NIA MAGOULIANITI-MCGREGOR
An authority on communication, Sover tells Yediot Achronot journalist Ayelett Shani: “Humour is an amazing means of survival.”
US comedian Mel Brooks described it this way: “If they’re laughing, how can they bludgeon you to death?”
That’s the accepted nature of Jewish humour: it’s a coping mechanism, a survival tactic that developed at a time of uncertainty, oppression and persecution. It’s acknowledged that today’s brand of Jewish joke evolved from Ashkenazi humour, which is derived from the culture of the shtetls in 19th century Eastern Europe until mass immigration to the US East Coast in the late 19th century.
But even as oppression dissipates globally, the type of Jewish humour made famous by Brooks, along with Roseanne Barr, Woody Allen, Bette Midler, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, continues to hold its own.
Cape Town-based comedienne Tracy Klass agrees. “We are born with it. Humour is in our psyche. It’s borne out of millennia of hardship. And our caution shows – we’ve perfected the art of answering a question with a question.
“Ask a Jewish person, ‘How are you?’ Who else would answer: ‘So who wants to know?’”q says Klass.
“Jews are deeply cognisant of the world around us. We laugh at ourselves, but primarily with each other. This is the difference between an anti-Semitic joke and Jewish humour.”
As the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, put it: “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of their own character.”
Klass is a prime example. On becoming a single parent with three children to support, she maintained her day job in marketing and communications for Cape Town’s Herzlia school but picked up the pieces of her emotional life by, well, being funny. (In one of her routines, Klass says: “My kids would say to me, ‘I’m going to tell dad.’ I’d reply: ‘Well, I hope you can find him ’cause the maintenance court can’t.’”)
She became part of the comedy club circuit and hasn’t looked back. “I inherited Moses’ gene. I have his sense of direction, but I found my way to the Cape Town Comedy Collective after reading an article in a local paper with the headline, ‘Are you funny?’ It turned out I was.”
She says she doesn’t make a point of doing the Jewish mother shtick, “but I am a mother and I am Jewish, so I deal with ordinary day-to-day issues I encounter”. Like her weight: “Let me move the microphone stand because it makes me look fat”; or on having a vegan son: “How do you make vegan chicken soup? I wept for a month!”
Comedian Daniel Friedman, also known as Deep Fried Man, has a favourite Jewish joke which he shares: Two beggars are sitting outside the Vatican. One holds a large cross, the other a Magen David. The beggar with the cross has a cup overflowing with money, while the Jewish beggar only has a few coins. A priest walking by notices the disparity and says to the Jewish beggar: “Excuse me, but this is the centre of the Catholic world. You’ll never raise money with that Star of David on your cup.”The beggar with the star turns to the one with the cross and says: “Moishe, look who’s teaching us about marketing…”
That’s the thing about Jewish humour. No one and nothing, says Friedman, is above being mocked. “It’s dry, cynical and self-deprecating. As with all humour, it’s the unexpected that makes you laugh, and with Jewish humour it’s also the bluntness of it, or the dark streak that runs through it. It’s the sense that the truth reveals how absurd life is or how unjust the world is. The humour comes from how true it is.
“My late grandparents on my dad’s side had a particular dry sense of humour, and that had a lot to do with the Yiddish language – they were from Lithuania. They would often say that things were funnier in Yiddish than English. I sometimes wonder if some of that style of humour has disappeared along with the language.”
Laughing about anxiety is characteristic of Jewish humour. Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has written a book called No Joke: Making Jewish Humor in which she tells this joke: “Four men go hiking together, get lost, then run out of water. ‘I’m so thirsty!’ says the Englishman. ‘I must have tea.’
‘I’m so thirsty!’ says the Frenchman. ‘I must have wine.’
‘I’m so thirsty!’ says the German. ‘I must have beer.’
‘I’m so thirsty!’ says the Jew. ‘I must have diabetes.’”
“Jokes work by breaking expectation,” says Wisse. “Jews laugh at their anxiety, and humour alleviates anxiety. Joking turns us into a unit because we laugh at the same things. There’s the release of laughter, but also the idea of the pleasure of the bond it creates.”
Local comedian Nik Rabinowitz agrees that anxiety is integral to Jewish humour. “As in, ‘Eat quickly before there’s a pogrom,’” he says.
Rabinowitz says his Jewish comedy exposes his discovery of his own Jewishness. “I went to a Waldorf school, which was a Christian environment, but I experienced no anti-Semitism because no one knew I was Jewish – including me.”
And when it was time for his barmitzvah, Rabinowitz says the family went from religious “Coke Zero to Coke Light. Still, I absorbed Jewish humour via osmosis – mainly from my uncle, actor and radio host Percy Sieff. I think it’s about being an outsider, whether you’re Jewish or black or a woman. It’s a good way of bringing people together. It’s a healing of sorts.”
Rabinowitz believes that because Jews are now part of elites around the world, the humour is less funny. “It becomes harder to be funny in that way when you’re part of the privileged minority.”
Still, it wasn’t that long ago that Jews weren’t privileged; that’s why everyone gets this joke: What’s the difference between a tailor and a psychiatrist? A generation.
