International Convention Shabbat Elective • Sponsored by Kallah East & West
Jewish Humor Program
- Read Chelm stories (3 minutes)
- Brief overview (5-7 minutes)
- The history of Jewish humor
- What is Jewish humor? (use attached articles as reference guide)
- Breakout group one (15 minutes)
- Breakout group two (15 minutes)
- Regroup for closing remarks (5 minutes)
- Kallah promotion (1 minute)
Take this
program home!
International Convention Shabbat Elective • Sponsored by Kallah East & West
Chelm Stories
For generations, Jews have told stories about the people of Chelm and their foolishness. The traditional stories are an early example of comedy in Judaic storytelling.
The Chelmites became involved in a passionate debate about which is more important, the sun or the moon. Unable to decide among themselves, they took the matter to Chelm's Chief Sage. "The moon, of course," ruled the Chief Sage. "Without the light of the moon our nights would be so dark we couldn't see anything. But the sun, the sun shines only by day, when there's no need for it at all."
The mayor of Chelm visited the prison where one by one the inmates insisted that they were innocent. At last he met one inmate who admitted he was guilty of the crime for which he charged. The mayor held a council of the town's wise men and recommended that Chelm have two prisons. A prison for the guilty and another for the innocent.
Sage was examining a horse in the marketplace. "This is a wonderful horse!" the horse-dealer exclaimed. "He gallops like the wind! With him, if you leave Chelm at three in the morning you'd get to Lublin at six!" The sage shook his head doubtfully. "What on earth would I do in Lublin so early in the morning?"
Two sages of Chelm were involved in a deep philosophical argument. "You think you're so wise," one said sarcastically, "answer this. Why is it that when a slice of buttered bread falls to the ground, it's bound to fall on the buttered side?" The other sage, being a bit of a scientist, decided to try an experiment. He buttered a slice of bread and then dropped it. "There, look!" he cried. "The bread didn't fall on its buttered side. What about your theory now?" "Ha!" the other laughed derisively. "You think you're so smart! You buttered the bread on the wrong side!"
A great calamity befell Chelm. The cobbler murdered one of his customers. He was brought before the judge and sentenced to hang. When the verdict was given, one of the townspeople stood and cried out, "If Your Honor pleases -- you've sentenced our cobbler! He's the only one we have. If he dies, who will mend our shoes"? The judge reconsidered his verdict. "It would be a great wrong against the community to let our only cobbler die. As there are two roofers in the town, let one of them be hanged instead.
International Convention Shabbat Elective • Sponsored by Kallah East & West
Overview: The History of Jewish Humor
"Garbage is garbage," it's been noted, "but the history of garbage is scholarship." So, too, Jewish humor is funny stuff, but the history of Jewish humor provides a penetrating window into the core of the Jewish story. No doubt, one might say the same thing about Jewish language, food, literature, or music, but because humor is so sensitive to inner tensions and outer concerns, Jewish humor provides a unique entry into the Jewish psyche.
Jews have been seeing the humor in their lives for a very long time. The Bible itself recounts how Sara laughed when told she'd have a child, and our forefather Isaac is named for that laughter. The Talmud, particularly in the aggadic (narrative) sections, is replete with witty asides and repartees, and in one famous account, the Talmud speaks of even God laughing. (Consider the theological implications of a God with sense of humor!) During the medieval period, the valuation of humor was institutionalized in Jewish communal customs, perhaps most famously in Purim shpiels, comic plays based on the book of Esther, which continue today in Jewish communities across the globe.
But Jewish humor as a distinctive cultural phenomenon first lights up in 19th century Eastern Europe. There, in the marketplace, the synagogue, and in the home, the Jewish joke developed into its own recognizable species. The shtetl (village) became home for the new Jewish-humor folk tradition--stories of the fools inhabiting the town of Chelm but one example. Sustaining and enriching this street humor were new Jewish texts. Jewish writers--including Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, along with playwrights such as Abraham Goldfaden--mined the bittersweet grumbling of the Jewish ethos and produced lasting classics of Jewish humor, which in turn fed the comic banter of Jewish daily exchange.
What was the genesis of this turn to the humorous? Theorists in the next century offered a parade of hypotheses. Jewish humor, insists one standard view, is all about coping: Jews were miserable, and laughter kept them going. Jewish psychologists further deconstructed Jewish humor as introjections of this external hostility--in other words, self-mockery. Freud writes, "I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character." Other commentators suggested the Jewish jest is a survival tactic: By altering one's perspective, the Jew can accept the unsympathetic world for what it was. "Want to alleviate your big-time worries? Put on a tighter shoe," advises the Yiddish proverb.
The destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust did not bring an end to the comic Jewish spirit, but it did change both its content and style. In pre-war European Jewry, humor was predominantly an internal affair--the Jewish joke was an inside joke. The comic lines were in Yiddish, the religious allusions were familiar to all, the fears and frustrations shared across classes, and the context of the storyline shared histories.
Then came America, where the story of American Jewish humor since World War II is largely the story the American humor since World War II. As Jews increasingly entered the American mainstream, they were not telling "insider jokes" but shaping the sense of humor of an entire country, depicting America to America.
In the early part of this Jewish humor explosion, "Yiddishisms" were essential to the repertoire, but this faded along with the European memories. The mid-20th century Borsht Belt shtick--acts that thrived in New York's Catskills region, where Jews flocked for vacations--thrived on shared immigrant histories and traditions. But by century's end many of these Jewish references were wearing thin. The majority of American Jews are now more comfortable eating sushi than gefilte fish. Jews are not outsiders, they generally don't cope daily with anti-Semitism, and the average Jewish income is among the highest.
And yet, from Joey Adams to Jon Stewart, with hundreds of comedians in between, Jews continually dominated the comedy business in every area of media, from stand-up to television to literature to film. Jews cultivated the mainstream forms of cultural satire (think Lenny Bruce and Jon Stewart), self-flagellation (think Woody Allen), and audience flagellation (Jackie Mason, Don Rickles); nurtured American literary humor (Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer); invented and sustained television comedy (Milton Berle, Roseanne Barr, Larry David); dominated stand-up comedy (Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Seinfeld), and on and on.
Some wonder whether Jewish humor will continue to flourish in the years ahead: Will the Jewish funny bone calcify with assimilation? Will the old Jewish comic themes--biting social commentary discomfiting satire, the undermining of the high and mighty, arguments with everyone, including God, the sheer cleverness--continue to drive the Jewish jest?
Source: myjewishlearning.com
International Convention Shabbat Elective • Sponsored by Kallah East & West
Overview: What is Jewish Humor?
Defining humor of any kind is a bad business to be in. The minute you lay down a rule, you can be sure that some schmuck will tap you on the shoulder and say, “Ahem. What about Danny Kaye? Nahman of Bratslav? How could you leave out Larry David? Are you joking?” Like a wannabe stand-up comic on his first open-mike night, all we can do is try.
What makes a joke, or story, or television episode qualify as Jewish humor is not--cannot be--just that it was created by a Jew. (If that were the case, some enormous percentage of all comedic American TV shows and movies would qualify.) There must be something inherently Jewish about Jewish humor. And so, while there is no single infallible determinant of the Jewishness of a joke, we can perhaps describe the tendencies, stylistics, even poetics of Jewish humor.
First and foremost, Jewish humor snickers in the face of authority. This tendency dates back to the first recorded laughter in the scriptural tradition, in Genesis 18:12, when the mother of the Jewish people, Sarah, laughs at the notion, delivered by divine messenger, that she will conceive a child in her dotage. Sarah’s laughter is, in effect, a minor rebellion against God, who proceeds to chew her out: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” And so, the subversive tradition of Jewish humor began.
A few thousand years later, in the 19th and especially 20th centuries, Jewish humor perpetuated this trend by tittering across all sacred boundaries. Practitioners of such transgressive Jewish humor include Franz Kafka, whose darkly comic stories ridicule the all-powerful bureaucracies of the modern state; Lenny Bruce, whose obscenities and profanities irked 1960s censors and landed him in jail; and, more recently, Jon Stewart, the Daily Show host who spends a half hour each weeknight cutting up politics and politicians.
Some linguists have gone so far as to suggest that the vernacular inventiveness of the entire Yiddish language can be regarded as a beautiful satire on the formality of German--a comic power that carries over into what Yiddish maven Leo Rosten calls "Yinglish." As we all know, if you want to take a highfalutin word down a peg, you can simply add the typical Yiddish prefix “shm-” as an alte kocker--roughly translated as "old fart"--might: “Seriousness, shmeriousness!”
And yet, while it’s often about subversion, Jewish humor also tends to navel-gaze, philosophize, ponder. As Moshe Waldoks and Bill Novak suggest in their Big Book of Jewish Humor, Jews are most often funny about something, and it’s usually something they know quite a bit about. In this mood, Jewish humor takes on many forms, ranging from extreme exaggerations of the logical acrobatics of a talmudic scholar, to Saul Bellow’s riffs on philosophy, to Seinfeld-ian analyses of social etiquette.
