Jewish Humor, Always Subtle, Never Slapstick

July 4, 2010 by ArtSummer

Every People has its style of humor. The British have their embarrassing situational humor. The Americans have their raunchy sexual humor. The Japanese have their physical pain humor, Europeans their secularist and anti religious humor. The Arabs don’t have much humor at all, and Africans are busy killing each other so much that they don’t have time to make jokes these days anyway.

And then there are the Jews and their intellectual Jewish humor. Never in your face, always under the surface, always biting and sarcastic, Jewish humor has had its effect on every culture that the Jews ended up being trapped in at some stage in their long exile.

Jewish humor has a lot to say about the Jewish mentality and way of thinking. Though unfortunately, most of Jewish humor today is exclusively the humor of Ashkenazi Jews, a term for Jews with a European background, as opposed to Sephardic or Yemenite Jews, whose culture is much more affected by Islam, and therefore didn’t pick up the same type of humor associated with Jewish humor today.

In the same way that Japanese humor reflects its cultural history, so does Jewish humor. The Japanese were for a long time heavily affected by the Samurai a group of Spartan fighters whose culture was based on war, physical supremacy, violence, and honor. Their demise in the late 19th century when Japan westernized did not mean its end for Japanese culture. During World War II, the Japanese were known for fighting to the death, committing suicide upon capture, and crashing their planes into American warships on suicide missions. Translated into humor, this became Japanese slapstick where pain becomes funny and entertaining.

Jewish culture has been built on hiding, secrecy, subtlety, and trying to blend in even though the world will never let you. The Jew is always suspicious of the world, though always ends up on top of it for some reason even though he is never really invited to fully participate. This makes Jewish humor very subtle, very biting, intellectual and reality based. If you are always trying to hide from the world in fear that it will eventually turn on you, you start to make fun of it mercilessly, but only in ways where only the most perceptive will even notice it in the first place.

Take Seinfeld for example. The whole idea of that show is quintessential Jewish humor, where through satirizing the monotony of everyday life, the Jew mocks it and tells the world how stupid society actually is. The same is true of Woody Allen’s dark humor, which some people absolutely can’t stand and some people love to death.
This tradition of Jewish humor goes all the way back to the Bible, especially in the Book of Esther, where a Jewish writer mocks the entire Persian Empire with the Persians’ own sanction on the book. Esther portrays the Persian reality as a drunken booze-fest of debauchery and insanity, with women sitting in spiced oil for six months before they go to the King, with fateful political decisions being made on a tipsy whim, and when the book was first published throughout the empire, the King didn’t even notice that he was being made fun of, because the book describes him as all powerful, though connotes him as a bumbling idiot.

This was perhaps the first organized Jewish effort to mock the world around them as they remained dependent on it, a Jewish humor tradition that continues even to this day, and, just like Jewish history itself, doesn’t seem as if it will end any time soon.

About the Author
Shalom Goldfarb is the editor of Judaica Worldwide, a portal of educational material on Judaism, Judaica, and Jewish holidays. There's also some Jewish humoron the blogroll, so check it out!

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