Humor in Architecture: Jewish Wit on Béla Lajta’s Buildings

Introduction

In the present article I posit a link between the “architectural jokes” by Jewish-Hungarian architect Béla Lajta (born Béla Leitersdorfer, 1873–1920) and Jewish wit in fin-de-siècle Hungary. By applying humor theories, I look at their formal artistic manifestation and socio-political import in the context of both the intellectual history of the Habsburg Empire and the framework of Jewish–Christian relationships in modern Europe. The analysis of Jewish humor is especially challenging, as it reflects a complex web of the minority’s human, cultural, and religious relationships with the surrounding majority.

Humor is often associated with the grotesque and a neglect or denial of tectonic principles in architecture characteristic of the heyday of postmodernism:¹ manifestations of humor in contemporary architecture are sometimes related to deconstruction, although their presumably Jewish aspects elude purposeful analysis.² However, mere grotesque and distortion, erroneous tectonics, or unconventional design may make architecture weird or depressing rather than “humoristic.” I suggest that humor in architecture should exceed the medium and refer to extraneous contents, just as the simple text of a joke often refers to content beyond the given discourse.

Theories of Humor and Architecture

For the sake of this brief survey, theories of humor can be divided into four main groups:³

1. 1. The incongruity theory, which sees humor as a response to ambiguity, logical impossibility, irrelevance, and inappropriateness, put forward by Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard.⁴

2. 2. The superiority theory, which contends that humor arises from a “sudden glory” felt when we recognize our supremacy over others, put forward by Thomas Hobbes (I show that in some cases it can also be inferiority).⁵

3. 3. The relief theory which maintains that humor is fundamentally a way to release or save energy generated by repression, put forward by Sigmund Freud and David Spencer.⁶

4. 4. The play theory, which sees humor as an extension of animal play.⁷

Before the onset of Postmodernism, humor had rarely been theoretically discussed as a constitutive element of architecture. Theories of humor are often applied to the architecture that is taken as language,⁸ in which its semantic “units” are composed according to a certain “grammar.” Such units are socially and historically accepted architectural elements: the masses, spaces, tectonics, and textures of a building. The grammar is understood as comprising conventional rules of composition, proportions, and the expression of tectonics.⁹ Either violation of the normative “grammar” or a combination of mutually incompatible “units” creates incongruity in architecture. I examine a mismatch in shape, in architectural meaning, or in context as an architect’s purposeful message, which in the given historical, social, religious, personal, or other contexts could be accepted as humoristic.

Jews in Fin-de-Siècle Budapest

Indicative of Béla Lajta’s multiethnic and multicultural immediate surroundings in Budapest was the variety of spoken languages. Jews spoke predominantly Hungarian, Yiddish (or a Yiddish-inflected German dialect), German, and Slavonic languages – Polish, Czech, and Slovak. By city quarter, German was mainly spoken in Wasserstadt (Víziváros), Serbian in Raizenstadt (Rácváros or Tabán), Hungarian and Slovak almost everywhere, and Yiddish in the Jewish Quarter. For many Jews, who represented more than a fifth of the entire population of Budapest,¹⁰ the multiethnic townsfolk were divided into two parts: Jewish and non-Jewish.¹¹ Despite the government’s endeavor to create a homogeneous Hungarian culture in the capital city, Budapest remained multicultural throughout Habsburg times.¹² Hungarian nationalists castigated Budapest as too cosmopolitan and preferred provincial towns with a more homogeneous Hungarian population.

Although Jews gradually abandoned Yiddish during the course of the nineteenth century and later German as well, adopting Hungarian as their first language, they – and their humor – remained largely multilingual.¹³ Yiddish and German were the prevailing languages of Jewish humoristic performances in the famous Jewish cabarets until 1907,¹⁴ and written satirical works that also appeared in Hungarian were understandable to the more Magyarized provincial Jewry.

Jewish Wit in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary

The hub of written Jewish humor was...