Why Jews are funny

Here's my latest column, about Jewish humor:


You might call it the intellectual borsht belt.

Go to hear the average Jewish guest speaker or scholar in residence, and you are bound to get at least a few good laughs. Whether they are rabbis, professors or writers, effective speakers for Jewish audiences are almost inevitably funny, even when their areas of expertise are anything but.

After attending a couple of such presentations recently – one about the astonishing rates of assimilation among young Jews and the other about the environment, each with several laugh out loud moments (who knew?) – it occurred to me that, within the Jewish community, we don’t merely appreciate humor, we practically demand it from our speakers.

As I thought about this, I asked Danny Butler, the local former magistrate who is also a popular (and very funny) speaker, for both Jewish and general audiences, whether Jewish audiences, more than others, expect speakers to be funny.

Not necessarily, he said, since non-Jewish audiences also appreciate good humor. But then again, not all audiences are created equal.

“The more educated and intelligent an audience is, the more they seem to absorb humor,” said Butler.

That makes sense, given that an expert speaker will probably rely on sarcasm, puns and other subtle forms of humor, not the low-brow sort.

And, with our advanced degrees and prominence in a variety of intellectual fields, it is no secret that Jews are brainy folks.

But with Jews, it’s not just that we appreciate humor, but that we are comfortable with it, even in the unlikeliest of places.

I asked Butler if a minister on the guest speaker circuit would be expected to be as funny as the average rabbi. He said probably not. “They would be afraid of not being taken seriously.”

Apparently this is not a concern for rabbis.

But seriously, something about Jewish culture allows us to be simultaneously funny and somber, and to understand that the two are not mutually exclusive.

“Memorable funerals even include laughter,” said Butler. “Humor helps to make what might otherwise be an uncomfortable [situation] more palatable for people.”

And that led us to the old standard explanation for Jewish humor, which is that persecution and powerlessness led us to develop humor as a defense mechanism.

Unfortunately, this has not been the response of the Palestinians or the Kurds.

Hardship alone never made anyone funny. So, it seems, there’s something more to the comedic tendencies of Jews, and it goes back to our very roots.

Years ago, Butler told me he asked the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, who wrote his own translation of the Torah and authored several books, whether there were any jokes in the Talmud.

“Without missing a beat, he said, ‘Yeah, but they’re all old.’”

In fact, said Butler, the Talmud instructs teachers to open their lessons with jokes, and quotes the prophet Elijah as predicting that the comedians of a particular town would surely go to heaven for all the laughter they brought to others.

So, even before the expulsions and pogroms, we had reasons to laugh.

Our good humor allows us not to take ourselves too seriously and to find something happy or hopeful in the bleakest of life’s moments.

To illustrate the Jewish approach to humor, I like to think of the parent’s advice to a child who has just endured an embarrassing situation.

“Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.”

As Jews, we say, “Why wait for someday? Laugh now!”