Spengler uses the abominable and extremely unfunny joke of Larry David on Saturday Night Live recently as a springboard for a discussion of the special qualities of Jewish humor—the kind of Jewish humor that is funny, and is characteristically Jewish: “All characteristically Jewish humor has a profoundly religious foundation: It stems from the absurdity of the encounter of finite humanity with infinite divinity.”
I especially enjoyed this one, which I’d never heard before I read his piece:
During the Days of Awe before the Day of Repentance, Yom Kippur, the rabbi is meditating in the synagogue. He prays, “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! Or the son of man, that thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Lord, I am as nothing in thy sight.” The cantor is moved, and he also prays, “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Lord, I am as nothing in thy sight.” And the janitor hears, and he is moved, and he starts to pray: “Lord, what is man, that thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Lord, I am as nothing in thy sight.” The cantor nudges the rabbi and says, “Look who thinks he’s nothing in the sight of God!”
I told an old Jewish joke at the end of this post:
In the olden days, pharmacies often had soda counters, too. An elderly woman walked into that kind of pharmacy and goes up to the pharmacist, and asks (best done with a Yiddish accent), “Do you do test the pee here?” The pharmacist answers (best done with a generic American accent), “Yes, we do urine analysis.” Then she asks, “And do you test the spit, too?” He answers, nodding, “Yes, we do sputum analysis.” Then she asks, “And how about the kaka? Do you test that, too?” He nods and solemnly says, “Yes, we do fecal analysis.”
She says, “Okay, then – vash your hands and make me a chocolate malt.”
I’m not one of those people with a huge storehouse of set jokes in my head. I know maybe five, and I can tell maybe one of them effectively. But I’ve heard plenty, Jewish and otherwise, and I disagree that “all characteristically Jewish humor has a profoundly religious foundation.” I see the joke I just related as characteristically Jewish, and it seems to me it has little to no religious foundation, as do many of the jokes I can think of. Some of them have to do with foolish people. Some have to do with self-deprecation. This one has to do with the joys of complaining:
A tall man,6’3”, somewhat overweight, is attempting to get comfortable in the small space of an upper-birth Pullman Sleeper on a train between Chicago and New York. He turns on his right side, then on his left, then on his stomach, then on his back. He plumps his pillow. Finally, the clackety-clack of the tracks begins to put him to sleep when from the other end of the sleeper car he hears a female voice: “Oy, am I thirsty! Oy, am I thirsty!” Over and over, at regular but all-too-short intervals, the voice calls out, “Oy, am I thirsty! Oy, am I thirsty!”
The man, realizing that sleep will be impossible if this woman’s thirst isn’t slaked, climbs out of his sleeper, puts on his bathrobe, and walks to the end of the car, where there is a water cooler and paper cups, one of which he fills. Following the sound of the voice – “Oy, am I thirsty! Oy, am I thirsty!” – he walks to the other end of the car and knocks gently. An older woman pulls back the drape that encloses her sleeper.
“Excuse me, Madame,” the man says, “I couldn’t help overhear that you were thirsty, and I thought perhaps this cup of water might help.”
“You, sir,” the woman says, “are a real gentleman. Thank you so much.” She takes the cup, and closes the drape.
The man climbs back into his own sleeper. Once again he struggles to find a comfortable position, turning and twisting every which way. Once again he plumps his pillow. Once again the rhythmic clacking of the tracks works its hypnotic spell and he is about to fall asleep when he hears the same voice call out: “Oy, was I thirsty! Oy, was I thirsty!”
I know a much longer and more elaborate version of that joke, one I think is superior. But it can only be told really successfully orally, because it relies in part on accents for its humor. In this version, instead of one man trying to sleep in another berth on the train and hearing the complaining woman, it involves a group of men playing poker in an adjacent club car. They hear the woman moaning about being thirsty (Brooklyn accent: “Oy, am I thoisty!). The joke-teller is supposed to draw it out much longer; they hear her over and over in an ever-escalating wail, from a soft moan to finally a really annoying yell (the joke teller must demonstrate this), over a period of a half-hour or so. Finally, one of the guys takes the cigar out of his mouth and yells back, “Lady, I’ll get you a drink if you just SHUT UP!” and he gets her the drink of water. She thanks him. A half-hour passes peacefully. And then they hear the low moan, “Oy, VAS I thoisty!”
This became a running joke between me and my husband and our son. Whenever something (mildly) unpleasant happened, and we were thinking back on it and about to say something about it, it was fun to preface it with “Oy, vas I thoisty!”
The Commentary challenge was to connect the joke with some Talmudic wisdom. I don’t know what it would be, but perhaps something to do with remembering Biblical travails so that we don’t forget our deliverance by God?
Sure enough, when I looked up the winning response, that was the gist of it. Along with another very funny joke:
Three rabbis, meeting over lunch, are discussing problems in their respective synagogues: gossip, fundraising, the fees for guest speakers.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” one of the rabbis interjects, “I hope you won’t think this too trivial, but our synagogue has of late had an infestation of mice, which has been very disturbing, especially for our female congregants.”
The eyes of the other two rabbis light up, and each admits that his own synagogue has had the same problem. One asks the first rabbi what he has done about it.
“I arranged through our shammes to set more than 75 mouse traps throughout the synagogue. But it didn’t work out. The traps would sometimes go off during services, which was most distracting. The net result was that we caught four mice and still have the problem.”
“I called in Orkin, the exterminators,” says the second rabbi. “They caught a dozen or so mice and charged us $1,100. But we, too, still have mice in the synagogue. Most unpleasant.”
“Gentlemen,” announces the third rabbi, “I don’t mean to brag, but I was able completely to solve the mice problem in our synagogue, and at minimal cost.”
The first two rabbis eagerly ask how.
“Very simple,” the third rabbi says. “What I did was buy a 25-pound wheel of Chilton cheese, which I set on the bima. Lo, in no time at all, 243 mice appeared. I bar-mitzvahed them all, and, gentlemen, they never returned.”
If you don’t get that one, I’ll explain (although explaining a joke does not generally enhance it; you either get it or you don’t). For many American Jews, they take religious instruction until their Bar or Bat Mitzvahs and never again return to the synagogue.