Only Joking

Monday night I was at Youngstown State for a lecture on Jewish humor and Christianity. The speaker was Jarrod Tanny, who teaches Jewish history at UNC Wilmington and wrote a book called The Seinfeld Talmud. He’d already written Tales of a Yid in Dixieland, about the Bible Belt, so the host suggested a sequel now that he’d seen the place, Tales of a Yid in the Rust Belt, and promised us an evening that would be “both educational and hilarious.”

Tanny opened with a content warning.

He started with Lenny Bruce, who stood on stage in the early sixties and took personal responsibility for the crucifixion on behalf of the Jewish people. A two-thousand-year-old charge, Bruce figured, ought to have a statute of limitations by now. Chicago’s vice squad warned a club owner that his license was in danger if Bruce mocked religion, and Bruce was convicted of obscenity after a run there in December 1962. His own explanation was that he’d picked on the wrong God. At one of his trials he told the court he was a Jew, and he wanted the record to show that “the Jew is not morose.”

He went back to Toldot Yeshu, folk tales that traveled the diaspora in several languages and turned the Christian story inside out, and to the Yiddish that carried those jokes right up to the eve of the Holocaust, when eleven million Jews still spoke it. His phrase for all of it was “weapons of the weak.” A community with no army and no say over what was preached about it had one way to answer. “It was their only way to fight back,” he said.

Then he brought it forward through Philip Roth, Kinky Friedman, Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and the material got a lot less polite. The stakes changed, though. Today it gets a Jewish comedian, in his words, “commercial success and adoring fans,” and “not pogroms and expulsions.”

Avraham throws a great feast on the day Yitzchak is weaned. Yitzchak’s name means “he will laugh,” and last year this column spent its whole length on Sarah’s two laughs, the one in the tent and the one with a baby in her arms. One verse after the feast the root comes back, and this time it goes wrong.

וַתֵּ֨רֶא שָׂרָ֜ה אֶֽת־בֶּן־הָגָ֧ר הַמִּצְרִ֛ית אֲשֶׁר־יָלְדָ֥ה לְאַבְרָהָ֖ם מְצַחֵֽק׃

Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing.

— Bereshit 21:9

JPS gives metzachek as “playing.” In the next verse Sarah tells Avraham to send Hagar and her son away for good. That’s a lot of fallout for a boy playing, and the rabbis noticed.

In Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbi Akiva hears the word the way Potiphar’s wife uses it about Yosef, and reads sexual misconduct. Rabbi Yishmael hears the Golden Calf, where the people sat down to eat and drink and got up l’tzachek, and reads idolatry. Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Yose HaGlili, hears the young men who “sport” before Avner and Yoav and then kill each other, and reads bloodshed. Rashi brings all three.

Rabbi Azariah, in the name of Rabbi Levi, has Yishmael invite Yitzchak out to the field, shoot arrows at him, and pass it off as a game. His proof text is Mishlei, the man who scatters firebrands and arrows at his neighbor and then says, “I was only joking.”

That’s the joke as cover for a weapon, and it belongs to the one holding the bow. Monday night was about the other kind — the joke as the only weapon there was, in the hands of people who’d never been allowed a bow.

“Rabbi Akiva used to say something to his discredit,” says Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who gets the last word, “and I say something in his favor.” His reading is about inheritance. When Yitzchak was born everyone was happy, and Yishmael told them they were fools. He’s the firstborn, he says, so he takes a double portion. Sarah’s answer proves it, Rabbi Shimon says, because what she objects to is “the inheritance.”

An older brother telling the guests at his baby brother’s party that they’ve got the math wrong is still a nasty laugh. But a family fight over who gets what is a lot smaller than idolatry, adultery, or murder, and Rabbi Shimon would rather the boy be guilty of the smaller thing. Four great rabbis heard the worst. The fifth went looking for something better, found it in the very next verse, and said so against his own teacher.

At question time on Monday a professor in the audience, a Catholic by his own account, told Tanny the talk “rests on a paradox, which is what great humor is about.” It was “very funny,” he said, “but behind it is a very severe kind of seriousness.” Then he took a swing at his own church for not knowing its own history. The host offered the students extra points to ask a question. There were books for sale, and my husband and I bought a copy of The Seinfeld Talmud from him.

So a Jewish historian spent an hour in Ohio on jokes Jews once had to tell in code, and a Catholic professor told him they were very funny. Bruce had to say it to a judge. The Jew is not morose.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham