Approach Why Is This Tribe Laughing? The subject of Jews in American comedy is inherently
entertaining, yet it also requires the exploration of serious matters including the
challenges facing Jews and Jewish culture in America – from the poverty of the
immigrant generation, to the threat of anti-Semitism, to the challenges of
assimilation. The series examines what historians Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer
describe as "a twofold process: the Americanization of the Jewish population on the
one hand and the impact of Jewish culture on America on the other." "Jewish humor . .
. has helped the Jewish people to survive, to confront the indifferent, often hostile
universe, to endure the painful ambiguities of life and to retain a sense of internal
power despite their external impotence." – Sarah Blacher
Cohen, Editor, Jewish Wry As Ken Burns’ Jazz
chronicles an African-American gift to music, A GIFT FOR LAUGHTER tells
the story of the Jewish contribution to American comedy. The series raises
a number of interesting questions. What are the roots of comedy in Jewish
culture? What has made the Jewish contribution to American comedy so extensive?
Why have American audiences, for more than a century, responded to the
Jewish gift for laughter? How have Jews in comedy responded to the issues
confronting Jews in America – from anti-Semitism to assimilation? Humor has always been a distinguishing
characteristic of the Jewish people. The Old Testament reports that Abraham’s
wife Sarah laughed when God said she would bear a child in her old age
and that she named her child "laughter," or Isaac. From then
on, the troubled history of a people who believed themselves chosen by
God was to require, over thousands of years of war, exile and oppression,
a sense of irony and a capacity for laughter, the saving gift. A characteristic of Jewish culture is the reliance on language to
master and manipulate reality. This is a function both of being the People of the Book and
of being outsiders in their countries of exile. Historian Stephen J. Whitfield gives
emphasis to the worldless-ness that characterized Jews of the Diaspora before the 20th
century. "The story of the Jewish exile has been so singular, so replete with
helplessness and so devoid of overt political action," she says, "that some
scholars maintained that Jews lived outside of history altogether." Hannah Arendt wrote of Jews as a pariah people who
"developed a heightened sense of human fraternity, or menschlichkeit – goodness,
integrity, decency. But they also paid a price," which Arendt characterized as a
radical "loss of the world." In a sense, Jews lived within their own world, one
that existed between people, on the one hand and between their people and God – a
world maintained largely through language. Indeed, says Whitfield, it is a Hasidic belief
"that God created humanity in order to tell stories." The argumentative,
logic-driven mode of communication that is nurtured over the generations within Jewish
families in America has fostered scholars and lawyers as well as comedians – professions
to which Jews have made contributions far out of proportion to their numbers. Among the enduring aspects of Jewish cultural history that have
contributed to American comedy are an openness to the absurdity of existence, the
experience of being outsiders and the fascination that people of the Book have with logic
and language. But it was not until the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the
United States "and the ensuing process of acculturation," according to Esther
Romeyn and Jack Kugelmass, that humor moved to "the center stage of Jewish
culture." Curators of a museum exhibition on Jewish humor, they note that "the
prominence of humor in American Jewish culture cannot be explained without also
considering the substantial Jewish contribution to the development of the entertainment
industry and the role of that industry in providing talented and ambitious Jews a route
out of the ghetto."
The ability to laugh
at oneself – or at least at the next person – is
one of the impressive features of the Eastern European shtetl culture
that found expression in Yiddish. Like the Eskimo language with its many
words for "snow," Yiddish has many words for "fool."
Among these, notes Ruth Wisse, "are the nar, tam, yold, tipesh,
bulvan, shoyte, peysi, shmendrik, kuni lemel, shmenge, lekish and
lekish ber, to name but a few." For schlemiel, a luckless
kind of fool, Wisse, the author of The Schlemiel As Modern Hero,
names eight subcategories, including the inept schlimazl, the burned
out nisrof and the farshpiler, who lost his money gambling.
Why the responsiveness of Americans to Jewish
comedians? America as a whole is a country of outsiders. Immigrants from countries around
the world, confronted with the need to learn American English, respond to the comedy of
malapropisms and mistranslations. Ted Cohen remarks that even WASPs, once the
quintessential insiders, have become outsiders in contemporary America, which is a source
of comedy as well as consternation. But this is only a partial answer. The comedy that
Americans laugh at changes over time. It is affected by historical events, an example
being the hiatus in public humor following the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. There
are times when Jewish comedians get laughs as Jews; others when their ethnicity is
irrelevant to their humor. Often when Americans laugh at a Jewish comedian, it is simply
because they have come to a comedian to laugh and the comedian happens to be Jewish. But
then why are so many comedians Jews?