No Joke (15 page)

Whether or not we choose to label this joke anti-Semitic, its sympathy obviously flows toward the exemplary Gentiles and against the mother, grasping even in her bereavement. The joke turns on her unexpected substitution of an insignificant sum for the so much more serious loss she has incurred. Raskin then traces the evolution of the joke through several variants before arriving at what, for its fusion of the practical, psychological, and metaphysical, he considers “one of the finest Jewish jokes we have today”:

Mrs. Markowitz was walking along the beach with her grandson when suddenly a wave came and washed the three-year-old boy out to sea.

“Oh Lord!” cried the woman. “If you'll just bring that boy back alive I'll do anything. I'll be the best person. I'll give to charity. I'll go to temple. Please, God! Send him back!”

At that moment, a wave washed the child back up on the sand, safe and sound. His grandmother looked at the boy and then up to the heavens.

“Okay!” she exclaimed. “So where's his hat?”

The focus of the original anecdote has shifted away from behavioral differences between Jews and Christians to alleged qualities of the Jew, which Raskin summarizes thus: “[No] one can satisfy a Jewish mother, not even God producing a miracle in compliance with her most desperate prayer.”
⁹
The grandmother still bears traces of the anti-Jewish cast in which she was conceived, but what figured earlier as greed now places her in the tradition of Jewish God arguers from the patriarch
Abraham to Rabbi Levi Yitzhok of Berdichev, affectionately known as the “defense attorney of the Jewish people.” The joke denies us the relief of a child's rescue by switching its attention to a preposterously exaggerated demand for perfect justice from the perfect judge. The no-nonsense Jew is the insatiably demanding Jew is the Jew who intends to hold God to His promise.

What Raskin omits to tell us in his otherwise-exhaustive treatment of this joke's evolution is that its later, “metaphysical” versions emerged not in England but rather in the United States. In its U.S. versions, the joke includes no juxtaposition of Jews with Gentiles. Instead, it plays off warring elements in the Jewish psyche itself, and in a way that the American Saul Bellow defines as “characteristically Jewish.” In narratives of this type, according to the novelist,

laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two. At times the laughter seems simply to restore the equilibrium of sanity; at times the figures of the story, or parable, appear to invite or encourage trembling with the secret aim of overcoming it by means of laughter.

Bellow thinks that when we laugh, our minds refer us to God's existence. He emphasizes that “chaos is
exposed
.”
¹⁰
One might reverse this remotely Hasidic concept so as to suggest that the best of Jewish humor recalls the improbable contract that earthly Jews entered into with the Ineffable, saying (Exodus 24:7), “We will do and we will hearken”—in that counter-intuitive order. If Jewish humor exposes chaos, it exposes no
less an unwillingness to
make do
with chaos, pitting people's expectations of God against God's of human beings, with no way of guaranteeing the outcome.

Illustrating Bellow's thesis even better than the Mrs. Markowitz joke is one that he adduces from his own repertoire. This joke is about three Jews boasting of their rabbis:

One said, “My rabbi's faith is so great and he fears the Lord so much that he trembles day and night, and he has to be belted into his bed at night with straps so that he doesn't fall out.” The second said, “Yes, you have a marvelous rabbi, but he really can't be compared to my rabbi. Mine is so holy and so just that he makes God tremble. God is afraid of displeasing him. And if the world has not been going so well lately, you can figure it out for yourselves. God is trembling.” The third Jew said, “Your rabbis are both great men. No doubt about it. But my rabbi passed through both stages. For a long time he trembled, too, and in the second stage, he made God tremble. But then he thought it over very carefully and finally he said to God, ‘Look—why should we both tremble?' ”
¹¹

The final question, cunningly phrased as a gesture of conciliation, undermines the pious claims entered by the other two boasters by establishing human beings as God's equal rather than His subjects. The wisecrack remains just this side of heresy, retaining the language of awe while upending its premise of a divine-human divide. And although Bellow offers no comment on the joke, his definition of what is characteristically Jewish deflates not only the devoutness of pietists but
also the very concept of “fear and trembling”—a favorite of certain twentieth-century students of religion drawn to the thought and in this case the phraseology of the Danish theologian Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. In the end, Bellow makes the analysis of humor almost as funny as the humor itself.

The open, much more freely competitive culture of the United States produced more so-called characteristically Jewish brands of humor than the social satire of England—though not all at once. The 1940s introduced two complementary perceptions of the Jews that greatly eased their acceptance. The greatest boon to the comfortable integration of Jews in the United States was the creation in 1948 of the state of Israel. Not only did the old-new homeland of the Jewish people come to serve as the “Mother of Exiles” for Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab lands who might otherwise have flooded the U.S. shores; the perception of Jews as a people taking hold of their future also appealed to Americans who valued a similar capacity for pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

At the same time, the genocide that generated those new refugees awakened the sympathy of their U.S. rescuers. Leon Uris's 1958 best-selling novel
Exodus
captured the budding U.S. love affair with the Jewish state—a state that needed no help from the United States in repelling British overseers and Arab attackers alike. In the novel, the all-American Kitty Fremont overcomes her dislike of Jews through simultaneous admiration for a tough-minded Israeli warrior and compassion for a European child survivor. She wants to marry the one and adopt the other.

