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When situating the Gospel of Mark within a Jewish context, incongruities concerning both Jesus's character and the collective character of Jesus's disciples become apparent. The Markan Christ, for one thing, is a non-Christ. He does not defeat the powers that be (rather, the powers that be defeat him), nor does he inaugurate a messianic age. His disciples, additionally, are generally clueless, and do not understand who Jesus is or what his theologies are. This essay puts into conversation the Markan narrative with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to consider whether humour might be part of Mark's Gospel. More specifically, it unpacks the self-disparaging humour of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (e.g. what it is; where it is; how it functions), and question intertextually if or to what extent Mark's Gospel might be implementing a similar self-disparagement as a way to open up space for critical reflection and critique—a self-disparagement that, when held up by humour, does not leave readers falling down an existential hole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prime-time television comedy Arab Labor, created by Israeli-Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua, allows viewers to reconceptualize Israeli collective memory, rendering it more inclusive for non-Jewish citizens of the state. A close visual and textual analysis of one particularly bold episode, titled "Memorial Day" (Zikaron), reveals that the episode aims to bridge an existing gap between two formative narratives: the celebratory Jewish War of Independence and the Nakba, the Palestinian disaster of 1948. This daring cultural suggestion, indeed an antidiscourse, identifies productive intersections between these competing narratives. Moreover, by employing humor, irony, and the genre of the sitcom, the creators of the series mask a volatile criticism of prevailing social conventions and norms in contemporary Israeli society. The creative resolutions to the various crises the storyline raises—resolutions that on many occasions transgress social boundaries—create a meaningful space for identity negotiation and cultural intervention in the Israeli sociopolitical arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Alter Druyanow’s popular work:The Book of Jokes and Witticisms(Sefer habediha vehahiddud, Frankfurt, 1922) as a turning point in the development of modern Jewish humour. The acceptance of the book is ascribed mainly to its Zionist agenda expressed not only in the formation of its repertoire, but also in the censorship of a large collection of sexual jokes. Following a discussion of Druyanow’s main motives and anthologizing principals, the article includes a first exposure of these jokes, aiming to analyse their social roles. The comparative reading of the jokes in their historical and cultural contexts points at what the Jewish society of that time considered as its “other” – from competing religious groups to other threatening reference groups within this society, such as women and assimilated Jews. In this way, the censored jokes shed light not only on the marginality of the East European Jews and their feelings of inferiority but also on their creative response to them and their ideological horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with a typology of 45 techniques of humor that I found when doing research on the mechanisms that generate humor in texts, lists the techniques and applies them to a Jewish joke. It references the work of Vladimir Propp on folktales as analogous in that both are concerned with mechanisms in text that generate meaning. It also deals with four theories about why people find texts humorous, defines the joke as a short narrative with a punch line that is meant to generate mirthful laughter and defines Jewish humor as being about Jewish people and culture as told by Jewish people. It offers a paradigmatic analysis of the joke, and offers some insights into why Jewish people developed their distinctive kind of humor. This article is an enhanced and expanded version of an article which was published in a Chinese semiotics journal (doi:10.1515/css-2015-0022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No area of Christian-Jewish co-existence during the medieval Ashkenazi period produced more personal contacts than the business sphere. During loan transactions, Jews and Jewesses interacted with Christian men and women from all social classes, from rulers and nobility to townspeople, farmers, craftsmen, and servants. Therefore, German-Hebrew business contracts are not only material cultural goods in their own right, they also serve as media of cultural transfer and as a shared legal, linguistic, and general cultural zone between Jews and Christians in the field of economics and of business practices. This paper not only deals with legal and linguistic topics, but also with the rather hidden and neglected aspects of polemics and humour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their 1993 essay on diaspora and identity, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin reject "diaspora" as a site of persecution and fear and instead argue that "the [new] lesson of Diaspora, namely, that peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected . . . can teach us that it is possible for a people to maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, without controlling land, a fortiori without controlling other people." I argue that the Boyarins' new "diaspora" has been incorporated into contemporary Jewish American humor and provides assimilated Jews a way to create humor in a multicultural world. The Boyarins' diasporic thinking can be applied to diverse contemporary Jewish comedic texts like Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews," Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," and Auslander's Hope, A Tragedy. Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David also reject traditional forms of Jewish comedy (the need for group identity and solidarity in the face of suffering, persecution, genocide, powerlessness) in favor of an emancipated diaspora that maintains identity while it is outer directed and engages the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article furthers the study of film comedy examining how perceived distinctions of "high culture" give rise to a sociological "problem" in the reputation of comedians. This article explains how Woody Allen's acclaimed film Annie Hall (1977) was perceived by critics as a transitional comedy--moving from the immediate, visual jokes seen in Allen's previous films, to more cognitive, script-based humor. Whereas many critics perceived this shift as Allen's ascension to "high" culture, according to the same critical distinctions, some critics were disappointed by what was also perceived as his move away from expectations of the "comedy" genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Zionist discourse was ripe with constructions of a new Jewish identity. Discussing responses to the so-called Uganda plan of 1903-5 and notions of Jewish colonisation in Africa and elsewhere, the article investigates demarcations of Jewishness from, and identifications with, 'blackness' in the early twentieth-century German Zionist press and literature and their impact on the Zionist imaginary vis-à-vis the colonial paradigm. Particular attention is given to Max Jungmann's 'Briefe aus Neu-Neuland', published in the satiric journal Schlemiel between 1903-7. It is argued that with his fictitious account of the Zionist settlement of East Africa (which historically never happened) and with the creation of the black African Mbwapwa Jumbo and his conversion to Judaism Jungmann articulates an intricate and critical response to colonial aspirations, Jewish or otherwise, and formulates a scathing but highly perceptive commentary on the convergence of Zionist, racial, and colonial discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most critics agree that Jewish humour is defined by its capacity to laugh in the face of despair, tragedy, persecution. Humour has been a source of salvation for the Jews, allowing them to survive in a hostile world. Howard Jacobson is an English Jewish writer who has always celebrated the important role that comedy plays in literature. He regrets the false division between comedy and seriousness that critics have created and firmly believes that comedy reaffirms the value of life by offering us a way to transcend our sadness and misfortunes. In The Finkler Question humour indeed fulfils this redeeming function and allows Jacobson to tackle the dark forces of anti-Semitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Jewish humor in the context of the U.S. South, noting the film "Borat," starring Sacha Baron Cohen. Topics discussed include the relation of Jews and white Southerners in the television show "King of the Hill," the 1997 article "Jewish Texans Commemorate Holocaust... Texas Style" in the satirical newspaper "The Onion," and the ironic nature of the historic plight of the Jewish diaspora. The relation of Jewish Southerners to the racist Ku Klux Klan movement, racial divisions in U.S. society, and writings by Jewish anti-segregationist Harry Golden are noted.

