HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JEWISH AND GOYISH?

Here’s how Lenny Bruce tells it:

Dig: I’m Jewish. Count Basie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor’s goyish. B’nai B’rith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish. If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.

Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish, even if the Jews invented it. Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.

All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish, macaroons are very Jewish.

Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews. Mouths are very Jewish. And bosoms. Baton-twirling is very goyish.

Underwear is definitely goyish. Balls are goyish. Titties are Jewish.

Celebrate is a goyish word. Observe is a Jewish word. Mr and Mrs Walsh are celebrating Christmas with Major Thomas Moreland, USAF (ret.), while Mr and Mrs Bromberg observed Hanukkah with Goldie and Arthur Schindler from Kiamesha, New York.

Bruce, one suspects, almost could have got away with telling Richard Pryor’s jokes.^* For what he’s suggesting in this sketch is a whole new way of telling the difference. Neither Jewish nor goyish are absolute categories – everyone is who they are-ish – hence you can count yourself among the Jew-ish set of differences if you like Bruce’s shtick and you laugh along with his jokes.

And it’s on the same basis, presumably, that you can convert to blackness. Or to whiteness. Or to a sense of humour. In fact, why not go further still? Maybe converting to a sense of humour is the most authentic means of conversion. Because isn’t it the moment when someone gets our jokes or finds the same things funny as we do that we do, implicitly, recognise them as one of our own kind? (Note that, before it found its way into the annals of Jewish joking, the whiskymixing cow started out on an Irish dairy farm in a joke about a dying Mother Superior surrounded by nuns who were already showing their talent for serving more than one order of high spirits.)

And Bruce’s sense of his own Jew-ish kind was the nervous kind, the vulnerable kind, the willing to show you’re flawed, human and mortal kind. So he’d have likely agreed with Jerry’s dentist about the sustaining power of humour. If, that is, Bruce could spot his own peeps everywhere, it’s because he recognised something critical about the funny – how it’s always got a hidden history of suffering buried somewhere inside it:

A black man was reading a Yiddish newspaper on the New York subway.

Someone stops and asks, ‘Are you Jewish?’

‘Oy gevalt,’ he replies, ‘that’s the last thing I need.’

Since a sense of humour surely is what he needs, however, he’s a man who makes perfect sense in the Jewish joke.

‘Every black man,’ the narrator of Paul Beatty’s extremely funny novel The Sellout (2015) confesses, secretly thinks he can ‘tell jokes’ better than anyone else in the world. And we get from the novel why that is: because of the suffering, pain, powerlessness and diverted aggression and anger that goes into it. It’s this, in fact, that comes into sharp focus at the conclusion of the novel, which winds up at a stand-up gig in which a black comedian admonishes the white couple in the front row for laughing at his jokes. In a reverse heckle that’s completely serious, although the couple at first assume he must be joking, he tells them to ‘get the fuck out!’ because ‘This is our thing!’ The problem, this comedian implies, with the white people laughing along with his act, is that they don’t really get what they’re laughing at. And the same, naturally, may be true for the white people laughing along with Beatty’s novel. Although the narrator’s subsequent question – ‘So what exactly is our thing?’ – sounds a little more dubious than is the comedian about the rules of belonging. Which, arguably, was also Bruce’s point: that just as joking is slippery, so must its recipients be. For while it’s true that no joke can be for everyone – and the joke will always depend on someone being ‘in’ on it, and someone left out – stand-up, being very much a ‘live’ act, can have no guarantees in advance as to who, if anyone, will find it funny.

Not, it’s important to add, that comedy is the only creative outlet for historical suffering:

We’ve come from the same history – two thousand years of persecution – we’ve just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained – we just never thought of putting it to music. Jon Stewart

*  And vice versa. Richard Pryor once claimed to owe his career to Lenny Bruce: ‘I played his record over and over, every night. It was him who said comedy wasn’t about telling jokes – it was about telling the truth’