Mick Hartley

In January I wrote about a review by Joseph Epstein of Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy: A Serious History. Now the book's reviewed by David Baddiel in the TLS.

In Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A serious history, the author refers to a Time magazine article about “the original sicknick” Mort Sahl, the beatnik stand-up who was at that time revolutionizing nightclub comedy, making it cool and political. The article lists the many young new American comedians who were considered by Time to be “cast in his image”: Shelley Berman, Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer, Don Adams, Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Which leads Dauber to an obvious question: “Is it coincidental that almost every one of these comedians is Jewish?” (In case you’re wondering, Jonathan Winters, the least verbal and most physical comic on this list, is the one who was not.)

Shouldn't Woody Allen be on that list? I still think his moose joke is a work of genius. But then Woody Allen is perhaps not kosher any more, what with the abuse scandal hovering over him, not to mention his marriage to Soon Yi Previn. For what it's worth, my take on Woody Allen is that he's a classic case of someone who overdosed on psychoanalysis:

What comes through clearly when you study Freud, amusingly for someone supposed to have probed more deeply into the human mind than any other thinker, is his remarkable lack of self-awareness. What about his grotesque decision to psychoanalyse his own daughter, the hapless Anna? I'm reminded of Woody Allen, who took as his lover a girl to whom he'd been a father, and failed to see what all the fuss was about. It takes years of psychoanalysis to get that obtuse.

But I digress. Back to Baddiel:

Dauber talks of how Seinfeld, created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, with its endless discussion of the invisible rules of life – “what are the boundary lines in nebulously defined situations? What consitututes the limits of social acceptability? When does this status change to that one?” – was described by Larry Charles, the show’s producer, as “a dark Talmud”. Except dark is possibly the wrong word: Seinfeld was never a show about nothing, it was a show about small things, about the minutiae and microscopia of everyday, modern life, and as such the one thing Seinfeldnever was, was dark. Because dark means weighty, deep, gravitas-achieving. Jewish comedy depends on bathos, on bringing things down to earth – which specifically tends to be the Jewish earth: whether it be with a well-chosen Yiddishism, or a comic-sounding Jewish name, or a reference to the mundane worlds of work, food, money, sex and, well, Jewishness. A joke with a four-word punchline that is quoted by Dauber neatly bears this out: when the Dalai Lama meets his mother she tells him, “Sheldon! Enough is enough”.  […]

Some of its jokes are laugh-out-loud-funny, and some of them are poignantly beautiful, like the one Dauber tells about a Relocation Officer speaking to a Holocaust survivor who has lost his entire family. The officer asks the survivor where he intends to go now:

“Australia.”
“Australia! But that’s so far!”
“From where?” says the survivor.

Jewish Comedy is similar in that respect to another recent book about the subject by the British academic, Devorah Baum, The Jewish Joke, which also contains a welter of both hilarious and beautiful jokes. The nearest to the above tells of a Holocaust survivor who dies and goes to heaven. On arrival he tells God a Holocaust joke. And God says: “that isn’t funny”. The survivor replies: “Oh well, you had to be there”.

Because of course He wasn’t. The two jokes say perhaps everything that needs to be said about comedy, Jewish or otherwise, as a survival mechanism.

Worth a read.