No Joke (28 page)

And since comedy relies on immediate feedback, humor in Israel does have to satisfy Jews who constitute over three-quarters of the population. Joking depends on what the audience knows and feels. Israeli humor perforce plays on what Jews undergo. Some of the sharpest Jewish humor will keep bubbling up from below, letting the professionals know when a target is ripe for lampooning and when a boil has to be lanced. At least as long as Israel is the main target of Israel's enemies, it will remain an incubator of Jewish humor.

During the Second Intifada—the orchestrated suicide bombings of the 1990s that were Israel's reward for the Oslo Peace Accords—a Jerusalem relative told me a joke she had heard that had “everyone rolling on the floor”:

Sara in Jerusalem hears on the news about a bombing at a popular café near the home of relatives in Tel Aviv. She calls in a panic and reaches her cousin, who assures her that thankfully, the family is all safe.

“And Anat?” Sara asks after the teenager whose hangout it had been.

“Oh, Anat,” says her mother, reassuringly, “Anat's fine. She's at Auschwitz!”

As against those who would object to the joke's insensitivity or fail to understand it, the Israelis who laughed share a
certain knowledge and sensibility. They know that as part of their education, Israeli teenagers are routinely taken on trips to Poland that include visits to the death camps where some of their ancestors perished. They may have felt a little queasy joking about the Holocaust, and such residual qualms would account for the
explosive
hilarity that comes with breaking taboos. The joke crosses the wires of anxiety over Jew-killing past and present, and revels in the forced recognition—surprise of surprises—that today's danger may be greater than yesterday's. It reassures us that the sense of “horror” spoken of by Reik persists in the recovered homeland. By acknowledging the infamous Nazi death camp as a refuge from what was intended to be the Jewish place of refuge, the joke offends both sides of the political spectrum—liberals who deny the ferocity of Arab aggression, and patriots who cannot acknowledge that Zionism does not fully safeguard the Jews.

The joke's reputation as a sidesplitter prompted me to tell it one evening to a pair of Israeli friends, Michael and Ruth Rabin, who spend part of every year in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Michael is a pioneer theorist of computer science, and Ruth a former judge; both are connoisseurs and superb practitioners of the art of joke telling. But neither laughed—a response so unusual in our habitual repartee that it seemed to call for an explanation. Michael broke the awkward silence that follows an unappreciated joke with this counteroffering: “We used to say that there were two kinds of German Jews: the pessimists who went to Palestine, and the optimists who went to Auschwitz.” A child of the pessimists, he drew for his punch line on the unwelcome, long-resisted, politically improbable
, yet ultimately comforting realization that security in Zion was more plausible than the once-assured comforts of Europe.

Both jokes end on the same word, but the mature Israelis' failure to laugh at its later version (unless I told the joke badly, or it lacked the punch in Cambridge that it would have had in Jerusalem) suggests that it may take longer than a lifetime for Jews to appreciate wit at the expense of their own formative assumptions of what Jewish humor is all about. Do you know the joke about the Polish comedian who boasts that the key to his talent is “t … t … t … timing”? The same principle holds true for humor at large. At a generation's remove, Syrkin and Scholem could not appreciate Roth. Humor is delimited by chronology as much as by culture and language.

Conclusion

When Can I Stop Laughing?

This is not the place to examine why I, a Jew, feel more threatened by those who would wipe out ethnic jokes than by those who unthinkingly make them. But it may be the place simply to record that I do.

—Howard Jacobson,
Seriously Funny

History itself seems to be making fun of the Jewish tourist in Europe who now pays good money for an excursion to the Auschwitz death camp or for a ticket to see Prague's Pinkas Synagogue, whose walls are inscribed with the names of 77,297 murdered Czech Jews. Nothing in the works of Kafka is quite as weird as the presence of
two
competing Kafka museums in the city where he once imagined the hero of his novel
The Trial
being slaughtered “like a dog,” with only his shame to outlive him.

