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Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS 113 Sitting in the Earth and Laughing: A Handbook of Humor, by A. Roy Eckardt. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992. 237 pp. $29.95. Throughout his long academic career Professor Eckardt has published a number of "liminal" works-books which stand at the boundaries of disciplines and religions, for example, Black-Woman-jew, Jews and Christians, Your People, My People, etc. Sitting in the Earth and Laughing is characteristic Eckardt, with a comic flair and the wisdom of age. Written by a senior associate fellow of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Oxford, the book looks at humor from the perspectives of theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, as well as both Christian and Jewish experience. Sitting in the Earth and Laughing is also a liminal work on other counts. It is, first, a book by a noted scholar of religion about humorwhen we tend to take both our scholarship and our religion very seriously. Truth, insight, and profundity as well as matters offaith and the sacred are associated with seriousness, solemnity, and gravity-not humor. Yet, as Eckardt demonstrates, scholarship without humor is a distortion of the very humanity being studied and doing the studying. Humor is an important dimension of human nature and an essential response to the human condition. . Likewise, religion without humor becomes a caricature of itself, for religion is always the belief and practice of a particular people who-like all other human beings-are finite, fallible, mortal, sinful, and frequently foolish. Without this confession made by humor and the humorist, religion easily fosters attributes which are the very opposite of its profession: pride, pretension, idolatry, oppression, animosity, hatred, etc. Religion also, thereby, ignores an important ally in coping with the various tensions, frustrations, and contradictions of Qur being-suspended as we are between spirit and flesh, the finite and the infinite, time and eternity, order and chaos, being and nothingness, life and death, hope and despair. These indeed are major sources and themes of humor. Second, the book has an unusual format and rhythm as it accommodates the paradox of taking humor seriously and dealing with serious subjects humorously. Eckardt alternates chapters between analysis of 114 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 humor and collections of miscellaneous anecdotes, jokes, limericks, nonsense, etc., so that the book combines a survey and discussion of the main interpretations of humor with a compendium of humorous materials. What? A scholarly book on humor having humor in it! Actually, the alternation between analysis and comic interlude is refreshing, like the alternation in classical Japanese theater between the tragic Noh drama and comic skits (kyogen, "mad words"). Either format is worth the price of the book, but the two formats together provide a real bargain. Third, the book is written by a Gentile aiming at universality of scope and application, while having a special interest in Jewish humor and the problematic of humor post-holocaust. Jewish humor is seen as making a special contribution, not only to the ranks of professional comedians, but to certain emphases and dimensions of the comic spirit and perspective. In the United States, for example, while the majority of comedians are Jewish, Jews comprise only 2.7 percent of the population. This, argues, Eckardt, is in part because Jews have had to use humor as a mechanism for coping with a history ofcompressed and exaggerated incongruity: betWeen an exalted theological status and contribution as God's Chosen and the humiliation, hatred, and persecution often suffered at the hand of others. Humor has served as a form of symbolic transcendence over circumstances in which a people are trapped and victimized. Humor, also, and remarkably, has provided a away of converting pain into pleasure, suffering into joy, and despair into hope. As long as the sense of humor remains, the human spirit is never fully conquered nor hope entirely extinguished. Even in the apparent silence or absence or abandonment of God, the resilience of a people oft-conquered but never vanquished is to be heard in words such as those of Woody Allen: "Not only is God dead: try getting a plumber on weekends!" Conrad Hyers Department of Religion Gustavus Adolphus College...

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