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The tradition of humor in Judaism dates back to the compilation of the Torah and the Midrash in the ancient Middle East, but the most famous form of Jewish humor consists of the more recent stream of verbal and frequently anecdotal humor of Ashkenazi Jews which took root in the United States during the last one hundred years, it even took root in secular Jewish culture. In its early form, European Jewish humor was developed in the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, with theological satire becoming a traditional way to clandestinely express opposition to Christianization.[1]
During the nineteenth century, modern Jewish humor emerged among German-speaking Jewish proponents of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), it matured in the shtetls of the Russian Empire, and then, it flourished in twentieth-century America, arriving with the millions of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and the early 1920s. Beginning on vaudeville and continuing on radio, stand-up, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American comedians have been Jewish.[2] Time estimated in 1978 that 80 percent of professional American comics were Jewish.[3]
Jewish humor is diverse, but most frequently, it consists of wordplay, irony, and satire, and the themes of it are highly anti-authoritarian, mocking religious and secular life alike.[4] Sigmund Freud considered Jewish humor unique in that its humor is primarily derived from mocking the in-group (Jews) rather than the "other". However, rather than simply being self-deprecating, it also contains an element of self-praise.
- ^ Tanny, Jarrod (2015). "The Anti-Gospel of Lenny, Larry and Sarah: Jewish Humor and the Desecration of Christendom". American Jewish History. 99 (2): 167–193. doi:10.1353/ajh.2015.0023. S2CID 162195868. Archived from the original on 2018-10-24. Retrieved 2016-01-30.
- ^ While numbers are inevitably fuzzy, Paul Chance, reviewing Lawrence Epstein's The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (Psychology Today, Jan-Feb, 2002) wrote, "While Jews make up only about 3 percent of the U.S. population, 80 percent of professional comics are Jewish." Accessed online Archived 2007-03-14 at the Wayback Machine 25 March 2007. Comedian Mark Schiff, reviewing the same book on Jewlarious.com Archived 2020-10-28 at the Wayback Machine, writes, "Most of the comedians that made us all laugh in the 1950s, '60s and '70s were Jewish." Similarly, Drew Friedman (author of Old Jewish Comedians), in a March 22, 2007 interview on Fridays with Mr. Media Archived 2007-06-21 at the Wayback Machine: "Somebody said, 'You could do an Old Protestant Comedian book,' and I said, 'Well, that would be a pamphlet, wouldn't it?'"
- ^ "Behavior: Analyzing Jewish Comics". October 2, 1978. Retrieved January 25, 2017.
- ^ Salvatore Attardo (25 February 2014). Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. SAGE Publications. p. 542. ISBN 978-1-4833-4617-5.