Why Are Jews Funny?
My dad still says my mother’s father is the funniest person he’s ever met. Once, on a visit to New York City, he encountered a woman being wheeled out of Carnegie Deli on stretcher and leaned in to say, “I’ll make a deal with you. You tell me what you just ate, and I won’t order it.”[1]
My upbringing was one steeped in Jewish humor…or at least humorous things coming from the mouths of Jews. Needless to say, this does not make me unique. A 1978 Time magazine article claimed that despite making up 3% of the US general population, Jews comprised 80% of professional comedians. The psychologist who performed this study attributed these numbers to a long history of alienation and depression. He believed that Jewish comedy, at its core, was “a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others.”[2]
This is a sentiment I’ve heard over and over, from strangers and friends, both Jew and goy. I agree; it seems logical for an historically persecuted people to adopt humor as a means of survival. As my friends and I used to say in high school, “you’re funniest when you’re miserable.”[3] Yet, to me, this explanation feels reductive, incomplete, and almost offensive. It insults me that violence could be credited for our humor. We are, by our own terminology, a “chosen people.” I refuse to believe that a people with this much chutzpa would attribute our talents to our oppression. Furthermore, to think of comedy as a defense mechanism or form of compensation degrades the skill of the art form and the breadth of its range. When I think of my favorite funny Jews, the scope of their humor is undeniable. From Jon Stewart to Jenny Slate, to Dave Eggers and Jonah Hill, Amy Schumer, Ira Glass, Jason Segel, Sarah Silverman… I could go on and on.[4] Surely the work of all these artists cannot be reduced to a single narrative?
If we choose to subscribe to the cliché that tragedy and comedy are directly proportional, then why, out of the all abused and marginalized groups of history, have the Jews alone been marked in this way? There must be more to this than simple mathematics. How does a history of persecution even begin to manifest itself generationally? It’s likely that many Jews in modern day America have never experienced the type of persecution endured by their ancestors, but the tradition of Jewish comedic excellence shows no signs of stopping. If not alienation, what is it exactly that makes our humor distinctly Jewish? And what is it about this allegedly “Jewish Humor” that has allowed it to be so massively successful with Jews and Gentiles alike?[5]
I’ve always felt the deepest connection to my Jewishness through art and popular culture. Beyond my bat mitzvah, and the preceding eight years religious schooling that party required, my experience with Jewish texts and religious practice is meager. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that even in our house, Christmas has eclipsed its second banana step child festival of lights in the month of December — in every aspect but the culinary, my Dad’s latkes are irresistible.[6] When I think of my own early Jewish comedic development, I think of the hours I spent on Wednesday afternoons hiding in the first floor bathroom of our synagogue, avoiding the half hour of prayer songs before Hebrew school while we ate $5 shrimp tempura rolls.[7] I think of knowing all the words to Adam Sandler’s Hanukah Song despite having no idea who David Lee Roth and Kirk Douglas were, of snickering when our Rabbi would refer to my friend Maddison as “Double D.” These experiences are surely colored by my Jewishness, but they do not seem to be spiritually informed by the existential insecurity of my ancestors.
As an older “funny”[8] Jew, much of the art I enjoy most is contingent on the ability to identify the absurd within the mundane. It resembles what Keats referred to as “negative capability…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Comedy is no exception. Jerry Seinfeld[9],[10] nailed the fundamentals with his notorious “What’s the deal with that?” punch lines. At its most sophisticated, this approach requires a grasp of nuance, a comfort with contradiction, and a willingness to spend time in dark places.
To me, this is the essence of Jewish humor. It is a manifestation of an inherited appreciation for intellectual discourse, born out of a long history of obligatory multiculturalism. Our culture is not partial to binaries. Ambiguity is our natural habitat. The scripture itself seems to call for its own questioning when God, in Deuteronomy 4, commands “ask now regarding the early days that were before you.” Only a people who place a high value on independent thought could write a joke where the punch line is that fighting about traditions has become more traditional that the traditions themselves. This is the intellectual brazenness that allows Woody Allen to satirize the Old Testament, casting Abraham as a gullible fool and ending with the “proverb,” “My lord, My lord, what hast Thou done, lately?” It is a culture capable of raising the young women of Broad City, bold enough to write a scene about explaining a sex toy at a Shiva. It grants artists permission to dwell in melancholia without “fixing it,” to instead feel around in the darkness and find what’s there that is interesting, true, and perhaps even transcendent. This is why Larry David can make millions off his own misanthropy, Woody Allen can land a joke about the pretentiousness of suicide, and Raphael Bob-Waksberg can make a critically acclaimed show about a depressed has-been who is also a talking horse.[11]
As children of the diaspora, hybridity is our birthright.[12] One may simply look to Yiddish, the pidgin Hebrew-German dialect of the pre-war European Jewry, and know this to be true. There is a joke I heard recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Two Jews, three opinions.” I’ve always been indecisive and argumentative, but until now had never thought of it as part of my heritage. To be funny in a truthful and original way, you have to be willing wrestle with reality and all its ambivalence. From the Talmud to the New Yorker Culture Desk,[13] this is my concept of the Jewish Tradition, a club to which I’m proud to belong, even if all the members are “people like me.”[14]
[1] An anecdote so absurdly well suited for this essay that even I now doubt its authenticity
[2] Samuel Janus
[3] Although to be frank, our angsty experience with “misery” was limited, mostly confined to teenage heartbreak and a sober Saturday night’s ennui
[4] Larry David, Ilana Glazer and Abby Jacobson, Billy Crystal, Lena Dunham, Jeffrey Tambor, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Sachsa Baron Cohen, Andy Samberg, Judd Apato, Adam Sandler (of the pre-Fifty First Dates era), Gilda Radner, Matthew Weiner, and so on
[5] Oy, this paper has more rhetorical questions than the Haggadah
[6] My father, a Georgia born gentile married to a Florida JAP, likes to joke that it takes a “shiksa” to make a truly good latke
[7] This now seems distasteful in more ways than one
[8] I’ll let you be the judge of that
[9] Arguably America’s Funny Jew in Residence
[10] Also actual resident of the neighborhood I grew up in
[11] The third season includes a visit to a Bat’s Bat Mitzvah, who is also Drake’s cousin
[12] Although it’s nowhere near as cost effective as a free trip to Israel
[13] The natural habitat of my favorite “Peak TV” scholar, Emily Nussbaum
[14] See here for last minute compulsory Groucho reference
