What's So Funny?

I just read Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy: A Serious History.  And it is a serious book.  There are plenty of jokes in it, but Dauber's an actual scholar--a professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and Columbia.  So the book isn't just Mel Brooks and Jerry Seinfeld.  Sure, we get those names, but Dauber spends a lot of time in the past, well before modern show biz.

In fact, the book goes from the Torah to the Talmud to Tevye to today.  You may not think there are a lot of laughs in the Bible, but if you look at the stories of Esther (Dauber's favorite), Jonah, Samson, Job and others in the right way, there's humor there.  And there have been a lot of great, if mostly forgotten, Jewish wits in the millennia since.

Dauber approaches the subject in an odd way.  Rather than go chronologically, the book has seven chapters, each looking at a different aspect of Jewish humor.  Each chapter is generally chronological, though, tending to go back to the beginning and working its way to the 20th and 21st centuries.

The seven aspects are: Jewish comedy as a response to oppression, as satire on Jewish society, as bookish and witty, as vulgar and raunchy, as ironic and metaphysical, as folksy and everyday, and as about the ambiguity of Jewishness itself.

That's a lot to take on in a book with less than 300 pages of text, but Dauber handles it in a deft and scholarly manner.  So if you want to read about the usual suspects--Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brother, Philip Roth, Sholem Aleichem and so on--they're all here.  But perhaps the greater value of the book is in introducing us to names and eras we're less familiar with.