Yukking It Up : Class Plumbs Essence of Jewish Humor, Emerges Laughing

In the beginning was the joke.

Tracing the origins of Jewish humor at UCLA Monday night, psychologist Benjamin Hulkower cited the first reference to laughter in the Bible. An already venerable Abraham tells his aged wife Sarah that they are to have a child. The result is Isaac, whose Hebrew name, Yitzak, is derived from the word for “to laugh.”

The Jews, a people whose very prophets had a sense of humor, have had a less than rollicking history, speakers noted at the first of four classes on Jewish humor offered by UCLA Extension.

“Let’s define Jewish humor as comedy wrought from tragedy,” said organizer and moderator Elinor Lenz. “We are going to look at a people whose historical experience has given them very little to laugh about.”

Why, then, has Jewish humor endured as a major cultural force? Lenz speculated that Jews share the wisdom of the French philosopher Beaumarchais, who wrote: “I force myself to laugh at everything for fear of being compelled to weep.”

“Above all, Jewish humor is the knowing, ironic laughter of the outsider,” said Lenz. Then she told the one about the woman who was sitting by the pool in Miami. “Why are you so pale?” the woman asked the man next to her.

“I’ve been in jail,” he said.

“For what?” she asked.

“Killing my wife,” he admitted.

“That means you’re single?”

Nursing a cold, comedian Steve Allen greeted the audience, “Good evening, ladies and Gentiles.”

Allen, who is an actor, writer and musician as well as a comedian, noted that American humor has come to be virtually synonymous with Jewish humor. All his favorite comics are Jewish, most notably Sid Caesar, said Allen, who is Irish.

“Irish humor is characterized by a certain poetry,” Allen said, “but Jewish humor is characterized by a philosophy.”

Fellow speaker Benjamin Hulkower, a psychologist who told jokes in the Catskills many years ago, argued that “Jewish humor is geared to survival.”

Like other participants, Hulkower peppered his remarks with jokes, including this illustration of the difference between involvement and commitment: “On a plate of steak and eggs, the chicken is involved,” he said, “the cow is committed.”

Yuks notwithstanding, Hulkower was serious in trying to pinpoint the essence of Jewish humor. It is often the humor of the oppressed, he noted. In a world that is hostile or worse, the joke can be an act of defiance, a kind of heroism. The mind dances when nothing else can.

“If you can’t change your circumstance,” Hulkower said, “at least you can think of it in different terms.” To illustrate, he cited his mother-in-law’s experience in Hitler’s death camps. She survived, she told him, by thinking of the unspeakable as a game. “I woke up in the morning, and I was in the game,” she recalled. “And if I went to bed at night, I had won the game.”

Steven Breuer, executive director of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, described Jewish humor as anti-authoritarian, substantive and critical. He noted that a cynic or scoffer, who is both part of the community and a critical commentator on it, is a staple of Jewish tradition.

Jews are not afraid to laugh at themselves, Breuer and others said. Like members of other minorities, he noted, Jews tell jokes among themselves they would be offended to hear told by non-Jews. He told the story of the two Jews who are rescued from a desert island where they have built three huts.

“Those are synagogues,” the men tell their rescuers when asked what the huts are. “My synagogue, his synagogue and the one neither of us would belong to.”

Such jokes serve to bind Jews together, Breuer said.

The relationship between God and his chosen people is another durable theme of Jewish humor, the panel noted. Unlike members of more dour faiths, Jews tell jokes about the deity, Hulkower pointed out. The psychologist ad-libbed a comic exchange about circumcision between Abraham and his maker:

“Let me get this straight,” the patriarch said. “They get all the land and the oil, and we get to cut a piece off what? “

Jews also joke about relations between Jews and the rest of the world.

“My priest knows more than your rabbi,” a Catholic boy says to a Jewish boy.

“Well, sure. You tell him everything.”

Humor is a way of life for Jews, the panel suggested. Lenz recounted a conversation with her brother, composer Mel Powell, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Musical Composition.

What would mother have said if she had lived to see it? she asked her brother.

Powell answered: “She would have said, ‘Very nice--but he doesn’t eat.’ ”

Called “Jewish Humor: Laughter and Liberation,” the class will meet Monday evenings through May 21 on the UCLA campus. Future speakers will include comedian David Steinberg, writer A. Scott Berg and cartoonist Mell Lazarus. The cost is $60. For further information, call (213) 825-9971.