Read No Joke for Free Online

“He’s my new son-in-law,” the schnorrer replied. “I’ve promised him his board for the first year.” 3
    In the first joke, expecting the shadkhen to parry the young man’s objections, we are surprised that he reinforces them instead. In the second, convolution, which normally serves to obscure the truth, ends up confirming it. In the third, the beggar assumes the host’s prerogative, manifesting largesse at the expense of his benefactor. Reversal, displacement, and turning the tables are the wellsprings of a tradition that mocks the contradictions of Jewish experience—the gap between accommodation to foreign powers and promise of divine election. Although many religions acknowledge a tension between the tenets and confutations of their faith, few have had to balance such high national hopes against such a poor political record. Jewish humor at its best interprets the incongruities of the Jewish condition.
    But I am doing what Freud does not. Though he draws heavily on the humor of his native Jewish culture, he extrapolates from it only such findings as are presumably universal. He is interested in the relation of joking to other psychological phenomena, not in relation to Jews. “[We] do not insist upon a patent of nobility from our examples,” he writes. “We make no inquiries about their origin but only about their efficiency—whether they are capable of making us laugh and whether theydeserve our theoretical interest. And both these two requirements are best fulfilled precisely by Jewish jokes.” 4
    One can’t help musing on the analyst’s reluctance to comment on the Jewishness of the Jewish material he discusses. Take a phrase like “patent of nobility”—transposed from the Yiddish yikhes-briv , a hybrid Hebrew-Yiddish term for pedigree. The irony implicit in Freud’s use of the term, which follows a joke about Jews’ aversion to bathing, derives from the distinction between Jewish and Christian-European concepts of nobility, with each side looking down on the standards of the other. Freud’s obvious pride in the claim of Jews to primogeniture as well as cultural and ethical advantages over their Christian overlords belies the scientist’s claim to be transcending parochialism.
    Only once in this book does Freud indulge in some speculation about the specifically Jewish affinity for humor. He does so during a discussion of tendentious jokes, “when the intended rebellious criticism is directed against the subject himself, or, to put it more cautiously, against someone in whom the subject has a share—a collective person, that is (the subject’s own nation, for instance).” In other words, Freud makes a distinction between jokes directed by Jews at Jews and jokes directed at Jews by foreigners—not because the former are any kinder, but instead because Jews know the connection between their own faults and virtues. “Incidentally,” he concludes this part of the exploration with a sentiment already cited in the introduction, “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.” 5 The offhand quality of this observationhas not prevented it from becoming the most quoted sentence in Freud’s book, perhaps because others have realized better than the author how much it says about the Jewish condition.
    Herzl and Freud, otherwise so alike in their German Jewish ambience and restless intelligence, reached opposite conclusions about Jewish humor. Both recognized its connection to anti-Jewish hostility, but Freud admired what Herzl—like Schnitzler in Der Weg ins Freie —feared. Freud put up with anti-Semitism in much the same way that he accepted civilization with its discontents (to paraphrase the title of one of his most famous works). 6 He therefore welcomed joking as a compensatory pleasure—the expressive venting of