HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GOOD JOKE AND A BAD JOKE?
Jews get a lot of laughs out of God. But how godly is the joke?
In the Jewish joke, sometimes godliness is a source of wisdom:
A Hasid comes to see his rabbi.
‘Rabbi, I have had a dream in which I am the leader of three hundred Hasidim.’
The rabbi replies: ‘Come back when three hundred Hasidim have had a dream that you are their leader.’
Yet at other times it’s a mockery of wisdom:
A man was boasting about his rabbi: ‘My rabbi is so modest about his piety. If he eats, it is only to hide from others the fact that he is fasting.’
Believers in comedy will often invoke the subversive power of joking to keep us honest by ridiculing the pretensions of the powerful. Yet we know, of course, that the joke is just as often a tool of the powerful to make laughing stocks of the weak. And that, as positions and perspectives constantly slip, slide and change, the identity of who is powerful and who weak is seldom set in stone. Thus, while we might be perfectly within our rights to send someone up one day, we may be abusing an unfair advantage if we do so the next. There are few utterances more flush with unchecked privilege, after all, than the sneering sound of someone insisting, in the face of another’s hurt, that they really ought to be able to ‘take a joke’
It’s the job of the comedian, therefore, to gauge what is and isn’t ‘fair game’, which is another way of saying that a comic requires a sense of that other slippery concept : justice.* And they require it not least because by being as clear-eyed and non-prejudicial as possible about the times in which they’re living, comedians can hone their sense of timing to make their acts that bit funnier:
Every incredible achievement in human history was done with slaves. Every single thing where you go, ‘How did they build those pyramids?’ They just threw human death and suffering at them until they were finished ... Even today, how do we have this amazing micro-technology? Because the factory where they make them, they jump off the fucking roof because it’s a nightmare in there. You really have a choice: you can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to each other, or let someone far away suffer immeasurably so you can leave a mean comment on YouTube. Louis C.K.†
Of course, the (good) comedian doesn’t imagine he’s any better than the time he’s telling. (The fact, for example, that Louis C.K. has tended to make self-admonishments at his own moral failings a constant theme of his comedy was brutally revealed, shortly after the UK edition of this book came out, to be no laughing matter‡ But what the comedian possibly does get better than most is that no one can claim to be entirely innocent when they’re laughing:
A Nazi sees a Jew walking towards him.
As the Jew passes by, the Nazi says ‘Swine!’
The Jew tips his hat and says, ‘Cohen.’
Or:
An old Jew was refused service in a restaurant.
‘We don’t serve Jews here,’ said the waiter.
‘Don’t let that bother you,’ replied the old man. ‘I don’t eat Jews.’
Neither of these jokes strikes me as laugh-out-loud funny. But if we see the punchline as mocking by resembling the original attempt at a put-down, we can see the joke as a means of showing how a lousy sense of humour can always get its comeuppance.
What typifies a lousy sense of humour? I’d say it’s a failure to understand the material it’s working with. And by material I mean words, as slippery as any banana skin:
I had dinner with my father last night, and I made a classic Freudian slip. I meant to say, ‘Please pass the salt,’ but it came out, ‘You putz, you ruined my childhood!’ Jonathan Katz
Words have a funny habit ofturning their sense around to make the teller of the joke the butt of the joke. It’s the reason why most jokes in circulation appear un-authored, as if they’d erupted autonomously out of our everyday language, laying waste to common sense. Indeed, it’s precisely because jokes appear disparaging of anything so proprietorial as authorship or beard-stroking authority that they’re broadly untroubled by issues of copyright (hence why I can raid other people’s joke-book collections for favourite examples in my own). So are our jokes then evidence that our words may be laughing at us? In which case, language would be just like the God who laughs when you tell Him your plans – the God who, as Heinrich Heine intimated, is nothing if not an ironist.§
Perhaps the difference between a bad and a good joke, then, is not unlike the difference between sarcasm and irony. Sarcasm pokes fun without any notion that there may be something misunderstood or unrecognised about the object of its derision (I’m so obviously right about this).¶ Irony, though, gestures towards the unknown and unknowable, getting laughs precisely at the point where other, more direct, forms of representation have reached their limits. Hence if sarcasm suggests a know-it-all attitude, irony, pace Socrates,# finds the funniness where it knows it knows nothing:
Moskowitz and Finkelstein were in a cafeteria, drinking tea.
Moskowitz studied his cup and said with a sigh, ‘Ah, my friend, life is like a cup of tea.’
Finkelstein considered that for a moment and then said, ‘But why is life like a cup of tea?’
Moskowitz replied, ‘How should I know? Am I a philosopher?’
* Interpreting a verse from Ecclesiastes, ‘And God will seek the pursued’, the rabbis of theTalmud suggest that God is always shifting positions to take the side of the pursued over that of the pursuer, regardless of each figure’s moral character or social identity.
† From his HBO stand-up special Oh My God (2013).
‡ On Nov 10 2017, in a letter in the NYT responding to allegations by a number of female comics that he had sexually harassed them, C.K. confessed that ‘these stories are true’.
§ The German romantic poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who was born into a Jewish family but later converted to Lutheranism (which didn’t prevent his becoming the target of anti-Semitic attacks and subsequently Nazi demonisation), attested to ‘God’s irony’ and ‘the irony of the great poet of the world stage up there’.
¶ Though I align it for the sake of argument with nominally ‘bad’ humour here, I don’t deny that sarcasm is often merited, nor that it can be extremely funny.
# The Greek philosopher identified by Kierkegaard as the world’s greatest ironist.