Not always amusing or peculiar
Anthony Blond
WHAT'S THE JOKE?: A STUDY OF JEWISH HUMOUR THROUGH THE AGES by Chaim Bermant
Weidenfeld, £12.95 Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous.
(Abraham wheedling with God about Sodom) When there's a quiet wedding they have something to be quiet about.
(The Talmud) The reason why there are so many Yiddish words for penis is not an obsession with sex . . . but rather an obsession with failure. (The author) I do not mean to say that women have no character; on the contrary, they have a new one every day.
(Heine) A vast crowd assembled to pay him [Sholom Aleichem] tribute in the Carnegie Hall, and he was then left to starve.
(The author) . she set out for London, where she suffered one of the major disappointments of her life. She learned that Big Ben was a clock. (Joan Rivers)
Mr Bermant acknowledges that he was commissioned by his editor at Weiden- feld to write the book under review, which stamps, but does not damn, it as a piece of `bookmaking'. It creaks a bit, as the above, well-intentioned choice of quotations may show, as he pursues his appointed task with the determination of a United States mail- man to get from the Beginning — the patriarch Abraham — to what is un- doubtedly (by any standards) the End the comedienne, Joan Rivers. This person (she would not allow any other appella- tion) incarnates much of what is horrible in today's entertainment on television, but her success does not appear to derive from her being a Jewess.
The presence of Abraham and Ms Riv- ers within the same volume suggests that Mr Bermant is making the proposition, 'If it's funny it's Jewish, and if it's Jewish it's funny.' Abraham arguing with God de- monstrates humour on neither side but more the familiar Jewish claim to be on intimate terms with the great, in this case the greatest. 'You are our God and we are your people!' cry the Jews on the eve of Yom Kippur and then in an undertone a wag might add, glancing at Auschwitz, `Next time would You mind choosing someone else?' Now that is quite funny and certainly Jewish, but how about this? 'The girl was a tramp from the moment her mother's waters broke. You think I'm kidding? When the doctor spanked her at birth, she cried for more.' Joan Rivers again, and fairly funny, but surely not particularly Jewish? It is her delivery, apparently, which makes them double up in the lounge. It is Mr Bermant's delivery — he calls this new genre Tampax Humour — which sustains What's the Joke?, better considered as a collection of amiable essays on matters Jewish, of which he is the current cognoscente, rather than a thema- tic study of a question to which the answer must be, 'There isn't one, for you haven't told us.'
There is nothing more Jewish, one would suppose, than the silent movies of Charles Chaplin, or indeed more Jewish than the noisy life of an immigrant who became a neurotic randy tycoon, terrified of death. Mr Bermant properly disposes of the myth (and of the theme of his book) that Chaplin was Jewish in his introduc- tion.
I remember attending a press conference called by Chaplin at the Savoy for foreign correspondents only — he was going through a bout of anglophobia — when he said wearily, 'Sometimes I wish I were Jewish — it would make life easier — but I'm not.' Chaplin' sounds Jewish, but snobs and readers of the Spectator (among whom I include myself) will know that it is rather a grand English name. Mr Bermant chooses the story of Morde- cai to illustrate humour in the Old Testa- ment, but except for Jews, who celebrate the occasion as Purim, it is not a funny tale unless one enjoys the humour of the gallows constructed by the villain (Haman) for use by the hero (Mordecai). Through the good offices of the King of Persias mistress Esther, a nice girl who doesn't let on that she was also Jewish until the last reel, the roles are reversed and Haman, not Mordecai, swings. Ha, ha. Purim became a sort of Mardi Gras in the steds and ghettos of European Jewry and it was compulsory for pious Jews, including rabbis (especially rabbis; one marked the event by slitting his colleague's throat, but it was all right because God restored him to life), to become spectacularly and publicly drunk. Today, Purim is not celebrated so enthusiastically by the Jews of the Di- aspora, 'possibly because they are by now so integrated into their host societies that they no longer need licensed occasions to let their hair down.' Precisely. Assimilation, and antisemitism, to which the author only refers in his prize-winning essay on Heine, are the two topics he funks. They are two sides of the smile shekel, the monetary unit of Israel, where there are no Jewish jokes. (One of his `Israeli' stories, incidentally, about the stolen car, the theatre tickets and the burgled house is pure Kensington Seven- ties and has been made into an English film.) One thing Jews cannot survive is indif- ference. 'Two Gun' Cohen, an East End, Jewish pug, San Yat-sen's bodyguard and eventually a Chinese warlord, told ine, the following story. A deputation of Chinese, knowing him to be a wise man (he imported guns in Singer sewing-machine crates), asked him to visit their village t° sort out their identity crisis; they didn't eat pork and every seventh day they didn't work. The didn't look Jewish but the Jews of Cochin look Indian and the Falashas African. 'Two Gun' explained to them that a millennium of tolerance had eroded their Jewish identity. Jews need a touch of antisemitism to survive, as Jews: it is instinctive with people brought up as Christians and so long as that education persists, so will they.
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