The Jewish Joke: An essay with examples (less essay, more examples)

(Paperback, Main)

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'This book is funny, clever and, at times, heartbreaking. In other words, Jewish' David Baddiel

'[Baum is] intellectually luminous, psychologically penetrating, existentially anxious, and wonderfully funny' - Zadie Smith

'Hilarious and thought-provoking' - David Schneider

The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, but still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke Why are Jews so often thought of as 'funny' And how old can a joke get

The Jewish Joke is a brilliant - and very funny - riff on Jewish jokes, about what marks them apart from other jokes, why they are important to Jewish identity and how they work. Ranging from self-deprecation to anti-Semitism, politics to sex, it looks at the past of Jewish joking and asks whether the Jewish joke has a future. With jokes from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho mostly), this is both a compendium and a commentary, light-hearted and deeply insightful.

Reviews

'This book is funny, clever and, at times, heartbreaking. In other words, Jewish' - David Baddiel

'[Baum is] intellectually luminous, psychologically penetrating, existentially anxious, and wonderfully funny' - Zadie Smith

'A Jew and a non-Jew read Devorah Baum's The Jewish Joke. They both found it hilarious and thought-provoking. Because it is' - David Schneider

'Hers is the book to turn to if you're looking to amuse your friends and has something in common with the joke books we used to pass around as kids ... [Shows] the sorrow that is the dark underside of laughter - sorrow that belongs to everyone' - Erica Wagner

'A breezy, accessible meditation on how [Jewish] humour works, and why it is so integral to Jewish identity... There is much for the scholar to enjoy in Baum's erudite but lightly sketched analysis of how humour helps us to deal with ageing, dislocation, impossible families and sexual confusion. Alternatively, you could just read it for the gags' - Matthew Reisz

Author Bio

Devorah Baum is the author of Feeling Jewish (a book for just about anyone) (Yale, 2017) and co-director of the documentary film The New Man (2016). She is Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and also attached to the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.