Nor is history's mockery confined to Jews. On a recent trip to Prague with a Catholic friend who was born in the city, she and I stayed at a cozy hotel that, as it turned out, had been converted from a police station—the very place where her mother had been interrogated when her father, a Czech patriot, fled
the Communists in 1948. Yesterday's tortures had become today's conveniences, inviting us both to enjoy the ironies of our respective good fortunes. Of course, because Jewish suffering has lately trumped its Christian counterparts in Europe, Jewish kitsch wins out over its competitors; in Prague, many more images of Kafka than of the Czech religious martyr Jan Hus grace tourist posters and matchboxes.

In one of the obligatory gift shops of Prague's six refurbished synagogues, from among the
tchatchkes
and postcards I picked up a glossy paperback titled
Jewish Anecdotes from Prague
that I anticipated would contain legends of the golem—the figure fashioned from clay and allegedly brought to life by the sixteenth-century rabbi Judah Loew to protect the city's Jews from impending attack. The legend is there, to be sure, but the Czech author of the book, Vladimir Karbusicky, a distinguished musicologist in his professional life, is more interested in the stories of his own time than in those of the distant past. A native of the city, he has collected the jokes of the Jews who formed about 20 percent of its population before the Second World War because he associates the city's magic with their form of humor. The legend of the golem reminds him of the following anecdote that circulated before the Second World War:

Leopold Munk has died. Always cheerful, healthy, ruddy, and suddenly … he has simply died. The family gathers around him, weeping and wailing. Into the room comes a certain Krauskopf [Curlyhead] who wants to know what is going on.

“Don't ask! Leopold Munk has died.”

“Died? How?”

“Just like that.”

“Nonsense,” says Krauskopf, “I'll resurrect him. Bring me a glass of wine.”

Given the wine, Krauskopf raises the glass and calls, “Leopold, to your health!” He downs the wine, but there is no response from the deceased.

Krauskopf shakes his head and says, “Bring me stronger wine. This was too weak.” They bring it and he calls in a louder voice: “Leopold, to your health. Arise!” But the dead man lies still.

The request for stronger wine is repeated once or twice more, until they bring Krauskopf the strongest wine. He drinks it and roars: “Leopold, I say: To your health! You are supposed to get up!”

Leopold Munk doesn't rise.

Krauskopf looks thoughtfully at the deceased and then says in admiration: “Now that's what I call dead!”
¹

Death is a common subject of jokes, thereby feeding on our common anxieties, and humor normally sides with mortals who enjoy the advantages of life at the expense of the deceased. Serving up these old jokes, the author seems painfully aware that he may resemble the freeloader by benefiting from his own doomed attempts to resurrect the dead who told these jokes and savored this brand of humor. Indeed, the book itself, like the nostalgia on which the city's tourism relies, suggests
that all of Prague nowadays profits from a version of Krauskopf's necromancy.

The Talmud's most popular tractate, Pirkei Avot (The wisdom of the fathers), teaches that “whoever cites his source by name brings deliverance to the world.” The rabbis honored not only the teaching that was passed down through generations but also the integrity of the process of transmission. In a similar act of homage, Karbusicky recounts this anecdote in the name of its teller, the popular Jewish humorist and cabaret entertainer Karel Polacek (1892–1945), who had performed it as part of his repertoire.

Polacek the Jew was taken to the Terezin concentration camp in 1943, and from there to his death in Auschwitz; at about the same time, Karbusicky the Christian was sent as a slave laborer to Hamburg. When Karbusicky returned to Prague, by then under Soviet rule, he found employment in the Ethnographic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He collected Jewish anecdotes as part of his work, though their “antiauthoritarian” disposition made it prudent to keep them under lock and key. Forced to emigrate in 1969 (he found refuge in West Germany), he had to leave the humor collection behind, and was never thereafter able to retrieve it. He thus reconstructed this collection from memory and other anthologies, publishing it as homage to former Jewish classmates who went missing in Auschwitz. Macabre motifs, he points out, characterized Jewish joking long before the Holocaust.

The many jokes in Karbusicky's collection, interchangeable with others across east-central Europe, may not prove his contention that “nowhere are such fine Jewish anecdotes told as in Prague,” yet they remain his touchstone of an “authentic” Prague culture that reached its apogee in the interwar years.
²
They connect him to the liberal tradition that is threatened in his region by repressive forces on the political Left and Right. The spunk of these jokes achieves some of the freedom that their tellers could not. The following one dates from after the war, from the four decades of Communist rule, enforced by Soviet rulers from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of the late 1980s.

