funny are pretty much all outsiders — African and Middle Eastern. That is in keeping with my point about modern American comedy expanding to include other minorities. It’s surprising and cheering to me that in a nation like France, which tries to prevent its minorities actually from being minorities, minorities resist. And of course comedy is one of the great resistance tools of the outsider.

But it is unlikely France will ever have the kind of standup culture Ms. Druckerman longs for. In order to have that culture, it helps to have Jews.

So here’s my final point. I don’t know Ms. Druckerman, nor what she knows or doesn’t. But I suspect she has to know the history and culture I’ve been talking about. Pretty much everybody knows that modern American humor is grounded in Jewish humor. And Ms. Druckerman also has to know that France is relatively devoid of Jews, and for a reason. The fact that she says nothing about this strikes me as unfortunate. For all that Jews are stereotyped and criticized, our real and enduring contributions to American culture are worth mentioning. And I suppose it’s also worth understanding, by implication, how those nations that have allowed the elimination of their Jews might be different for it.