From King David to Larry David: A New Look at Jewish Humor

One could feel sorry for authors competing for an American Jewish book award against Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A Serious History. Winsomely erudite, this newly released book is a pleaser. Although analyzing humor is notoriously capable of killing it—“You want a joke book, buy a joke book,” Dauber warns at the start—his serious history of Jewish comedy is engaging and historically informative even when it’s not ha-ha funny. Which is not to say that it’s free of shortcomings; but these can wait.

A professor of Yiddish literature at Columbia University, where he also directs its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Dauber is the author of several excellent monographs on Yiddish and Hebrew literature and a fine biography of Sholem Aleichem. But all along, he reports, he has been thinking about Jewish humor. To his mind, as he writes in this book’s preface, the story of Jewish comedy—“if you tell it the right way”—is nothing less than the story of Jewish civilization.

To tell it the right way, Dauber traces seven thematic threads that he finds running throughout Jewish comedy over the centuries: comedy as a response to anti-Semitism; as a vehicle for internal social critique; as a reflection of Jewish intellectuality and book-centeredness; as a celebration of Jewish vulgarity and body-centeredness; as metaphysical questing and questioning; as a spotlight on ordinary Jewish experience; and, finally, as a meditation on—and often an enactment of—the sometimes elusive nature of Jewishness itself. Each thread receives a chapter unto itself, and each chapter illustrates its theme in chronological fashion, with examples that range from, as it were, King David to Larry David.