Overview

"The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, and yet still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as ""funny""? And how old can a joke get? With jokes from Lena Dunham to Woody Allen, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho, mostly), Baum balances serious research with light-hearted humor and provides fascinating insight into this wellknown and much loved cultural phenomenon."

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9781643132372

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Reviews

Delightfully entertaining and cheerfully insightful. Baum effectively considers the roles Jewish humor has played as a response to oppression and as a way to mock hypocrisy about religious observance.

"""[Baum is] intellectually luminous, psychologically penetrating, existentially anxious, and wonderfully funny."" --Zadie Smith ""Devorah Baum collects enough humor of this ilk to unstick the slowest dinner party. I closed her book a prouder Jew than I had begun it."" --Washington Post ""Baum effectively considers the roles Jewish humor has played as a response to oppression and as a way to mock hypocrisy about religious observance."" --Publishers Weekly"

Author Information

Devorah Baum is the author of Feeling Jewish: A Book for Just About Anyone (Yale, 2017) and co-director of the documentary film The New Man. She is a lecturer in English literature and critical theory at the University of Southampton and an affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

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