The Big Book of Jewish Humour

"Not long after the Grimm Brothers and folklorists in Europe began to collect stories and songs, Jewish collectors did likewise, and one of the first things they recognized was the prominence of joking. In fact, some of the intellectuals of the time put their minds to collecting humour and there are some truly first rate collections of jokes, witticisms and proverbs (many of which are quite funny) in Yiddish and in Hebrew as well. We’re talking about the end of the 19th century. The Grimm brothers are a little bit earlier but in Europe, among Jewish intellectuals, this impulse to collect folklore began in the last decade of the 19th century in particular and the beginning of the 20th century. There’s Yehoshua Hana Ravnitsky who was also the editor of the Yiddish Zionist weekly that was published after the first Zionist Congress in 1897. He was a very prominent writer and thinker and his collection of Jewish jokes is marvellous. Then there is Alter Druyanov. In Israel recently, a selection of the Hebrew joke collections of Druyanov was reissued by a contemporary young Israeli, Danny Kerman. And he writes in the introduction that of all the books on his parents’ shelves, the three volumes of the Druyanov collection of jokes and satires were the books that were most thumbed through, that they most used. So he culled from that and had this illustrated in a very beautiful collection. Quality counts in anthologizing and in humour as much as in anything else and Waldoks and Novak are really professionals in this field. They have a personal delight in humour, but they also gave themselves over to this in a very scholarly way. They researched it for a long time. Actually they wanted to do a much larger version for the 25th anniversary book but they couldn’t because of copyright laws: they would have had to go back and revise the whole book and it became too complicated. So all they did was add an introduction in which they tried to include as much new material as they could. It’s a good question. It’s probably the only form of folklore that’s left because songwriting is copyrighted and storytelling is copyrighted. Jokes are probably the only form it’s difficult to copyright, but cartoons, for example, are copyrighted. One of the things I like about this book is the sensibility of the two people who have collected it. Their choice is very good and it’s capacious. They include formal literature, they include stories of very well known humorists and also some whom they uncover… I don’t know if it’s applicable to American society as a whole, but it’s certainly applicable to the realm of humour. The presence of Jewish comedy and Jewish comedians was so enormous up to the 1970s and 1980s that they had a tremendous impact on American humour and American entertainment in general. In that sense, the entertainment industry became much more Jewish, culturally and ethnically, I would say. But in some ways it became de-Judaized because, as the level of Jewish knowledge and Jewish observance decreased, what people called Jewish was less and less what had been known as Jewish behaviour and Jewish thinking and the Jewish way of life."