The Jewish Joke

An essay with examples (less essay, more examples)

Devorah Baum

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782831938
• Print ISBN:
  9781781255247
  9781781255230

'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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Less Essay, More Examples
• And Finally …
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Devorah Baum
• Copyright