Mr. Roubitschek [a mainstay of Czech Jewish joking] has done so well in the [Communist] Ministry of Commerce that they've sent him to Budapest to negotiate a new contract for the exchange of goods. The next day a telegram comes: “Contract successfully negotiated—stop—Long Live Free Hungary!”

This pleases the Minister, so Roubitschek is sent to Warsaw. On the third day, a telegram arrives: “Contract successfully negotiated—stop—Long Live Free Poland!”

Roubitschek's enthusiasm for the freedom of the socialist system wins the political trust of his superiors. He is ceremoniously summoned: “Comrade Roubitschek! You speak many languages and will therefore be given the important mission of negotiating a treaty for us in the West.”

Mr. Roubitschek packs his bags and sets out. A week later a telegram comes to the Ministry. “Am in Paris—
stop—business going well—stop—Long live Free Roubitschek!”
³

Like the joke about diabetes with which this book began, this one likewise turns on the double meaning of a term—with the Jew here winning release from the repressive system that he has been obediently hailing as “free.” He can finally release truth from the lies that he has been compelled to repeat.

But what do these liberating anecdotes gain from having been ascribed to Jews? One can readily see why
Jews
might give their jokes a Jewish coloration, but why did non-Jews ascribe a Jewish provenance to anecdotes that could as easily have circulated about Catholic Czechs, or in Poland about Catholic Poles? Why continue to use recognizably Jewish names like Munk, Krauskopf, and Roubitschek if these jokes are being told in Czech, and might just as well have been told with Czech protagonists? Why did the Jewishness of Jewish joking gain ecumenical appeal under repressive regimes?

It seems that as long as Jews experienced intimidation, repression, and terror aimed at them specifically, their humor held little attraction for onlookers who wanted to stay clear of the fray. Once fascism and Communism routed and regimented the rest of the population as well, though, Jewish humor resonated with citizens under similar attack, and became emblematic of the kind of freedom that “Roubitschek” personifies. For staunch liberals like Karbusicky—and his counterparts in other subjugated countries of Europe—Jewish anecdotes acted much like Winston Churchill's V for Victory sign—the two-fingered gesture used by the British prime minister throughout the Second
World War to signal the eventual triumph of a humanized Europe. The Czech liberal emphasizes the Jewishness of his joking because where liberalism is under siege, the Jewish joke stands for independence, for the right to joke and freedom to mock.

Karbusicky's book of Jewish anecdotes brings us full circle from Samantha, the Harvard secretary I discussed at the beginning of this book who feared Jewish joking because it
offended
her generous humanism. I now arrive at the musicologist who embraces Jewish joking because it
exemplifies
that same generous impulse. There is an irony in the fact that the Czech welcomes the kind of laughter the United States fears. Samantha's idea of tolerance was shaped in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, which worked so hard to eliminate stereotyping that it left its loyal adherents nervous about any ethnic joke whatsoever. For the Czech Karbusicky, the very presence of a differentiated citizen—and perhaps the Jew in particular—defies the uniformity of the robotic subjects whom totalitarian regimes have tried to create and rule. For him, Jewish joking is proof of this creative defiance. He has lived under Communism; she has not. He has shared the Jew's fate; she has not. He would probably have roared at the joke about diabetes and added it to his collection; she worries lest mockery seduces us into accepting what we ought to resist.

As this book nears its end, some readers may still question the impulse to separate one culture from another rather than finding and celebrating their commonalities. Others may impatiently await a definition of Jewish humor that will distinguish it once and for all from Gentile varieties. To them all I would
say that the distinction lies more in the Jews' greater reliance on humor than in the precise nature of that humor. A reduced nation with a magnified image exploits the paradoxes of being an “ever-dying people,” as the scholar Simon Rawidowicz called the Jews. An exegetical tradition that values literate intelligence cultivates wit as one of its values, and a religious tradition of great self-restraint seeks permissible forms of self-expression. A culture forged in the ancient East that developed in the modern West, and a theology founded in divine election whose adherents have been targeted for genocide—such incongruities tickle the modern Jewish imagination. These are among the reasons for the proliferation of humor among Jews.