HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JEWISH PERSON AND A COMEDIAN?
Remember that episode of Seinfeld when Jerry’s dentist converts to Judaism?* Jerry is seated in his dentist’s chair, and his dentist tells him a (not very good) Jewish joke about matzo balls:
Jerry: ‘Do you think you should be making jokes like that?’
Dentist: ‘Why not, I’m Jewish, remember? Jerry, it’s our sense of humour that sustained us as a people for three thousand years.’
Jerry: ‘Five thousand.’
Dentist: ‘Five thousand – even better.’
His dentist, Jerry figures, shouldn’t get to tell Jewish jokes – you need millennia of persecution to have a sense of humour like that (though, you have to admit, ‘Five thousand – even better’ is a pretty good Jewish joke). But does Jerry really have the right to kvetch? For while having badly-told Jewish jokes visited upon you while supine in your dentist’s chair is no picnic, Jerry hasn’t personally suffered so much of that history of persecution. Yet there’s something about his dentist’s conversion to Judaism that troubles him. What, he suspects, his dentist may really be after is the holy grail of comedy: ‘total joketelling immunity’. Getting to tell any joke he likes. Which is such chutzpah, it’s enough to lead Jerry to a confession box to grass on the dentist to his former priest:
Jerry: ‘I have a suspicion that he converted to Judaism only for the jokes.’
Father: ‘And this offends you as a Jewish person?’
Jerry: ‘No, it offends me as a comedian!’
And if you remain unsure how exactly to tell the difference between a Jewish person and a comedian, then you’re probably getting what I take to be the point of the whole episode: it isn’t so easy to tell.
In fact, when his dentist first announces his conversion, Jerry’s response – ‘Welcome aboard!’ – is less offended, or delighted, than bemused. If, indeed, anything tells the difference between Judaism and the major monotheisms to which it’s most often compared, this could well be it: while Christians and Muslims tend to regard converts to their faith as serious people of good sense, Jews harbour a sneaking suspicion that the would-be Jewish convert must be joking.
Although if Jews often have a hard time accepting why anyone would want to convert to Judaism, they’re usually even less accepting of those who attempt to convert out of it:
Two Jews are strolling down the street one day in the Pale of Settlement, when they happen to walk past a church. Above the door of the church they see a big sign that says ‘Convert and get ten rubles’. Moishe stops, stares at the sign and turns to his friend:
‘Avreleh, I’m thinking of doing it.’ With that, he strides purposefully into the church. Twenty minutes later he comes out with his head bowed.
‘So’, asks Avreleh, ‘did you get your ten rubles?’
Moishe looks at him contemptuously: ‘Is that all you people think about?’
Which is surely one of the best jokes, let alone Jewish jokes, of all time, because it demonstrates so neatly how power really works.
And such jokes also help to explain why Jews, historically, have often viewed conversion as a sociopolitical rather than authentically religious phenomenon:
Four converts trade stories about why they converted. The first claims he was a victim of a false accusation and converted to escape the harsh sentence he would otherwise have had to serve. The second confesses that her parents drove her wild with complaints about her lax observance, so she converted to spite them. The third gives a rambling account of falling in love with a Christian boy: she converted in order to marry him. The fourth pipes up: ‘Unlike the rest of you, I converted out of a firm conviction that Christianity is a religion of a higher order.’
‘Oh, PLEASE!’ the others interrupt him. ‘Save that for your goyishe friends!’
Which suspicion of conversion has lingered even when Jews have turned to other religions during more liberal times:
My best friend is a Jewish Buddhist. Believes you should renounce all material possessions but still keep the receipts. David Baddiel
So you think you can cease to be Jewish, huh? Well then, the joke’s on you:
Mr Dropkin was on a business trip in a small town and was giving his major presentation on the stage when he bent over and gave the loudest fart anyone had ever heard. He never showed up in that small town again. But many, many, many years later he was invited back. Undecided whether or not he could yet show his face, he tried to coax himself: ‘I’m so old now,’ he thought. ‘Surely no one will remember me from all those years ago. I don’t even look as I did then.’ So he decided to return. All the same, when checking into the hotel he took the precaution of changing his name.
‘Have you ever visited our pretty town before?’ the hotel receptionist asked him, genially.
‘Only once,’ said Mr Dropkin. ‘But it was a long time ago and between you and me I haven’t returned until now because I’ve always been so embarrassed about a very painful experience that happened to me when I was here, and have feared that people might still remember it.’
‘Oh, what a shame!’ said the receptionist, before reassuring him, ‘you know, people have such short memories and they’re really only focused on their own lives – things are never quite so bad as you think. So I’m sure you’re being paranoid. I mean, how long ago was this incident?’
Dropkin said he didn’t exactly remember.
‘Well, was it before or after the Dropkin fart?’
* ‘The Yada Yada’ (TV episode, 1997).