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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]

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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]

Copyright of Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

The article reviews the book "No Joke: Making Jewish Humor," by Ruth R. Wisse.

Copyright of German Life & Letters is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

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]

What is the essence of Jewish humor and how does this kind humor come into place in movies and in cinematic storytelling? Is there a characteristic of the "laughable" in the Bible and in the traditions of the Jewish community? Or should we consider, as some authors have suggested (Eckardt, 1992), that the notion of ''Jewish humor" should be replaced with the more politically correct phrase "humor amongst Jews", since the first term is too constricting and stereotyping, while other authors, like Patricia Erens, provide arguments for the existence of a "Yiddish narrative" in cinema, attempting to identify general elements of this narrative: pathos, humor and humanity (Erens, 1984). And, if we can use the term Jewish humor, what are the fundamental elements to be found in cinema? Using the Romanian born, French director Radu Mihăileanu as an example, I found one answer he himself has given to the set of questions on what Jewish humor is, with reference to "other" types of humor. "The Jewish tell a lot of jokes about themselves... about their mother, about their rabbi, about their accountant, about God. They are always discussing with God" (Mihăileanu, 2000). The second level of questioning refers to the general mechanism that puts into place the Jewish humor, what is its main resource. On possible answer is to be found with Henri Bergson, who, in his seminal book on laughter, Le rire (Bergson, 1901), suggests that laughter evolved to make social life possible for human beings. If we use his argument in trying to explain Jewish humor in cinema, we can start from the theoretical premise that laughter makes possible social circumstances that are otherwise unbearable for humans beings. This I believe to be explicit with Radu Mihăileanu's cinema - and I will refer in this paper to three of his movies: Train de vie (Train of life, 1998), Va, vis et deviens (Live and become, 2005) and Le Concert (The Concert, 2009), all three having in their center the problems of identity (Jewish and non Jewish) and Jewishness as a social phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Reports on a number of developments regarding humor research. 15th International Society for Humor Studies in July 2003; 2004 Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop; First European Workshop on Humour Studies; Third International Summer School and Symposium on Humour and Laughter; One-day conference on Jewish humor; CORHUM workshop on humorous drawing; Australasian Humour Scholars Network.

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.

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.

Investigates empirically the relation of Jewish humor to sociocultural conditions. Hypothesis that self-directed demeaning ethnic humor represents either a means of self-depreciation or a stance of disidentifying with one's own group of origin; Competing conceptualizations of Jewish wit; Social milieu of the publication samples.

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.