No Joke “Growing up,” said my son Jacob, “ if you had told me that someone in my family would write a book about Jewish humor, I would have imagined it to be my father, or perhaps my brother, who has something of a legendary wit; certainly not my mother, who was generally regarded as the proverbial straight man in the family.” The nice things he went on to say about me at a launch for the book No Joke: Making Jewish Humor did not contradict his surprise that I should have been drawn to this subject. I surprised myself. When I took up the study of literature in college, I was attracted by what normally appeals to adolescents—death and heartache, sex and romance, and how to navigate the shoals of life. Yiddish that I chose as my field of concentration seemed to me the most consequential branch of literature, haunted as it was by the fate of its speakers in Europe. I wrote my Masters’ thesis on a group of Yiddish prose poems about the final days of the Ghetto of Vilna. My doctoral dissertation on “the schlemiel as modern hero” addressed the same concerns for Jewish fate from a different angle. We tend to think of the schlemiel as a character in Jewish comedy, but the French aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso, author of the original Peter Schlemihl (1814), was an exile most of his life, and his tragicomic hero sells his shadow to the devil with the same unfunny consequences as Goethe’s Faust who sells the devil his soul. The man without a shadow and the man without a country lack what “normal” people are expected to possess. The schlemiel of Yiddish folk culture is likewise a hapless person in a tragic situation. Take this schlemiel joke that dates from the First World War: An Austrian officer drilling his recruits asks, “Katsenstein, why does a soldier give up his life for his country?” Private Katsenstein replies, “You’re right, Sergeant, why does he?” The Jew is presumed to be so ignorant of soldiering and so innocent of aggression that he does not grasp the rhetorical basis of the question. Jews mocked their vulnerability as a way of confronting the knowledge that they were at risk: Two Jews awaiting execution are told that instead of being shot they are going to be hanged. One says joyfully to the other, “You see—they’ve run out of ammunition.” Self-mockery was a way of gaining advantage over those who berated them. In fact, Jewish humor turned out to be a penetrating commentary on the modern Jewish condition and on the discrepancy between being singled out by God and being targeted by other nations. “God will provide—if only He would provide until he provides.” “Thou hast chosen us from among the nations…why did You have to pick on the Jews?” Jews took pride in their closeness to the Lord of the Universe and in having entered into the Covenant at Mount Sinai, but how could they account for the gap between the idea of a “Chosen People” and the worsening condition of Jewish national life in exile? Humor thrives on incongruity and delights in paradox. The bilingual Jews of Eastern Europe moved easily from the Hebrew—the Biblical language of study and prayer—into the Yiddish vernacular. They used the shift from high language to low language to reconcile faith with skepticism, pride in their civilization with the humiliation to which they were subject. Joking helped Jews keep their moral equilibrium in the face of persistent and unearned enmity. As distinct from those who blamed themselves or their fellow Jews for the violence against them, humorists provided an Irony Dome against the stings and arrows of outrageous hostility. When Scud missiles rained down on the country during the first Gulf War and Israelis were threatened by poisoned gas, they quipped, “What’s the difference between Saddam Hussein and Haman? Haman was hanged and then we donned masks. With Saddam, the masks came first.” Joking acknowledged that unwelcome enmity persisted despite Israel’s defensive capability, and that Israelis could not altogether escape the condition of their ancestors in exile. Joking told the truth that no one otherwise wanted to hear. People who wonder how I got from Yiddish to politics have not paid enough attention to what Yiddish culture had to say. Two Jews are riding along in a wagon when their horse suddenly stops before a boulder blocking their path. They sit there pondering the situation until a wagon approaches from the other direction carrying two peasants, who get down and shove the rock away. “There’s goyish thinking for you,” says one Jew to the other, “always with force.” The penchant for Jewish self-congratulation is turned inward—with a vengeance—by the realization that some problems have an obvious and material solution. Maybe it was time to stop mocking those who resorted to “force” and to attend a little more to the way things actually work in the world. So take Yiddish humor seriously and you see the seriousness of the Jewish condition. And maybe, once you stop laughing you will try to figure out what needs to be done about it.