My Debt to Jewish-American Humour

Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, and Phil Silvers (as Sgt. Bilko)

 

 

I.

 

Humour, said Freud, is a means of obtaining pleasure from life, no matter what. 

 

In other words, laughter is a way of overcoming suffering as well as an antidote to that all-too-human tendency to take ourselves seriously. 

  

That's why the most profound comedy is often rooted in misery and self-mockery (even self-hatred). And that's why the best humour in the world is Jewish in origin ...

 

 

II.

 

I'm certain that the tradition of humour in Judaism can be traced way back, but I'm a late 20th-century boy and so I'm mostly interested in the humour that developed amongst the Jewish community of the United States and shaped the worlds of film and television in the last seventy years, rather than the subtle theological satire expressed in the Talmud, for example.

 

Antisemitic conspiracy theorists often claim that the Jews are overrepresented in the world of banking and maybe that's true, maybe not [1]. But what cannot be denied is that a disproportionately high percentage of American comedians and comic actors have been Jewish [2].

Of course, Jews have significantly influenced and contributed to the development of the modern world in many fields - art, philosophy, science, politics, business, etc. But I'm particularly grateful for their role within the world of entertainment. 

 

For my childhood was made happier by Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, and Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko. And today, the comic genius of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld continues to exert a huge influence over my understanding not only of what constitutes funny, but of how I view the world (ironically and with curbed enthusiasm).

 

 

 

Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David

 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The idea that Jews are good with (and greedy for) money is one of the oldest antisemitic stereotypes. It's undeniable, however, that Jews are well-represented in finance and business. See the article on Jews and Finance on myjewishlearning.com which nicely puts things into historical and cultural context, explaining why this is so. 

 

[2] In 1978, Time magazine claimed that 80 per cent of professional comedians in America were Jewish, even though Jews only made up 3 per cent of the U.S. population at that time. Click here to read the article 'Behaviour: Analyzing Jewish Comics' (2 Oct 1978).    

 

 

Ours is Essentially a Tragic Age ...

The opening passage of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which more or less establishes Connie's precarious position at the beginning of the book, is one of the great opening passages in twentieth-century literature: 

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

What I love most about this passage is the insouciant refusal to take an essentially tragic age tragically, thereby paradoxically rendering the essential inessential and denying the need to be determined by that which masquerades as fundamentally determining, or absolute necessity.

There might be blood on the floor, implies the narrator, but there's no use crying over it any more than spilled milk: the cataclysm has happened - get over it and move on  - no matter how many skies have fallen.

In other words, like Nietzsche when faced with the death of God and the problem of modern nihilism, the narrator displays not only admirable courage, but also a certain ironic intelligence that laughs in the face of earnest stupidity (not so much transforming tragedy into comedy, but recognising that the drama of human existence is born in the space between them).

Further, when confronted with the way in which an established order can rapidly become chaotic and disintegrate at every point, there's no call for reterritorialization along old lines, or a nostalgic longing for past wholeness; new little habitats and new little hopes are the key - and this, too, I greatly admire.
                 
As much as I love this passage, however, I can appreciate that some readers might have problems with certain aspects of it - not least of all with the presence of a phantom narrator who despite being outside of events is nevertheless a privileged spectator to them; not to mention a narrator who, from the get go, cheerfully deploys a possessive pronoun, thereby implicating us all in the fictional affair that is about to unfold.   
 
The narrator's presumption that readers inhabit the same moral and spatio-temporal universe as the lovers, is a way of homogenizing the text (and shaping interpretations of the text), as well as soliciting sympathy for Connie and Mellors; their position is our position; their feelings are our feelings; their sins are our sins.

Not everyone is comfortable with such complicity, or happy with the attempt to ensure consensus. As readers, we've got to live and that means - as Lawrence himself knew, anticipating the postmodern aesthetic - trusting the tale and not slavishly obeying the author or agreeing with their (often unreliable, sometimes manipulative) textual proxy, the narrator.                

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).