Jewish humor: A way to show gratitude, humility

Published 5:28 pm Friday, October 26, 2007

By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
As a "Jewish writer" visiting Dowagiac, "which is probably not the Jerusalem of the Midwest," Jonathan Safran Foer lectured on humor Thursday night at the middle school Performing Arts Center.
He opened with self-deprecating jokes playing on ethnic stereotypes to make the point that in a different context could be anti-Semitic.
"As a Jew, I find 'Borat' incredibly funny," he said. "The Anti-Defamation League raised concern because it was afraid audiences wouldn't be 'Jewish enough' to get that it wasn't anti-Semitic."
When he writes in a coffee shop in his neighborhood, a glass wall separates him from a homeless panhandler outside.
"As a reasonable person, it occurs to me that on this side of the glass I'm typing whimsical, kind of funny stories with my college education, so jokes must have some value. I thought I'd talk about that in four different ways – laughter and silence, laughter and prayer, laughter and recognition and laughter and comfort."
Foer illustrated laughter and silence by recalling childhood family of five drives from Washington, D.C., where he grew up, to New York City.
His dad pulled the car over across five lanes of traffic and decreed an etiquette moratorium so the occupants could vent and relieve tension.
Jonathan uttered several profanities to lighten the mood.
"I was trying to make them laugh," he admits. "Laughter was valued and congratulated. Our dinners sitting all together around the table always ended in laughter. My grandfather was the patriarch of the family, though I never met him. He died when my mother was 6 years old. He was born in a year we don't know in a village whose name we don't know. We don't know his parents. We don't know if he had any siblings. I don't know what kind of school he went to, what he was educated to do or what kind of jobs he had. I know through the family grapevine that he had a wife and a baby and I don't know either of their names or the sex of the baby. We know they were killed by the Nazis, but I don't know how he escaped. There are people who know these things, but in many Jewish families information is distributed with great care. In particular, children are aware of the things they don't know and knew not to ask questions. We're not people of the spoken word or talking about things. Laughter is the real opposite of silence. Laughter can be nervous, but silence is always morose. You'll never see an ecstatic silence. Humor is a relief from silence and the pressure that came with all these other things I wasn't able to say that were unsafe."
"I'm somebody who doesn't believe in God," he said. "I'm agnostic. I'm also somebody who wishes he believed in God and very often wants to, for example, pray – especially since my son was born as a way of showing gratefulness. Yet I don't think anybody's listening."
He read a passage by Israeli author David Grossman, whose son died in the recent war in Lebanon. His eulogy focused on his son's sense of humor and itself "was kind of funny, which kind of surprised me with the world listening."
"I'm interested in humor that elevates," Foer said, "and by that I don't mean 'happy.' Humor is a way for people like me, agnostics and atheists, but not only them, to show gratitude and humility. It's a way to be religious.
Of laughter and recognition, Foer asked, "What are Jewish jokes?" He called on audience members to tell some. "Jewish humor is a kind of cure for loneliness and alienation," he said. "The history of Jewish comedians is always based in finding sacrificial substitutes – finding ways to talk about things we can't talk about. After the war, Jews spread out all over the world from Europe." He has relatives not only in Israel, but also Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Africa and Australia.
"The diaspora not only inspires humor, but it requires it," Foer said, "because we're not surrounded by each other anymore. It's a great relief to be close to somebody who has a history like yours. People were simultaneously in love with and infuriated by 'Portnoy's Complaint' when it came out because they thought they were being made fun of. But they were in love with it because it made them feel good to say how foolish, short and neurotic we are. All those jokes depend on 'we.'
"I had an experience on a radio show in Philadelphia with a caller who thanked me for my first book. He laughed so hard at 'all the jokes about my family.' In my mind I'm imagining a 25-year-old Jewish guy with dark hair and glasses, speaking like me. He said he was a 65-year-old black guy living outside Trenton. I was totally taken aback. The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I am by my surprise because my assumption was that I couldn't have anything in common with such a person. One of the nicest things about being a published author is that you get to have that misconception corrected because some of the best responses I've had from readers, having to do with humor or otherwise, have come from people with circumstances of their lives that couldn't possibly be any more different than mine."
As a "non-lactating male" who couldn't breast-feed his son, Foer felt frustrated at not being able to establish the intimate bond with his son that his wife did.
Their "one-directional" relationship took a turn for the better, however, the first time his son smiled at him.
"To make him laugh, I would gently toss him or put his socks on my ears. To him, these things are all scary and wrong. I was presenting him something that was not the way it should be. But the more I repeated it, the more he laughed. He moved from fear to a realization that things were okay, just a false alarm. He moved to a sense of security."
It's why someone slipping on a banana peel is funny if they get up, furtively brush themselves off and hurry away, but not if they break their neck and are paralyzed.
"The difference is we're presented with a situation that's scary and wrong and we need to move to the knowledge that things are okay," Foer said. In life, "Silences are absolutely inevitable. Alienation is absolutely inevitable. Every parent knows their child will outlive them. Parents prepare their children to live without them, giving them an arsenal of tools to use when these inevitable things happen. Laughter is an effective tool."
Jolie Sheffer in 1992 was a Cass County high school student dreaming of becoming an English professor "so I could read books all day long. Today, I'm living in the Michiana/Ohio area. I'm now the college professor I dreamed of being when I was a teen-ager and the youngest member of the Visiting Authors Committee. It feels like both a homecoming and an arrival to be here introducing our youngest featured writer."