Humor for Friday

 I grew up on Jewish comedy.  My all time favorites are the Marx Brothers.  I have seen all their movies multiple times and I still laugh,  I think Duck Soup was their best movie, and possibly the funniest movie ever made.  That is my subjective view.  For the same reason, that humor is subjective, I could not choose humor in the Hebrew Bible for my dissertation.  I could not be objective.  We can argue who is the funniest Jewish comedian and the best picture made by the best Jewish director at the best Jewish movie studio.  We cannot argue the impact that Jewish humor was eventful on the entertain industry in America.

One of the usual anti-Semitic slander is that the Jews owned movie studios, newspapers, and radio stations.  The Jews could exercise an intellectual influence over the masses through control of all these.  The Jews, or to be more precise, particular Jews owning these in and of itself was not slander.  It was true.  The Jews, blocked out of the usual money making markets, like banks, the stock market, and law created a whole new entertainment system.  A large part of that was built on Jewish humor.  

Let's start with stand-up.  The list of Jewish stand up comedians is filled with many outstanding comedians.  Because cultereally, I am still stuck in the 60's and 70's I loo to them.  Then there are today's comedians.  Jews also excelled as actors in the newly emerging movie industry.  It takes a certain personality to perform as comedians and actors.  Acting and comedy seemed to come natural to Jews.  So, I wonder, why?

I go back to my desired doctoral thesis topic, humor in the Bible.   My advisor, a brilliant scholar of the Bible and a man who I thought knew everything about everything, only said that humor is subjective, not that it wasn't there.  And so, I think many portions of the Bible are funny, and are meant to be that way.   Over the course of the Friday's, I will explain why I think these stories are meant to be funny.  

The test I use to determine if a scene is meant to be funny is, can I stage it in a humorous way.  To me, by acting as director, you are interpreting the text.  You determine the tone of voice, and you describe how the characters look and move.  Direction on the stage or with an orchestra, is an act of interpretation.  Words on a text and musical notes on a score are tone less.  The characters are static.  Directing the characters interprets the sscne.

The biblical text, especially the narratives, make it easy.  They are storied composed mainly of dialogue. It is meant to be auditory, so we hear a lot of dialogue.  What we don't hear or see is anything on the side of the stage.  The main characters are front and center.  Occasionally, there are editorial comments, but they do not affect the narrative discourse  Action is described as well as dialogue, but it is kept to a minimum.  What the characters have to say is more important than what they do.

So it starts with the Hebrew Bible.  Abraham and Sarah laugh on multiple occasions.  When they laugh, are we meant to laugh as well?  I think so.  Funny in the Bible seems to be making fun of characters for accepting the irrational and believing it to be rational.  In other words, make fun of the foolishness and their stupidity.  They are more powerful than us, our neighbors, but we can still make fun of them. The people of Israel itself is not excluded from this list. It seems to confirm Freud's contention that the masses are lazy and stupid.  The Bible tries to encourage them to become wise, but it is to no avail.

Making fun of the more powerful seems to be a mechanism to cope with an oppressive situation.  I have heard this from many survivors of the Holocaust, and it is said that by the end of this decade there may be no more.  They all explained that the people who could laugh, even in the death camps, were the ones to survive.  Jews became great psychologists.  Freud, who I am studying more closely now, is the most renowned and famous.  The rabbis in the Talmud were psychologists of a sort, trying to make a way of life that is psychologically understandable and at the same time acceptable.  The rabbis try to understand human emotion as logical and rational.  Two Talmudic rabbis were known as comedians, always trhing to get their morose rabbi to laugh.  Among the Hasidim, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was a man who always smiled, even though many tried to get him to be a little more morose.

I don't know if comedy is embedded in Jewish DNA.  I just know that it is there.  And so, over the next number of Fridays, we will look at stories that I think can be interpreted as funny.  Hope you goin me.j