By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
What did the chicken say as she crossed the road? What else? Next year, in Jerusalem.
That is (an admittedly bad) Jewish joke. Jews have been using humor, like nearly everything else at hand, to cement the community together and hold fast to a common identity, probably since that much-maligned chicken spent 40 years crossing the desert.
For not quite that long — more like 20 years — Dr. Stephen Z. Cohen, Ph.D, a professor of social work from Chicago, Ill., has been collecting, analyzing and turning his insights into Jewish humor, as he did on a damp Seattle evening at Congregation Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath. He also told a lot of jokes.
Jokes like the one about a Jewish businessman in the ‘50s who decided he was going to join a restricted country club in his area.
Since the club did not allow Jews to join, he practiced passing himself off as a gentile. When his partner asked him how he thought he could “pass,” the man explained that he had a voice coach from England who had helped him lose his Old World accent and he’d prepared himself with a cover story to fit in with the other club members. At his meeting with the membership director he answered all the questions immediately. What was his name? Smythe. What did he do for a living? He was a civil engineer.
“What is your religion?” the membership director asked at last. Without a moment’s hesitation, the man replied, “I am a goy.”
This was Dr. Cohen’s first appearance in Seattle. He sat on a stool before an intimate audience of several dozen and explained what makes a joke Jewish and provided examples of Jewish humor as it grew and evolved among the Ashkenazi in the United States over the past century. He said the immigrant experience, from the voyage to America to the processes of establishing themselves in their new country, formed the backbone of Jewish humor close for to 75 years through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
That period is where the greatest amount of Cohen’s material originated, he says. In all his years of research, he said, he had found almost no distinctly Sephardic jokes.
In an interview with the Jewish Transcript, he said he gives two different kinds of presentations: a more scholarly history of Jewish humor and another primarily for entertainment.
“When a group calls me and asks for a program, I have to explore with the group that’s going to be in attendance, whether they’re interested in a lecture. Those lectures are filled with Jewish jokes but they have much more of an analysis and an explanation about the material and what it says about Jewish life.
If the group wants an entertainment then I probably don’t give as much of the analysis and I share as many of the jokes and stories as I can. But it’s definitely not stand-up comedy.
“In a sense what I do is not unlike what well-known Jewish humorist Myron Cohen used to do, which was to tell a series of stories and vignettes — sometimes with dialect, sometimes without,” says Dr. Cohen. “As opposed to someone doing stand-up one-liners, mine is much more storytelling.”
In his day job, Prof. Cohen has spent decades training generations of social workers in the Chicago area. He now teaches part-time at the University of Chicago, using the remaining time to tour with his Jewish humor programs. Cohen says his lifelong interest turned into a second career almost by accident.
“I had been doing it for many years, just informally to friends: telling Jewish jokes and talking about Jewish humor,” he says. His first gig was entertaining at a couples group in suburban Chicago. “They liked it so much someone there invited me then to a Hadassah [gathering] and someone at the Hadassah, a month later, invited me to a synagogue and it just developed from there,” says Cohen.
He notes that “the Golden Age of Jewish humor is really the first half of the 20th century in America, with the heyday of the Borscht-Belt comedians by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, writing and presenting Jewish comedy to Jewish audiences, often in Yiddish.”
Cohen also credits Leo Rosten and other writers with developing the anthologies of Jewish jokes, “often translations of Yiddish joke and also jokes that developed during that Golden Age.”
Some of his material, like a classic “mother-in-law joke” go all the way back to the Eastern European shtetls: A rebbe is asked to help decide which of two young women the only available bachelor should marry. Finally, he proposes to split the young man down the middle with an axe. The mother of one of the daughters jumps up, protesting, while the other one says, “Go ahead, cut him up.”
“That is the real mother-in-law,” the rebbe declares, pointing to the second one.
Dr. Cohen says that adding Jewish names or telling the joke in dialect doesn’t make a joke Jewish if there is no uniquely Jewish link to the character or situation. A joke about a Bar Mitzvah, for example, just doesn’t work with characters named Chang and Ng, as a rule.
These days, he says, Jewish comics like Jerry Seinfeld do not base most of their routines on ethnic heritage. Also, there is a distinctly Israeli humor that has developed in the last half-century, but he says it is so grounded in the Israel experience the joke gets lost in translation.