"Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe."
"Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does."
" I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something."
-Jackie Mason
I think kids won’t know how to do that accent! When I was little here in LA so many Jewish people had that old NY accent, with a little Yiddish in their speech. Now that generation is quite old. The accent is going and it’s sad.
Ya gotta do the accent to do the jokes. The funniest ones are a little off color. Here’s an example.
Morty was retired and finally made it to Florida. Walking along a deserted beach early one morning, he discovers a lamp in the sand. He gets out his old hanky and rubs it clean. Lo and behold, who should come out but a (all say it together) genie! The genie is thrilled to be let out f the lamp and grants Morty one wish. “Anything you want. Anything at all.”
Morty reaches into his pocket and pulls out a creased piece of paper. “Genie, this is a map of the Holy Land. Look here at little Israel, surrounded by her enemies, always living in war and fear. I’d love for you to give peace to the Holy Land.”.
The genie says, “Kind sir, my powers are great, but that wish... That wish is just too difficult for me. Is there anything at all else you might desire?”
Morty thinks. Finally he says, “You know, genie? My marriage has always been good but there is this one intimate act my wife has never done for me, you know the one. I’d like to sample that before I die.”
The genie says, “Lemme see that map again.”
Google “Old Jews Telling Jokes” - there are some guys filming them for posterity.
I remember the Ed Sullivan show used to be a great vehicle for a lot of those kinds of comics. It appears the old variety shows and that kind of humor have gone the same way. And reading “The Joys Of Yiddish” by Leo Rosten which was a great repository for that kind of humor. Oy Vey!!
I grew up on that stuff. Love it. I grew up in the most Jewish neighborhood in the city of Chicago in the '50s and '60s. Jewish comedians and comedy writers were all over TV. They formed my sense of humor.
>>My last wish,” the old man whispers, “is to see another doctor.”
That joke was told by Albert Brooks on the 70s album A Star Is Bought. “Blues king...Albert King” plays guitar and talks with Albert Brooks as he tells it: “The Englishman, German, and Jew Blues”. The Englishman’s last wish, after the three of them are exposed to radiation (”now, radiation can kill ya.
It’s like, it’s like eating a TV set”) is to see the White Cliffs of Dover again; the German, to spend his last days getting drunk at the great beer halls of Munich and listening to music.
The Jew: “Well, to tell you the truth, if I had one last wish, I wish to see another doctor!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPwyWyXo4U0
I was just thinking of this like two days ago! So true.
There used to be so many good Jewish comics in the old days, before my time, but they played the Poconos and whatnot, learning their trade, NY Jewish accents, and they could really really make one laugh.
A dying breed and that is sad. Glad you put up this article.
Get the Wadok’s book on Jewish humor. You’ll like it.
Now, the type of Jewish humor known as “Borscht Belt” (i.e. the Jewish mountain resorts in the Catskill Mountains and a second tier in some other mountainous resort areas in New York, were the place that young comics could try out their “shtick” (comedy routine and embellishments).If they were successful, it was often the key to New York and Hollywood.
{I went to Shawanga Lodge in 1961, owned by an Israeli couple named the Dans, and ended up fixing up their daughter Stefanie with a good friend of mine at Temple Un., about 3 years later. They got married, bless them. It was a good week, and a little like “Dirty Dancing” without the dirty dancing}
The best place to find partially hidden Jewish humor is in any Mel Brooks comedy, esp. “Blazing Saddles” and “The History of the World” series (some in “Young Frankenstein” too). It was also carried out brilliantly in the writing for these movies, as well as in the acting, esp. by the late Madelaine Kahn, Marty Feldman, Gene Wilder and Terri Gar, aided and abetted by the hilarious Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, Kenneth Marrs, and Clevon Little, to name a few.
In the older film, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World”, you had the cream of the second crop of Jewish comedians/actors, including Peter Falk.
A third wave of Jewish humorists and comedians came about because of TV, featuring old timers like Burns and Allen, the Three Stooges, Myron Cohen, Mollie Goldberg, and Jack Benny. THey spanned the periods from vaudeville to the USO shows of WW2 to the Ed Sullivan Show, and then their own shows.
A fourth wave came about with the rise of TV shows who featured up and coming comedians, some Jewish, some not. These included Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Rita Rudner, Roseanne Barr, etc. Of these, at least Crystal, Rudner and Barr are Jewish (but we’re not sure what Barr is today other than meshugana (crazy).
And the last major wave that I can think of that had a major effect on humor was “Seinfeld”, the show about nothing. Three of the four leads were Jewish - Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Julia L. Dreyfuss.
There are other comedians out there, but the groups I have mentioned represent the changing history of Jewish humor, from the early days of talking movies and radio to HBO specials and mainstream TV shows.
If you want to understand at least some of the philosophy behind the new American Jewish humor, read two books, “The Education of Hyman Kaplan” and “Harry Golden’s “Enjoy, Enjoy”. They are period pieces written as humor, but they show how early Jewish humor evolved from the early 20th Century immigrant humor to the becoming-Americans adaptation phase, and then, as Wadoks did in his book, it became more inclusive from the Old World to the New, and I think we are better for it.
