HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MORALITY AND NEUROSIS?*
Here, on the other hand, is what distinguishes a physician from a psychiatrist:
A psychiatrist is a Jewish physician who can’t stand the sight of blood.
Jewish history, after all, has not only seen a lot of blood, it’s also seen a lot of psychology.
And for Freud, of course, jokes, alongside dreams and verbal slips, are a way in to the unofficial part of oneself he called the unconscious. So do Jewish jokes provide evidence of the Jewish unconscious? If so, the Jewish joke might then be supposed to remember what other archives of Jewish life have sought to forget. Starting with this joke:
What’s the definition of Jewish Alzheimer’s? You forget everything but the guilt.
Oh boy, the guilt! What a Gordian knot of an emotion that is. Jews might well forget everything but the guilt – because guilt attests to a history that you can deny all you like, but it’s still got its hands around your neck.
But while our guilt likes to remind us that there’s something in our past that needs dealing with, it tends not to be too straightforward about what that something is. Guilt is a feeling that hides as much as it reveals, and it’s a feeling that works to repress other feelings: aggressive feelings, for example, or incestuous ones. So you could say that guilt, too, is a bit of a joke. Hence why Maureen Lipman’s revision of the joke – ‘Jewish Alzheimer’s is forgetting everything except a grudge’ – is just as funny and equally revealing. For both guilt and jokes are socially sanctioned ways of masking our unconscious intentions towards those we feel guilty about, or feel inclined to joke about (albeit by finding an outward outlet for its forbidden feelings, joking is generally the healthier of the two). Might that, then, explain why there are so many Jewish jokes about Jewish guilt?
We’re back to those Jewish mothers sitting in the dark. And when it comes to pinning guilt on the Jewish mother, Jewish jokes can get very dark. See for instance the most lightbulb-less example of a Jewish mother joke in Philip Roth’s novel-length send-up of the Jewish mother, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). It features a neighbourhood kid whose suicide note reads:
Mrs Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.
Ronald
No matter the fallout, though, you should know that the Jewish mother does have a method to her madness:
Let your son hear you sigh every day. If you don’t know what he’s done to make you sigh, he will.
And, to be fair to her, guilt is a symptom from which she too suffers:
When the Jewish mother was called up for jury service, they had to send her home because she kept on insisting she was guilty.
So it’s only reasonable if she passes it on to her friends:
The afternoon is drawing to a close, and the guests are getting ready to leave.
‘Mrs Goldberg,’ says one of the ladies. ‘I just wanted to tell you that your cookies were so delicious I ate four of them.’
‘You ate five,’ replies Mrs Goldberg. ‘But who’s counting?’
And to her family:
The Jewish mother, upon receiving a phone call from her adult daughter, announces: ‘I’m very weak, I’m starving, I haven’t eaten for two weeks’
‘Because I didn’t want that I should have my mouth full when you rang.’
* If only I knew. Freud’s entire life’s work was arguably an attempt to tell this difference.