Practice of History: Jewish Humor and History

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.

When wielded by the white majority, ethnic humor can be used to ridicule and demean marginalized groups. In the hands of ethnic minorities themselves, ethnic humor can work as a site of community building and resistance. In nearly all cases, however, ethnic humor can serve as a window through which to examine the complexities of American race relations. In Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, David Gillota explores the ways in which contemporary comic works both reflect and participate in national conversations about race and ethnicity. Gillota investigates the manner in which various humorists respond to multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of the American population. Rather than looking at one or two ethnic groups at a time--as is common scholarly practice--the book focuses on the interplay between humorists from different ethnic communities. While some comic texts project a fantasy world in which diverse ethnic characters coexist in a rarely disputed harmony, others genuinely engage with the complexities and contradictions of multiethnic America. The first chapter focuses on African American comedy with a discussion of such humorists as Paul Mooney and Chris Rock, who tend to reinforce a black/white vision of American race relations. This approach is contrasted to the comedy of Dave Chappelle, who looks beyond black and white and uses his humor to place blackness within a much wider multiethnic context. Chapter 2 concentrates primarily on the Jewish humorists Sarah Silverman, Larry David, and Sacha Baron Cohen--three artists who use their personas to explore the peculiar position of contemporary Jews who exist in a middle space between white and other. In chapter 3, Gillota discusses different humorous constructions of whiteness, from a detailed analysis of South Park to "Blue Collar Comedy" and the blog Stuff White People Like. Chapter 4 is focused on the manner in which animated children's film and the network situation comedy often project simplified and harmonious visions of diversity. In contrast, chapter 5 considers how many recent works, such as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and the Showtime series Weeds, engage with diversity in more complex and productive ways.

From vaudeville to the movies to television, the complete--and often hilarious--history of how Jewish comedians transformed American entertainment

This text deals with ten important Jewish American comedians from an historical perspective and in a systematic manner. The focus is on the impact of Judaism on these humourists and on their relations to American culture and character. The performers have played an important part in American popular culture and their humour reflects interesting and important things about American society. Throughout the book there is a discussion of techniques used by these comedians and examples of their humour.

When the Jews of Eastern Europe came to the United States in the 19th century, they brought with them their own special humor. Developed in response to the dissonant reality of their lives, their self-critical humor served as a source of salvation, enabling them to endure a painful history with a sense of power. In America, the marginal status of immigrant Jews prompted them to use humor a a defense, exaggerating or mocking their ethnicity as events dictated. Jewish Wry examines the development of Jewish humor in a series of essays on topics that range from Sholom Aleichem's humor to Jewish comediennes through to the humor of Philip Roth. This important book offers enjoyable reading as well as a significant and scholarly contribution to the field.

Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust argues that humor performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. Co-editors David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries? Clearly, there have been comedy and laughter in the decades since. However, the extent to which humor can be ethically deployed in representing and discussing the Holocaust is not as clear. This book comes at an important moment in the trajectory of Holocaust memory. As the generation of survivors continues to dwindle, there is great concern among scholars and community leaders about how memories and lessons of the Holocaust will be passed to future generations. Without survivors to tell their stories, to serve as constant reminders of what they experienced, how will future generations understand and relate to the Shoah? Laughter After is divided into two sections: "Aftermath" and "Breaking Taboos." The contributors to this volume examine case studies from World War II to the present day in considering and reconsidering what role humor can play in the rehabilitation of survivors, of Jews and of the world more broadly. More recently, humor has been used to investigate the role that Holocaust memory plays in contemporary societies, while challenging memorial conventions around the Holocaust and helping shape the way we think about the past. In a world in which Holocaust memory is ubiquitous, even if the Holocaust itself is inadequately understood, it is perhaps not surprising that humor that invokes the Holocaust has become part of the memorial landscape. This book seeks to uncover how and why such humor is deployed, and what the factors are that shape its production and reception. Laughter After will appeal to a number of audiences-from students and scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies to academics and general readers with an interest in media and performance studies.