For Jews, Laughter Should Be a Religious Experience

The Jewish penchant for humor, suggests Meir Soloveichik, can be traced back to the Bible itself—specifically, the passage from Genesis read on Rosh Hashanah, which describes the birth of Abraham’s son Isaac. Since Abraham laughs when God tells him the improbable news that he and his ninety-year-old wife will have a son, God instructs him to name the child “Isaac,” which derives from the Hebrew word for “laugh.” Seeing this as evidence for Immanuel Kant’s theory that “the essence of humor lies in incongruity”—that is, in the unexpected—Soloveichik proposes a theological interpretation of Jews’ love of the comic: