JEWISH HUMOR

The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, described “uniquely Jewish” humor last fall during an interview at momentmag.com. “When you look at Jewish humor,” he said, “for the most part, the jokes are layered — they build up and eventually show some sort of logical inconsistency, either in the world or ourselves. In the broader culture a majority of jokes have an aggressive component, a scatological component or a sexual component, but Jewish jokes work through understanding our shared vulnerabilities as fallible human beings. It’s based on a mindset that looks at things from many different angles. ... The habits of mind acquired by studying the Talmud — discussing things seriously and quickly switching perspective — are applied to other subjects. A lot of Jewish humor deals with identity,” he continued. “Jews developed an insider/outsider sensibility in the countries that they came from. If you were Polish, you were Polish-Jewish, or if you were Russian, you were both Russian and Jewish. ... Here's an example of a joke that deals with Jewish identity: A Jewish man goes to a rabbi and asks the rabbi, ‘Rabbi, what should I do? I raised my boy to be a good Jewish boy and he became a Christian. What should I do?’ The rabbi says, ‘Funny you should ask. I'm a rabbi and I too raised my boy Jewish. My son went to yeshiva and he went and became a Christian.’ The man asks the rabbi, ‘What did you do?’ ‘I asked God,’ said the rabbi. ‘What did He say?’  ‘God said, “Funny you should ask ...”