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  • On Slucki, Finder, and Patt's Laughter After:Humor and the Holocaust
  • Elyce Rae Helford
Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust. Edited by David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 352 pp., ISBN 978-0-8143-4438-6 (pb), $34.99.

I begin with a confession: I laugh at Holocaust-themed humor. From the Nazibashing wit of Mel Brooks to the taboo-breaking excess of Sarah Silverman, I find the subject of comedy after the Shoah fascinating and important. Thus, I share the interests of the editors of and contributors to Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust: the power and problematics of post-Holocaust humor are compelling and worthy of scholarly attention. Today, as survivors die and antisemitism (including denialism) raises its dangerous head once again, understanding the politics of laughter is vital.

Conventional wisdom and traditional scholarship have posited that we must present the Holocaust seriously and realistically. Anything else, the argument goes, will demean, devalue, and potentially lead to denial. Such a supposition neglects problems with claims of authenticity and the limits of verisimilitude. Representations are all and always artificial. Moreover, post-Holocaust humor can point to the limits—even the failures—of Holocaust tragedies and melodramas. As Slavoj Žižek posits, comedy, unlike dramatic realism, "accepts in advance its failure to render the horror of the Holocaust."1 [End Page 259]

The 1990s brought debates over the place of post-Holocaust humor in response to films including Train de vie (1998) and Jakob the Liar (1999) but especially Life Is Beautiful (1997). As the editors state, Roberto Benigni's picture "marked a turning point, if not in humorous representations of the Holocaust, then at least in discussions about the ethics and functions of such humor" (6–7). The collection Laughter After is possible, they argue, because the distance of twenty years have seen the "explosion of Holocaust humor on television, in stand-up comedy, and in literature in the Americas, Israel, Europe, and Australia" (7). Indeed, the volume offers valuable international and generic diversity, from Yiddish humor in Europe to Latin American caricaturas. One can only wonder what the editors might have concluded about the impact on Holocaust humor studies of the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit (2019).

The editors divide the book, semi-historically, into two sections: "Aftermath" and "Breaking Taboos." "Aftermath" contains three chapters focused on Yiddish humor in the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Netherlands and then shifts to post-Holocaust writing and film in two additional chapters about US texts dating from 1939 to 1972. "Breaking Taboos" contains nine chapters, all post-Holocaust in focus, from the 1960s to the present, in texts from Latin America, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States, including literature, film, television, stand-up comedy, newspaper comics, and shared jokes.

If I am a bit unsure of the rationale for and effectiveness of the book's structure (there are no section introductions), I am entirely engaged by the wideranging content of the chapters themselves. Although the "classics" are covered in several chapters—for example, The Great Dictator (1940), The Producers (1969), and so on—the collection's linchpin is its trio of chapters on Yiddish humor. Anna Shternshis begins with "Hitler Hanging on the Tree: Humor and Violence in Soviet Yiddish Folklore of World War II." She presents a compelling archival study that interrogates the mobilization of communist ideology in jokes and stories collected between 1941 and 1947 by Soviet Yiddish journalists. Her goal would have been to compare such official discourse with uncensored Yiddish jokes, but these are available only via previously collected and published volumes. In this context, Shternshis posits that the Soviet collection reveals "an attempt by the state to use Yiddish humor as a weapon against fascism" (17).

In "Too Soon? Yiddish Humor and the Holocaust in Postwar Poland" and "Is It Still Funny? Lin Jaldati and Yiddish Satire Before and After the Holocaust," [End Page 260] authors Marc Caplan and David Shneer consider additional Yiddish texts. The former analyzes the "conflicting imperatives of Yiddish humor and Holocaust commemoration" (40) through Moyshe Nudelman's 1947 volume Laughter through Tears, the Polish film Undsere kinder (1948...

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