Jewish Comedy: A Serious History by Jeremy Dauber (review)

Much has been written about Jewish humor; many engaging and insightful works have tackled assorted aspects, from its origin and vehicles to its impact on various cultural areas. Nevertheless, the subject is far from exhausted. On the contrary, its richness and scope continue to appeal to researchers and inform fresh and challenging approaches. To quote one of the most recent such works, "Almost as daunting as the corpus of Jewish humor is the supply of scholarship and commentary that threatens to overwhelm it."¹ It is to this overwhelming field that Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy: A Serious History brings a sensible and nuanced contribution.

Jewish Comedy does not build toward a particular thesis. It rather explores the manifestations of Jewish wit and humor along more than two millennia, following the development of seven well-defined categories that capture essential and definitive traits of Jewish comedy. These "conceptual rubrics" (xiv), as Dauber calls them, derive from their main functions, that is, responding to anti-Semitism and abuse, scrutinizing the normative character of the community, attempting behavioral correctives through satire and stereotype analysis, reflecting community identity through aspects that range from a sometimes vulgar attitude toward corporeality to the appreciation of intellectual prowess, negotiating the relation with divinity, and exploring "the blurred and ambiguous nature of Jewishness itself" (xiv).

Each of the book's seven chapters engages one of the already classic characteristics of Jewish humor. The categories delineated by Dauber form the foundation of the literature that discusses Jewish humor. Self-deprecation, victimization, bittersweetness, subtly disguised hostility, or defiance relying on intellectual superiority are probably the most commonly discussed traits in examinations of responses to anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. The high incidence of ill-omened scenarios and catastrophic outcomes, the rather strong sense of inadequacy conveyed, the proclivity toward an indecorous—even morbid—exploration of bodily functions, and the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of Jewish humor have been examined by other authors as well.² However, Dauber's book participates in these conversations by complementing them with an exploration of various subthemes, such as persecution and subversion, the Holocaust, assimilation and acculturation, diasporic evolution, stereotypes and stereotypical perception, and the gender question. Dauber's contribution lies in the insightful readings that he provides of jokes and examples from films, fiction, stand-up routines, and television shows he considers relevant to the understanding of the specificity of Jewish comedy.

The nuances of Dauber's examination challenge oversimplified perceptions of Jewish comedy. For instance, he exposes the image of the shtetl as a counterfeit idealized version of Jewish life (51); he corrects Theodor Reik's claim that Jewish humor has never targeted bodily deformities, handicaps, and other physical frailties (131); and he offers an insightful interpretation of modern Jewish politics through an analysis of ideologically informed parodies (151-57). Dauber directs his analytical and critical skills toward the works of Bellow, Malamud, Elkin, and Roth in order to engage theological questions and recalibrate the clichéd view of Jewish comedy as laughter through tears, and he extends his analysis to the present with a brief overview of twenty-first-century writers (189-200). He also refines the lopsided view of Jewish wit as "based on aggression, masochism, and the like"—a perspective derived from the Freudian thesis regarding the aggression that underlies Jewish humor and further developed by Theodor Reik and Martin Grotjahn—by arguing that Jewish comedy is much more varied and diverse (207-9). Dauber is also careful to avoid the presentation of Jewish comedy as an exclusively masculine affair by examining the contribution of women. For instance, the work of the "unkosher comediennes," he demonstrates, proves relevant to the development of Jewish humor (228-31), and his analysis of them provides a transition to his investigation of misogyny and female stereotypes in the Jewish comic imagination (231-40). Dauber concludes his history with an exploration of the relation between humor and individual/ ethnic anxiety resulting in a form of "disguised acculturation." This section includes one...