Old Jews Telling Jokes

Contents

A Note of Introduction

Old Jews Telling Jokes
.

It’s a simple concept, one of those ideas where the name tells you everything you need to know. Like “peanut butter” or “Dungeons & Dragons.” Or “autoerotic asphyxiation.”

Old Jews Telling Jokes
. No-brainer, right? Let’s face it—jokes are funny. Jews are funny. Old Jews—funnier still.

But, like every success story, it was an uphill climb.

Eric Spiegelman and his business partner, Tim Williams, were starting an Internet content company and they asked me if I had any ideas for a site. I said yes. I have a great one. How about a site for social networking where you could reconnect with all the people that you had spent the last twenty years trying to avoid?

They said it would never catch on.

So I pitched them my second idea. Porn. As in: pornography. We could just use the Internet to distribute naked videos of all sorts of people having sex with each other in novel and interesting ways.

They told me to stop being ridiculous.

Why would anyone want to watch porn at home when you could go to a dirty, crappy theater in a horrible part of town and watch it with a bunch of unwashed strangers?

I said fine. You guys want to be like that? Here’s an idea for you. Why don’t we just go videotape my dad and his friends telling the same old jokes they’ve been telling for forty years?

And
Old Jews Telling Jokes
was born.

All kidding aside,
Old Jews Telling Jokes
did begin in an abandoned storefront in my hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey, with a group of twenty of my father’s friends and relatives. He cast people who he thought could “tell a good story,” and indeed that’s what it’s all about. We lit the set carefully and shot against a plain white background, to indicate that these were more than jokes; they were portraits. We also decided that no joke teller could be younger than sixty years old. We wanted a lifetime of experience to infuse these jokes.

Old jokes, fairly or not, tend to be stigmatized. I think this has something to do with the way we naturally respond to humor. Things are much funnier when they surprise us; therefore the first time we hear a particular joke is probably the best time we will ever hear it. To some immeasurable extent, it lessens in value with each hearing.

Despite this, jokes, because of their ability to entertain, tend to last longer than other forms of oral communication. They get passed around and around, sometimes for decades. The jokes themselves become time capsules, revealing the fears and anxieties and celebrating the joys of all aspects of life, including its end.

Needless to say, our site became a hit. It only took me three or four days to explain to the older joke tellers that “going viral” was a good thing. As of this writing the jokes have been seen six million times. We have shot rounds of jokes in New York City and in Los Angeles, and we have plans to shoot soon in Florida and London. The beauty of shooting in Los Angeles was that Eric, a native of that city, tasked his father with putting together the cast of old Jews. I found great satisfaction in the symmetry of our two fathers, on opposite coasts, pooling friends to come preserve and celebrate these stories and jokes with us.

This book endeavors to take the process a step further. We have categorized the jokes into chapters, roughly tracing the trajectory of the Jewish experience in America. Make no mistake: We do not attempt scholarly analysis—we’ll gladly leave that work in the competent hands of academics. Rather our goal is a portrait, both in photos and jokes, of an evolving culture.

1
The Jewish Mother

So starts
Portnoy’s Complaint
, Philip Roth’s definitive kvetch novel of the American Jewish Mother. What’s interesting to me is that Roth’s portrait doesn’t start with any of the petty stereotypical claims—overprotective, anxious, neurotic. Instead Portnoy’s mother is defined by her power.

Coincidentally, when I posted my own mother’s joke to our website, it was accompanied by the following description: “Diane Hoffman is my mom. She can do pretty much anything and, at any given time, is doing everything.” The phrasing may be less sublime, but the sentiment is related. If we, and by “we” I mean the Jewish boys, have an issue with our mothers, the issue is with their abundance of gifts, talents, and abilities, or at least with our perception of these things.

But why are these Jewish mothers so exaggerated? Are there steroids in the flanken? What has created this über-race of shape-shifting moms?

Some scholars suggest that it is intrinsically tied to the Jewish suburban flight during the middle of the last century. For generations the mother had occupied the central role in the Jewish family. In the shtetl, they ran the household, which could include domesticated animals and small farming, while the fathers often spent copious time studying Torah. Suddenly these ferociously intelligent, energetic women were stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere with little or nothing to do. By the 1950s, many could even afford a little help around the house with the laundry and the dusting.

So what’s a ravenously curious, intellectually gifted, ambitious woman to do? Many joined associations and community groups such as Hadassah and synagogue sisterhoods. Many ran parent-teacher organizations and started book clubs and charity organizations. And starting in the 1960s, many started to enter the labor market. But before having a job became a generally accepted option, many turned their laserlike focus to their children. This had a mixed effect, which we could address further if we had a chapter on psychoanalysis, but unfortunately the publishers didn’t find our collection of 378 Freudian knock-knock jokes to be worth printing.

One might ask—why start the book with a chapter on Jewish mothers?

The answer is simple. That’s where it all starts.