No Joke (10 page)

And Kuni-Leml was simple to the point of idiocy. When handsome Max, a university student, disguises himself as Kuni-Leml in a plot to secure parental approval for his, Max's, marriage to their daughter Khayele (aka Carolina), he deceives not only the parents but also the infatuated and clueless Hasid, who lets himself be persuaded that Max is the “real” Kuni-Leml. Their encounter is a manic version of the ageless routine that Sholem Aleichem evokes in “Two Anti-Semites,” where disguise tests the very notion of identity.

KUNI-LEML: I m-meant to ask … for example, if I walk down the street and someone calls out to me, “Reb K-kuni-Leml! Reb K-kuni-Leml!” should I answer or not?

MAX (
in an angry tone
): No, you m-mustn't answer, since you're not K-kuni-Leml! Now r-run along home!
⁷

By thus exposing his rival, Max convinces Carolina's father to recognize the religious folly represented by the young Hasid. In the final scene, a chorus of university students chases the Hasidim off the stage, completing the triumph of modernity over obscurantism.

Even though Goldfaden's original title,
The Fanatic
, almost certainly took aim at the obscurantists, the operetta he based on his play moderated the severity of the critique. When the curtain falls in the musical version, Kuni-Leml, having secured a bride of his own, is singing along with the chorus, and the hubris of Max the modernizer is shown up as almost equal to the stubbornness of the religious believer.
⁸
A 1977 Israeli film adaptation,
Kuni Leml in Tel Aviv
, is similarly ambivalent toward easy assumptions of progress, and for similar reasons, suggesting that the threats to Jewish life from the temptations of modernity almost outweigh the perceived corruptions of entrenched tradition. Ultimately in both versions, music and dance sweep up the antagonists in familial as well as cultural comic harmony.

Hasidic Humor

Less obvious than the role of the Haskalah in the development of modern Jewish comedy is the role of the Haskalah's favorite target, Hasidism. We may not customarily associate Hasidic ecstasy with laughter, but we should consider how, like ecstasy, laughter too overcomes indignities through an altered state of mind. The believer subordinates the material considerations of earthly life to the quest for divine perfection; the ironist makes fun of the gap between the two. To elevate the spiritual over the material, transcendence over immanence, Hasidic teachers employ paradox, contradiction, and incongruity—the very features that Freud identifies as
staples of joking. Both mystic and comedian aspire to get the better of a world they are powerless to reform.

The
Tales
of the Hasidic master storyteller Nahman, mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, are compendiums of inversion whose narrator tries to wean us from trust in manifest reality to allegedly profounder levels of perception. In Nahman's most famous story, seven beggars bless a newly married couple with the words, “May you be as I am.” That is, the blind beggar confers the gift of insight, the hunchback the ability to shoulder the world, the stutterer—following Moses in the Bible—the key to cosmic mysteries, and so forth. Beggars become benefactors, presenting ostensible deformities as moral advantages while implicitly showing the pursuit of sensual pleasure as
corrupting
the senses. As in comedy, Nahman upends our expectations through dramatic reversals. In another tale, featuring a contest between a simple man and a wise one, we see how the latter cannot achieve through his merits what the former attains by trust. The wise man, an ideal Maskil, is exposed as a restless, compulsively miserable perfectionist, misled by his skepticism into self-destruction; the simpleton takes on honor and authority by joyously obeying the summons of “the King.”

One scholar has compared this dialectic tactic to the Talmudic expression
adraba—ipkha mistabra
, yet the opposite (of what was just stated) is the more reasonable. “It is the signal that the student must awaken to a logical reversal, … reconsider everything, distinguish anew between truth and falsehood.”
⁹

The aphorism attributed to Nahman, “Nothing is as whole as a broken heart,” invites us to experience language itself as
paradox; indeed, Hasidic storytelling occasionally severs altogether the relation of language to meaning. Deficiencies of conventional prayer are conveyed in the story (that has analogues in other cultures) of a boy whose whistle pierces the gates of heaven during the closing service of Yom Kippur, after the entreaties of the rabbi have failed to do so. In a more extreme version of this anecdote, a pious but ignorant water carrier prays passionately by intoning a single word,
tamei
—meaning “impure,” “unclean.” To protect the man from public mockery, and in deference to religious propriety, the rabbi of Kotsk asks him to substitute the contrasting word,
tahor
, meaning “pure,” as in pure of heart. The water carrier tries to follow this advice but fails; when he reports back to the saintly Kotsker that his prayer has been ruined in the attempt, the latter gives him permission to return to tamei. Sincerity trumps significance.
¹⁰

Such habits of inversion in Hasidic storytelling were transmitted from redemptive fools to their successors, zany comedians. Through this same kind of verbal inversion the Marx Brothers would later overturn polite society, refreshing its language and puncturing the pretensions of people who think
they
are in command.

Another spring of corrective humor welled up from within Hasidism itself—this one aimed at the movement's own excesses. A rich fund of stories arose around Hershele Ostropolier, hailing from the town of Ostropol in the Hasidic heartland. Hershele, a semilegendary prankster in the universal tradition of the trickster, is alternately on the right and wrong side of morality. He is capable of devouring a dish
of dumplings that a mother begs him to leave for her hungry children, or instructing a browbeaten husband to reform his wife—with a whip. In this respect he owes much to Germany's famed jester Till Eulenspiegel, who tricks the stingy out of their money, insults the high and mighty, and pays back other mischief-makers in kind. But cultural differences play their part. Where the German trickster is an archetypal social outcast, Hershele supports his wife and children. Intent on exposing the underside of his society, Eulenspiegel often has other people (including Jews) eat his excrement.
¹¹
Hershele, much more reserved, substitutes scatological rhetoric for the thing itself:

A wealthy Jew refuses Hershele's appeal for a handout. Instead of a curse, Hershele rewards him with a blessing: “You and your children and your children's children will remain prosperous until the end of days.” The tightwad wants this sanction explained, so Hershele obliges him: “When a pauper goes to the outhouse and accidentally drops a kopek into the pit, he would probably not reach in to pick it up. If a wealthier man attending to his needs dropped even a ruble into the excrement, he would almost certainly not stoop to recover it. Since it is said of the Lord of Hosts, “The silver is mine and the gold is mine,” having once dropped, say, fifty thousand rubles into you, would He be likely to dirty Himself by stooping to retrieve it?”
¹²

Hershele pulls the comic lever here by means of a quotation from the prophet Haggai (2:18) to the effect that prosperity—all the silver and gold—is God's to bestow, which would be familiar
to the average synagogue goer. The semantic drop from high to low, from Haggai into the pit, corresponds to the deflation of the miser—although whether the vulgar Hershele is offending religion or acting as its worldly standard-bearer is left ambiguous. In this connection, it is worth noting that according to Chaim Bloch (1881–1973), a scholar of Jewish folklore who assembled a well-researched collection of Hershele stories, those who had known the man attested that of his two miens—the pious and roguish—the former was dominant.
¹³

Trickster humor was by no means confined to Hasidic territory. Among other wits who became known by name, one might mention Shmerl Snitkever and Leybenyu Gotsvunder in Hershele's Podolia (Ukraine), Motke Chabad of Lithuania, and Shayke Fefer of Poland. Jewish beggars, or schnorrers, endorsed by a religion that requires high levels of giving, generated a brand of comic insolence by demanding gratitude from their benefactors. In the previous chapter, we saw how Heine's Moses Lump invites a compliant Rothschild to polish his sabbath lamp. In Yiddish joking, a beggar turned away because the master of the house has suffered a financial reversal retorts, “So because he's had a bad week, why should
my
family go hungry?” Asked to return the following day because of a lack of money at hand, the schnorrer objects, “If only you knew what a fortune I've lost by extending credit.”

When the twentieth-century Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91) began speaking before U.S. audiences, he developed a routine that contrasted the scarcity of English terms for poor person (pauper or beggar) with the abundance of its Yiddish equivalents: accompanying the plain
oreman
and
evyon
are the burned-out
nisrof
, the
farshpiler
who has gambled away his money, the once-wealthy
yored
who has lost his fortune, the
betler
and
schnorrer
who have turned poverty into a profession, the “mistress over a head of cabbage,” the “doyenne of shovel and poker,” or “one for whom the whole year is Passover—he hasn't enough for a slice of bread.” In this comedy of inversion, U.S. prosperity is put to shame by the inventive richness of Jewish poverty.

Misnagdic Humor

In addition to Enlightenment satire and Hasidism's multipronged comedy of inversion, a long tradition of rabbinic wit continued strong in the yeshiva circles of eastern Europe. Just as Samuel Johnson's educated male society of London became known for its table talk, rabbinic scholars were touted for their
sikhes khulin
—their demonstrations of rabbinic wit. The appetite for this sort of humor in Lithuanian Jewish circles matched the Hasidic taste for the magical exploits of their leaders. Indeed, early collections of Yiddish humor contain as many stories about clever rabbis as they do about tricksters and matchmakers.

The microscopic examination of texts that is the hallmark of Talmudic learning produced, in addition to centuries of creative exegesis, an appetite for verbal ingenuity and appreciation for subtleties of the language. Since Hebrew was not vocalized, rabbis could frequently pun on a word to make a point. In one famous (and nonhumorous) example from the
Talmudic Tractate Berakhot 64a, Rabbi Elazar says in the name of Rabbi Hanina, “ ‘Students of the sages increase peace in the world,' as it is written,
vekhol banayikh limudey adonay
,
verav shlom banayikh
, And all your children shall be disciples of the Lord, And great shall be the happiness of your children (Isaiah 54:13). Do not read, ‘your children' (
banayikh
) but rather ‘those who build you up' (
bonayikh
).”
¹⁴
This idea—that scholars spread peace—was later often cited ironically. But the formula, “do not read X but rather Y,” opened the door to myriad creative misreadings.

Another subgenre comprises anecdotes of how scholars refuse unwelcome petitioners and squelch impertinent critics:

“But you approved my earlier commentary on the Book of Job,” complains an author who has just been refused a rabbi's endorsement of his new book. “Well, you see, Job is different,” replies the rabbi, “I thought that having already withstood so many hardships, he could survive another.”

A skeptic challenges the Malbim [acronym of the rabbi and scholar Meir Leibush ben Jehiel Mikhel Weiser, 1809–79] to tell him whether among all their ingenious legal fictions, the rabbis could not find a way of allowing smoking on the Sabbath. The Malbim replies, “Of course. If the burning end of the cigarette is placed in your mouth.”