The Jewish Joke: A Short History?with Punchlines
Description
Heard the one about the rabbi and the cow from Minsk? Look no further than this witty compendium, a fascinating and revealing celebration of the great Jewish joke.
Comedy is full of famously funny Jews, from Groucho Marx to Larry David to Sarah Silverman. This smart and funny book includes tales from many of these much-loved comics, and will appeal to their broad audience, while revealing the history, context, and wider culture of Jewish joking.
The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, and yet still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as “funny”? And how old can a joke get?
With jokes from Lena Dunham to Woody Allen, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho, mostly), Baum balances serious research with light-hearted humor and provides fascinating insight into this wellknown and much loved cultural phenomenon.
Praise for The Jewish Joke: A Short History?with Punchlines
Delightfully entertaining and cheerfully insightful.
Baum effectively considers the roles Jewish humor has played as a response to oppression and as a way to mock hypocrisy about religious observance.
In her slim volume The Jewish Joke, the British academic Devorah Baum collects enough humor of this ilk to unstick the slowest dinner party. I closed her book a prouder Jew than I had begun it.
[Baum is] intellectually luminous, psychologically penetrating, existentially anxious, and wonderfully funny.
— Zadie Smith
This book is funny, clever and, at times, heartbreaking. In other words, Jewish.
— David Baddiel, comedian
A Jew and a non-Jew read Devorah Baum's The Jewish Joke. They both found it hilarious and thought-provoking. Because it is.
— David Schneider, actor, Mission: Impossible