This new U.S. forbearance occurred, finally, on the cusp of a broad civil rights movement that in striving to erase the legacy of slavery, also vastly broadened interest in “foreign cultures” and made a value of ethnic self-expression. The distinctively Jewish humor that emerged in the United States during this era was a by-product of a greater Jewish self-confidence that was itself part of the spirit of the 1960s.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Until the end of the Second World War, the United States was not much more comfortable than Great Britain with the religious and national distinctiveness of Jews. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Jewish entertainers served the general public largely with Christmas music, films about marriage to Christian women, and joking. “I don't want to join any club that would have me as a member,” said Groucho Marx, lampooning the Jew in himself who disdains the welcome of his own kind in favor of the restrictions placed on him by others. Since the presumptive appeal of Groucho's joke is proportional to one's discomfort with one's identity, it bears noting that this became his most famous line.

Zangwill's closest U.S. counterpart during the early, strained period of Americanization was Leo Rosten (1908–97), who happened to be something of an Anglophile, just as Zangwill was something of an adopted American. Born in Poland, raised in Chicago in a Yiddish-speaking family, and a graduate of the London School of Economics and University of Chicago, Rosten seemed headed for a career in the social sciences when he sold a comic sketch to the
New Yorker
based on a job he had briefly held teaching English in a night school. Expanded into
The Education of H
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(1937), the work was published under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross, allegedly because the author did not want his professors to discover that he was writing humor, though the name's Gentile ring suggests a slightly different explanation.

The book's plot was simple: Mr. Parkhill, a teacher of exemplary patience, instructs a collection of immigrants in English. Most of the students are Jews (along with a Pole and Greek as well as a Mrs. Rodriguez and Mrs. Tomasic), and most are slow. The exceptions are the conscientious spinster Rose Mitnick and irrepressible Kaplan, the “star” of the class who compensates through invention for what he lacks in mastery. Kaplan (the asterisks in his name are his) is as ebullient as Zangwill's da Costa was aggressive and no less threatening to the (linguistic) status quo.

Some of Rosten's comic method can be deduced from his admiration for Groucho—“the man from Marx”—whose wit he considered “a form of surrealism.”
¹²
Rosten appreciated the master comic's “singular faculty of
hearing
with originality,” which allowed him to ambush the unwary word. But whereas early in his career Groucho left ambiguous the ethnicity of his comic persona, Rosten made Jews his most ostentatious greenhorns and showed how resourcefully they in particular could mangle the language. Let us count the veys. Through logical induction: if the feminine of the word host is hostess, then the feminine of the word ghost must be ghostess; in the same way, the conjugation of write, wrote, and written corresponds to bite, bote, and bitten. Via creative mishearing: Mary had a little lamb whose fleas were white as snow; the waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific is the Panama
Kennel. Through inventive grammar: for the positive word bad, its comparative would be the term worse, and its superlative would be the word rotten. And through original etymology: Montana was so named because it is full of mountains; Ohio sounds like an Indian yawning.

Mr. Parkhill's function is to teach proper English, and Kaplan's to reinvent it. “Mr. Kaplan had a way of getting Mr. Parkhill to submit each rule to the test of reason, and Mr. Parkhill was beginning to face the awful suspicion that he was no match for Mr. Kaplan, who had a way of operating with rules of reason entirely his own.”
¹³
Mitnick is likewise humbled by her rival. Always correcting, she gloats when she catches the sentence in Kaplan's exercise letter to his uncle, “If your
eye
falls on a bargain pick
it
up.” The class bursts into laughter, and even Mr. Parkhill “permitted himself a dignified smile.” Kaplan smiles as well, with self-assurance that anticipates a wondrous reversal: “ ‘Mine oncle,' he said, ‘has a gless eye.' ”
¹⁴
Kaplan is seldom this vaudevillian, but Rosten never deviates from the same formula that Zangwill applied in having the most “impaired” speaker of English carry the day.

Kaplan proves his patriotism in spectacular displays of individuality that turn his failures into triumph. His apparent inability to master the host language actually demonstrates a U.S. kind of ingenuity, as mistakes become new ways of appreciating the elasticity and inventiveness of English. Yet although Kaplan's Jewishness is taken for granted, the only explicit reference to anything Jewish is the mention of Hanukkah in a class discussion of Christmas. Jewishness may
be the implicit basis of the comedy, but the Gentile reader is never confronted with any particularity that suggests Judaism's meaningful distinctiveness or might impede an appreciation of the humor.

Whereas Zangwill over the course of his literary life gradually distanced himself from his Jewish immigrant origins, Rosten followed an opposite trajectory. His 1960s
The Joys of Yiddish
and its sequel
The Joys of Yinglish
appeared under the Rosten name, which itself became a trademark for salable, specifically Jewish humor. By “joys,” Rosten means the comic potential of Yiddish, which he presents as an essentially comical language:

A woman, feeling sorry for a beggar who had come to her door, invited him in and offered him food. On the table was a pile of dark bread—and a few slices of
hallah
. The shnorrer promptly fell upon the
hallah
.

“There's black bread, too,” the woman hinted.

“I prefer
hallah
.”

“But
hallah
is much more expensive!”

“Lady,” said the beggar, “it's worth it.”
¹⁵

The joke (of which there are many versions) serves as Rosten's elucidation of chutzpah, “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts'; presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.” In fact, a better illustration of chutzpah might be Rosten himself, who as Ross turned a Yiddish accent into a joke and who as Rosten, with the change of U.S. fashion, then turned the Jewish language into a laughing matter.