The article discusses the political satire of Yiddish-speaking Jewish performers Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher. The author focuses on Dzigan and Shumacher's use of Yiddish and the influence of Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem and expressionist theatre on their work. Specific topics addressed include the history of Jewish humor, Jews in Dzigan and Shumacher's hometown of Łódź, Poland, and how moving to Israel in 1950 affected their humor.

This article offers a rereading of Brenner's oeuvre with Freud, as it were, through the peeping hole furnished by the anecdotal and incongruous tale "Nerves" and its connections with the Jewish joke. Like the latter, the article argues, this story by Brenner originates in a fabric of deceit, error, and disruption, in incongruousness and a questioning of the very conditions of truth and falsity. Like the Jewish joke, Brenner's poetics is presented as marked by disruption and disproportionateness. In lieu of the coherent and full national story, Brenner proposes the alternative poetic of the "genre of nerves." Here, he replaces the "beautiful" with two key "artifacts": the abject and the sublime, both involving the negative, the incongruous, and a breach with the very possibility of representation. The article argues that a rereading of Brenner's work with a view to Freud requires abandoning the realistic-psychological-biographical perspective and approaching the oedipal model with suspicion. "Nerves" should be read with reference to the tension between two clashing psychoanalytical perspectives: the Jewish joke, on the one hand, and the oedipal meta-narrative, on the other. Rather than uncritically adopting the latter, as is common in Brenner criticism, this article examines how Brenner subtly builds the oedipal-familial construct as a basis from which to imagine the national community. It will however to an equal extent show how Brenner punctures the over-inflated oedipal bubble by using the "double face" of the Jewish joke, disruption, and fragments of Jewish khokhmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Larry David's persona in Curb Your Enthusiasm serves as a contemporary manifestation of the schlemiel from Yiddish culture. Although David keeps the essential aspects of the schlemiel intact, he adapts them to twenty-first-century America. David's schlemiel persona reflects the uneasiness many Jewish people feel about their place in multicultural America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the connecting themes of two comedies including "The Jews," by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and "Go for Zucker!," by Dani Levy. The author notes that both pieces are critical narratives of German-Jewish relations and presents the "Jewish Question" in a comedic style. "The Jews" was written by Lessing in 1749 while "Go for Zucker," was released as a feature film for television in 2005. Both comedies explore the issues of assimilation by portraying pre-existing notions of the Jew as a foreigner through drama and humor.

From the era of the early republic, American humor has drawn from the frontier ethos that valued domineering triumphs over nature and over others. The tradition of masculine posturing and physical bravery was countered in the twentieth century by Jewish comedians who punctured brawn with brain and who played with anti-Semitic stereotypes as well as showing the advantages of business acumen. Instead of glorifying winners, as mainstream frontier humor had done, Jewish humor in the United States toyed with the character ideal of the loser, who is indifferent to practicality and to mastery of the environment, and thus shuffled cards of identity that made the nation’s culture more variegated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the books `Portnoy's Complaint,' by Philip Roth and `Rubinstein's Versteigerung,' by Rafael Seligman in the context of the social dynamics of Jewish humor or Judenwitz which the authors used in the book. Wish of both protagonists in the books to escape maternal domination; Obsession of the protagonists with sex and their difficulties in achieving sexual fulfillment; Comparison of the style by which the books were written.

Discusses a Jewish joke that contrasts the work of man with that of God. Variations; Two different Jewish conceptions of man's relationship with God; Interpretations of punchline; Consistency of theme with standard Jewish jokes.

The article discusses the question of Jewish humor. The author considers this question as a special variation upon the persisting question of Jewish singularity. It is often maintained that only a member of a given people can really understand its life, including its humor. He asserts that it is hardly a coincidence that some of the best jokes are Jewish jokes. Jewish humor is here accounted for on the ground, not of something peculiarly Jewish, but of a particular socio-historical condition called marginality.

The article focuses on the interpretation of dialect jokes of Jewish-American literature and stories. It is said that some of the jokes narration depends on the used of language as to be perfectly delivered. Meanwhile, ethnic humor is sometimes perceived as highly personal and may be construed as act of self disclosure. A means by which a person tells or present something about himself. While, jokes, often contains explicit information about the narrators contrast to others. According to the author, there is at least one or more possible interpretation of the joke that objective describes a certain type of sensitive speech or event specifically in telling Jewish American dialect stories.

Discusses the dynamics of Jewish jokes. Analysis of jokes using the psychoanalytic approach; Symbolism of Jewish jokes; Nature of masochism.

An introduction is presented that discusses issue articles on topics including the nature of Jewish humor, the purported role of former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in rescuing Jewish refugees during World War II, and the history of Zionism in Lubbock, Texas.