In each of these examples, humor performs a social function, drawing together people who share similar cultures: If you haven’t studied the Talmudic tractateMasekhet Beitzah, struggled through Heidegger, or visited New York City, you may not end up laughing. Whenever a joke is about something--whether that something is as general as an ethnic stereotype, or as specific as one rabbi’s bad breath--who laughs and how much they laugh depend on how familiar they are with the target. As the philosopher Ted Cohen suggests, humor divides the world into “us” (we who get the joke) and “them” (those humorless jerks who don’t).
For Jews, throughout history, various lines between “us” and “them” have been crucial, imposed internally as well as externally--think Jewish/Goyish, to use the Yiddish for non-Jews, offensive today but part of the vernacular in Yiddish culture past. There's also Orthodox/Reform, Israel/Diaspora, Ashkenazic/Sephardic, et cetera. Humor has always been, and continues to be, one way to draw such fundamental lines.
Attentive readers might now be scratching their heads: Jewish humor (1) crosses boundaries and (2) draws lines? Isn’t that a bit, well, hypocritical? It is. And that’s part of the beauty of humor, and Jewish humor in particular: it doesn’t have to make sense, be consistent, or tell the truth.
Comedy doesn’t have to do anything, in fact, except make people laugh--and often enough in Jewish history, a bit of laughter has provided solace when nothing else could. Joking has served as a coping mechanism for all the worst afflictions faced by the Jewish people, from persecution in Czarist Russia to ongoing trauma in the Middle East to the threat of assimilation all over the world. Dark Jewish joking has even, in some controversial examples, responded to the Holocaust.
Some may decry jokes about Hitler, pogroms, or intermarriage as tasteless, but humor by its nature breaks every rule. And this is the power of Jewish humor. Comedy grants an unlimited license to experiment, to invent, to create. And Jewish humor--in all its contradictions, subversions, and possibilities--is one of the ways that Jews, through the ages, have created an idea of themselves.
Source: myjewishlearning.com
International Convention Shabbat Elective • Sponsored by Kallah East & West
Jackie Mason
Jackie Mason (born Yacov Moshe Maza on June 9, 1931, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin) is an Americanstand-up comedian. His "politically incorrect" routines and opinionated observations on Jewish and American life have often provoked controversy.
Mason graduated with a BA from City College of New York and (at the age of 25) was ordained as a rabbi in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.[1] Three years later he resigned the post to become a comedian.
In 1992, Mason won an Emmy for his voice-over of Rabbi Krustofsky in The Simpsons episode, Like Father, Like Clown. [2] (making him the first and only guest star to win an Emmy for his role) and in a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, Mason was voted amongst the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. He was also ranked #63 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-Up Comedians.
I've got a friend who is half-Jewish and half-Italian.
If he can't buy it wholesale, he steals it!
I've got another friend who is half-Polish and half-Jewish.
He's a janitor, but he owns the building!
I've got another friend who is half-German and half-Polish.
He hates Jews but can't remember why!
Now Discuss…We’ll Give You A Topic!
- What was your immediate reaction to the piece? Did you think it was funny?
- What experiences might the comedian have had in his life that might have made him want to tell this particular story through his comedy?
- Was there anything about the piece that offended you? If so, what was it and what about it did you find offensive? Did it cross lines? How so? What lines?
International Convention Shabbat Elective • Sponsored by Kallah East & West
Sarah Silverman
Sarah Kate Silverman (born December 1, 1970) is an Americanstand-up comedian, actress, and writer.
Her innocent outward appearance and sing-song delivery is in direct contrast to much of her comic material, in which she deals with many controversial topics such as racism, abortion, rape, death, scatology, and child abuse, among others. Her comedy acts are sometimes performed from a caricatured or stereotypical Jewish-American princess perspective. Silverman stars in and produces the The Sarah Silverman Program, which debuted February 1, 2007 on Comedy Central.
My niece calls me up and she's like, "Aunt Sarah, did you know that Hitler killed sixty million Jews." And I corrected her and I said, "You know, I think he's responsible for killing six million Jews." And she said, "Oh yeah! Six million! I knew that but seriously, I mean, what's the difference?" "Uh, the difference is sixty million is unforgivable, young lady!"
If companies like Mercedes could only have seen…the amount of money they'd be making from Jewish consumers, maybe they'd have helped not kill the Jews. But instead they helped facilitate a genocide of a people who would ultimately become their best customers. Any Jew will tell you that's just bad business.
Now Discuss…We’ll Give You A Topic!
- What was your immediate reaction to the piece? Did you think it was funny?
- Was there anything about the piece that offended you? If so, what was it and what about it did you find offensive? Did it cross lines? How so? What lines?
- What was the bigger message that this comedian was trying to get across? What story was the comedian trying to tell? Was this message/story worthwhile? Was the comedian successful at getting the bigger message across?