HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOKING AND NOT JOKING?
When Jerry’s dentist proclaims, with the zeal of the newly converted, that ‘it’s our sense of humour that sustained us’, he may make us laugh, but he isn’t joking. Though to truly appreciate his formula for funniness – the more suffering you’ve had, the funnier you get to be – you’d need to look not to the minor irritations that rankle the cast of Seinfeld, but to Jewish life in the kind of pogrom-prone place where it’s not always that easy to tell the difference between what is and isn’t a joke:
‘Good news! Good news! The child that got killed in the forest yesterday? He’s Jewish!’
The ‘joke’? That one murdered Jewish child in the forest may be counted ‘good news’ when contrasted with the pogrom liable to follow the discovery of a murdered Christian child. Sometimes we laugh, in other words, when we recognise a (terrible) truth. Or when we realise that what we’re hearing should be a joke, but isn’t.
We tend to think of wit as a form of levity, but as even the joke’s own vocabulary attests, there are darker, more aggressive sides to humour. Consider the word punchline, for instance, with its suggestion that someone, by the end of the joke, is guaranteed to get knocked out. How should we understand such a ‘technical’ term? Do jokes necessarily require victims?
In the annals of Jewish joking we can see why punchlines might make sense:
Mendel the butcher is walking to his store one morning when a stranger runs up, punches him in the face and says, ‘That’s for you, Yossel.’
Mendel is surprised, but quickly starts to laugh.
The stranger says, ‘Why are you laughing? Do you want me to punch you again?’
Mendel says, ‘No, it’s just that the joke’s on you – I’m not Yossel!’
When life’s bound to beat you one way or another, you get your laughs however you can.
Though ‘having a laugh’ clearly isn’t the only thing going on here. In Israeli author David Grossman’s novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar (2017), set in a comedy club in which a stand-up comedian intersperses stock-in-trade gags within a much more disquieting monologue, it’s the propensity to selfharm that first sets his audience on edge: ‘He gives his forehead a loud, unfathomably powerful smack ... It was an awful blow, that slap. An outburst of unexpected violence, a leakage of murky information’. And as the comedy swerves towards the painfully testimonial, our narrator, watching him, begins to understand what that murky information is: ‘he is uniting with his abuser. Beating himself with another man’s hands.’ Thus what we see in the novel, rather like its pictured audience of repelled but fascinated spectators, is a sort of disrobing of the entire comedic project: instead of a comedian telling ‘cracks’ and the audience ‘cracking up’, his ‘cracks’ reveal deeper cracks as roles are reversed and it’s the man on stage who cracks up.
Joking has always been a good cover for not joking. When speaking ‘only in jest’, one may speak of unspeakable things. The Holocaust survivor and novelist Aharon Appelfeld has written of how immediately after the war the victims of the camps were unable to talk about their experiences with each other directly other than through grotesque comic performances. Rather than thinking of comedy as tragedy plus time,* he found that comedy was the language that instinctively came first – possibly because it was the only genre that acknowledged the sheer impossibility of representing what the victims had lived through...
A Holocaust survivor gets up to heaven, meets God.
He tells God a Holocaust joke: God doesn’t laugh.
The survivor shrugs: I guess you had to be there.†
The child of a Holocaust survivor, David Schneider has long since been interested in the curious compulsion of so many jokers to find the laughs in those things that clearly aren’t in any straightforward sense ‘funny’:
As a comedian, I’ve always been fascinated by whether you can do comedy about such a difficult and taboo subject.
I used to compere Jewish comedy gigs and I remember once getting a note passed to me backstage saying: ‘We are a coach party of Auschwitz survivors come to see you. Please can you say hello to us during the gig?’
And I just thought, what am I meant to do? Go on and shout: ‘Hi, is there anybody from Auschwitz in the place tonight?’
Thus, while it’s understandable when people prefer not to laugh at such horrors, or feel shocked when others do, it would be a mistake to assume too much about anyone’s laughter. Laughter, after all, frequently assails its subjects unbidden, implying that there may be things folded into it that aren’t always known or recognised by the one who laughs. What’s more, by paying attention to the alternative ways there always are of viewing even the darkest things, seeing the funny side is a skill worth having – not only for its ability to leaven our bleakest moments, but because it can help to identify blind spots, multiply perspectives and even create new possibilities. As such, there may be little to wonder at in the thought that Jews, wishing to expand the often narrowest of horizons, have so often depended on the funny. After all, there’s nothing so bad that it can’t get worse:
Two Jews are in front of a firing squad awaiting their execution. As they stand there, the leader of the firing squad asks them, ‘Do either of you have any last requests?’
The first Jew says, ‘There’s been a terrible mistake!’
The second Jew turns to him and whispers, ‘Morris, don’t make trouble.’
Nor anything so innocuous that it won’t prove malign:
An Englishman, a Scotsman and a Jew are sitting on a park bench.
The Englishman says, ‘I am so tired and thirsty, I must have beer.’
The Scotsman says, ‘I am so tired and thirsty, I must have whisky.’
The Jew says, ‘I am so tired and thirsty, I must have diabetes.’
Nor any response so enthusiastic that it doesn’t reveal a criticism:
A Jewish mother gives her son two neckties for his birthday. The boy hurries into his bedroom, rips off the tie he’s wearing, puts on one of the ties his mother has brought him, and hurries back.
‘Look, Mama! Isn’t it gorgeous?’
His mother responds, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t like the other one?’
Which is a bit of a mood-killer admittedly, and yet it’s in precisely this nit-picking response that we can identify the lesson of Jewish history, along with that of the joke: there’s always a flipside.
* A popular definition of comedy that has been attributed to various people but was most probably coined in the 1950s by Steve Allen, an American TV personality.
† A popular definition of comedy that has been attributed to various people but was most probably coined in the 1950s by Steve Allen, an American TV personality.