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Jewish humor dates back to the compilation of Talmud and Midrash.[1] In the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, theological satire was a traditional way to clandestinely express opposition to Christianization.[2]
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.[3] Time estimated in 1978 that 80 percent of professional American comics were Jewish.[4]
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.[5] 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.
- ^ Humor in the Talmud and Midrash
- ^ 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.