Jewish humor
Beginning on vaudeville and continuing on radio, stand-up, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American comedians have been Jewish.
[3] 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.
Jewish humor can be found in one of history's earliest recorded documents, the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Talmud.
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.
[8]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.
As radio and television matured, many of its most famous comedians, including Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, George Burns, Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, Phyllis Diller, Jack Carter, Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, and Joan Rivers, were Jewish.
This is like the story of the boy who tells his rabbi he can't daven (pray), because he no longer believes in God.
He was walking once on Shabbos (Saturday, the holy day in Judaism, on which it is forbidden to handle money), and there was a wallet crammed full of cash in his path.
[12] Many of these stories have become well-known thanks to storytellers and writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Nobel Prize-winning Jewish writer in the Yiddish language, who wrote The Fools of Chełm and Their History (published in English translation in 1973), and the great Soviet Yiddish poet Ovsey Driz [yi; ru] who wrote stories in verse.
The latter achieved great popularity in the Soviet Union in Russian and Ukrainian translations, and were made into several animated films.
Soon it got caught on a mountaintop and so all the foolishness spilled out and fell into Chełm.One Jewish Chełm resident bought a fish on Friday in order to cook it for Sabbath.
The people of Chełm hit on a solution: they got four volunteers to carry the shammes around on a table when there was fresh snow in the morning.
That way, the shammes could make his wake up calls, but he would not leave tracks in the snow.The town of Chełm decided to build a new synagogue.
Thought to have come from Ukraine, he lived in the small village of Ostropol, working as shochet, a ritual slaughterer.
But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we're on the verge of taking over the entire world.
"Or, on a similar note: After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, a government official in Ukraine menacingly addressed the local rabbi, "I suppose you know in full detail who was behind it."
"A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 42 percent of American Jews rated humor as essential to their Jewish identity.
[15] One common strain of Jewish humor examines the role of religion in contemporary life, often gently mocking the religious hypocrite.
For example: A Reform Rabbi was so compulsive a golfer that once, on Yom Kippur, he left the house early and went out for a quick nine holes by himself.
On the sixth hole, God caused a mighty wind to take the ball directly from the tee to the cup – a miraculous shot.
An example, from one of Woody Allen's early stand-up routines: We were married by a Reform rabbi in Long Island.
The Reconstructionist movement was the first to ordain homosexuals, all of which leads to this joke: At an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant.
The barber finds on his doorstep – a dozen rabbis!Or, A Jewish man lies on his deathbed, surrounded by his children.
Feeling satisfied, the other passenger sits down again, only to hear "Oy, was I thirsty; oy, was I thirsty".Wex comments: "It contains virtually every important element of the Yiddish-speaking mind-set in easily accessible form: the constant tension between the Jewish and the non-Jewish; the faux naivete that allows the old man to pretend that he isn't disturbing anyone; the deflation of the other passenger's hopes, the disappointment of all his expectations after he has watered the Jew; and most importantly of all, the underlying assumption, the fundamental idea that kvetching—complaining—is not only a pastime, not only a response to adverse or imperfect circumstance, but a way of life that has nothing to do with the fulfillment or frustration of desire.
"[18]Many Jewish jokes involve a rabbi and a Christian clergyman, exploiting different interpretations of a shared environment.
Or, in the last years of the Soviet Union: Q: Comrade Lev, why now, just when things are getting better for your people, are you applying for an exit visa to make aliyah to Israel?
The old man arrived at Tel Aviv airport, where an Israeli customs official found the bust of Lenin.
The angel: "Well, in Israeli hell, you live on a kibbutz: you wake up at dawn to work all day in the fields, at lunch you get some bread and cheese.
[19] Terms like shnook and shmendrik, shlemiel and shlimazel (often considered inherently funny words[citation needed]) were exploited for their humorous sounds, as were "Yinglish" shm-reduplication constructs, such as "fancy-schmancy".