Now, if you want some good Jewish (and even non-Jewish) Russian emigrant humor, you’ll have to listen to Yakov Smirnoff. His early routines are priceless and hilarious, esp. his observation that “You Americans are so lucky. You even have “Freedom” in a box, naively referring to “Freedom Maxi-Pads”. Plus his delirious act of putting a stickem MaxiPad on his head and saying, “See, you can even put Freedom on your head”. Is America great or what?”
Russian emigre joke (1970’s)I learned from a friend:
Ivan is walking down the streets of Moscow when he sees Igor coming towards him, with two rolls of toilet paper under his arms.
Ivan excitedly greeted him and asked, “Igor, I haven’t seen toilet paper for months. Where did you get yours”?
Igor: “I just came back from the cleaners”.
Or:
True story: A friend of mine, once Soviet Army Major Avram (Abraham) Shifrin, spent some R&R time in the KGB’s infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, before being shipped to various slave labor/death camps along the TransSiberian Railroad system from Potma to Lake Baikal.
He was continually moved from prison to prison, thus ending up with a variety of Soviet political prisoners of every type - ethnic, religious, political.
He used to tell us, and Congress, that the only place you could find “freedom” in the Soviet Union was in the prison camps “because everyone was there. There was no discrimination”.
My own attempt at Jewish humor (which is always borrowed from someone else): “Ten Jews, eleven synagogues”.
“My grandmother’s matzoh balls were so hard that if you dropped one on your foot, it would break it” (TRUE).
There’s a joke about old Mrs. Schwartz and her shual’s rabbi
which is worth a laugh or two:
There was a somewhat poor synagogue out in the middle of the American hinterland. They were ashamed that they couldn’t pay their rabbi a really decent salary so at a congregational meeting, each person was asked to volunteer some serve or goods to help improve the rabbi’s life.
One after another, people stood up and offered to do this.
The shoemaker offered to repair his shoes and make him one new pair for the year. The painter offered to paint his house. And on it went throughout the small gathering.
Finally they came to 75 year-old Mrs. Schwartz. When it was her turn to offer something for the rabbi, she said with a straight face, “Sex”. After the laughing stopped a few minutes later, someone asked her how she arrived at that, to which she replied.
“Vell, I told my husband that the shual wanted all of us to donate something to the rabbi, and he said, “Screw the rabbi.”
So here I am.
Shalom!
Myron Cohen was always my favorite. He worked most of his life in the garment industry; when he retired he, at the insistence of friends, visited a comedy club, and became an instant success. Unlike Belle Barth, his humor was soft and kind; his mind stayed far from the gutter.
As a new Cleveland-based airline pilot in the late ‘70s, I recognized him getting on our airplane early one morning. He had performed downtown the night before. I told the flight attendants who he was. The flight didn’t have many passengers on board; by the time we landed they had been huddled around and fussing over him for nearly two hours. After our arrival, he was the last to leave, and exited the airplane arm-in-arm with two of them - off for coffee and a Danish.
Leo Rosten. Incredible talent. These are wonderful books for just enjoying the wit of Yiddish.
My friends wife is Jewish. Her mother was named ‘Goldie’ and she was quick witted with that inherent jewish style humor. Some of it was downright corny and kooky but made you laugh with just the delivery.
This is a for real story. Years ago I worked in a psychiatric center and there were two patients talking to each other. One a younger minority and the other an older jewish man. The younger guy rushes up to the jewish man and fakes like he’s a mugger and says, “you’re money or your life’? The old jewish guy looks up and replies, “I ain’t got neither”.
I LMAO to this day over that one.
It’s not just the Jewish/Yiddish humor that is fading - it’s really the broader base of ethnic humor of every extraction. One poster’s recollection of a Jewish guy in Phoenix reminded me of my great-uncle in Phoenix, a second-generation Irishman that was a wholesale liquor salesman. He had a total repertoire of “Pat and Mike” jokes (his two sons are named Pat and Mike) that he would launch into at the drop of a hat. Of course, as another poster noted, a big part of the joke is the accent and Uncle Johnny was raised by an Irish immigrant mother so the accent came naturally. Since I was raised in KS, I didn’t get much time with him but I really enjoyed the few times I was around him.
It’s not the joke, it’s how it’s told. (cases in point - Jack Benny’s long “take”, Myron Cohen’s raised eye brow , George Burns’ perfectly timed puff on his cigar.)
Or as George said of Gracie: The difference between a comic and a comedian is that a comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.
As the SS were marching the villagers into the pit to meet their doom, Sol quietly whispers to his neighbor Jacob “Could be worse”. Jacob, incredulously, asks “How?”
Sol, softly explains, “Could be raining.”
I don’t recall where I got it, but many years ago I picked up “The Big Book of Jewish Humor”. The dry humor & logic was so wonderful that I read nothing else until it was read all the way through.