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Jewish humour is the long tradition of humour in Judaism dating back to the Torah and the Midrash, but generally refers to the more recent stream of verbal, self-deprecating and often anecdotal humour originating in Eastern Europe and which took root in the United States over the last hundred years. Beginning with vaudeville, and continuing through radio, stand-up comedy, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American and Russian comedians have been Jewish.

The history of Jewish humour

Jewish humour is rooted in several traditions. The first is the intellectual and legal methods of the Talmud, which uses elaborate legal arguments and situations often seen as so absurd as to be humorous in order to tease out the meaning of religious law. .

Hillel Halkin in his essay about Jewish humour traces some roots of the Jewish self-deprecating humour to the medieval influence of Arabic traditions on the Hebrew literature by quoting a witticism from Yehuda Alharizi's Tahkemoni .

A more recent one is an egalitarian tradition among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly, rather than attacked overtly—as Saul Bellow once put it, "oppressed people tend to be witty." Jesters known as badchens used to poke fun at prominent members of the community during weddings, creating a good-natured tradition of humour as a levelling device. Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, a scholar of Jewish humour, argued:

You have a lot of shtoch, or jab, humor, which is usually meant to deflate pomposity or ego, and to deflate people who consider themselves high and mighty. But Jewish humor was also a device for self-criticism within the community, and I think that's where it really was the most powerful. The humorist, like the prophet, would basically take people to task for their failings. The humor of Eastern Europe especially was centered on defending the poor against the exploitation of the upper classes or other authority figures, so rabbis were made fun of, authority figures were made fun of and rich people were made fun of. It really served as a social catharsis.

After Jews began to emigrate to America in large numbers, they, like other minority groups, found it difficult to gain mainstream acceptance and obtain upward mobility. (As Lenny Bruce lampooned, "He was charming... They said, 'C'mon! Let's go watch the Jew be charming!'") The newly-developing entertainment industry, combined with the Jewish humour tradition, provided a potential route for Jews to succeed. One of the first successful radio "sitcoms," The Goldbergs, featured a Jewish family. As radio and television matured, many of its most famous comedians, including Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, George Burns, Henny Youngman and Milton Berle, were Jewish. The Jewish comedy tradition continues today, with Jewish humour much entwined with that of mainstream humour, as comedies like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm indicate.

Sigmund Freud in his Wit and the Unconscious , among other things, analyses the nature of the Jewish jokes.

Types of Jewish humour

Religious humour

As befits a community to which religion was so important, much humour centres on the relationship of Judaism to the individual Jew and the community.

Two Rabbis argued late into the night about the existence of God, and, using strong arguments from the scriptures, ended up indisputably disproving His existence. The next day, one Rabbi was surprised to see the other walking into the Shul for morning services.

"I thought we had agreed there was no God," he said.

"Yes, what does that have to do with it?" replied the other.

Assimilation

The American Jewish community has been lamenting the rate of assimilation and disappearance of their children as they grow into adults.

Two Rabbis were discussing their problems with squirrels in their synagogue attic. One Rabbi said they simply called an exterminator and they never saw the squirrels again. The other Rabbi said, "We just gave them all a bar mitzvah, and never saw the squirrels again."

Wits

Similarly, in the tradition of the legal arguments of the Talmud, one prominent type of Jewish humour involves clever, often legalistic, solutions to Talmudic problems, such as:

Q: Is one permitted to ride in an airplane on the Sabbath?
A: Yes, as long as your seat belt remains fastened. In this case, it is considered that you are not riding, you are wearing the plane.

Tales of the Rebbes

Some jokes make fun of the "Rebbe miracle stories" and involve different hasidim bragging about their teachers' miraculous abilities:

Three hasidim are bragging about their Rebbes : "My rebbe is very powerful. He was walking once, and there was a big lake in his path. He waved his handkerchief, and there was lake on the right, lake on the left, but no lake in the middle." To which the second retorted, "That's nothing. My rebbe is even more powerful. He was walking once, and there was a huge mountain in his path. He waved his handkerchief, and there was mountain on the right, mountain on the left, but no mountain in the middle!" Said the third, "Ha! That is still nothing! My rebbe is the most powerful. He was walking once on Shabbos (Saturday, the holy day in Judaism, on which it is forbidden to handle money), and there was a wallet crammed full of cash in his path. He waved his handkerchief, and it was Shabbos on the right, Shabbos on the left, but not Shabbos in the middle!"

The lives of the early hasidim, while not funny in and of themselves, are rich in humorous incidents. The dealings between rabbis, tzaddikim, and peasants form a rich tapestry of lore.

Eastern European Jewish humour

A number of traditions in Jewish humour date back to stories and anecdotes from the 1800s.

Chelm

One popular humorous tradition from Eastern Europe involved tales of the people of Chełm, a town reputed in these jokes to be inhabited by fools (including their rabbi). The jokes were almost always centered on silly solutions to problems. Some of these solutions display "foolish wisdom" (reaching the correct answer by the wrong train of reasoning), while others are simply wrong.

Chelm tales were told by authors like Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. A typical Chelm story might begin, "It is said that after God made the world, he filled it with people. He sent off an angel with two sacks, one full of wisdom and one full of foolishness. The second sack was of course much heavier. So after a time it started to drag. Soon it got caught on a mountaintop and so all the foolishness spilled out and fell into Chelm." The short animated film Village of Idiots is based upon classic Chelm tales.

Here are a few examples of a Chelm tale:

In Chelm, the shammes used to go around waking everyone up for minyan (communal prayer) in the morning. Every time it snowed, the people would complain that, although the snow was beautiful, they could not see it in its pristine state because by the time they got up in the morning, the shammes had already trekked through the snow. The townspeople decided that they had to find a way to be woken up for minyan without having the shammes making tracks in the snow.
The people of Chelm hit on a solution: they got four volunteers to carry the shammes around on a table when there was fresh snow in the morning. That way, the shammes could make his wake up calls, but he would not leave tracks in the snow.

Or,

The town of Chelm decided to build a new synagogue. So, some strong, able-bodied men were sent to a mountaintop to gather heavy stones for the foundation. The men put the stones on their shoulders and trudged down the mountain to the town below. When they arrived, the town constable yelled, "Foolish men! You should have rolled the stones down the mountain!" The men agreed this was an excellent idea. So they turned around, and with the stones still on their shoulders, trudged back up the mountain, and rolled the stones back down again.

Or,

The sexton of the synagogue decided to install a poor box so that the fortunate might share their wealth with the needy. On shabbes eve, he announced to the congregation that a new opportunity for mitzvoh was available. "But," one member complained, "it will be so easy for the goneffs (thieves) to steal from the box." The sexton thought long and hard that night, and announced the next day that he had found a solution. Pointing upward, he showed, the poor box was now suspended from a chain at the ceiling, high, high, high overhead. "But now how do we put money in the box?"
The next week, the congregation saw the wonderful solution. A lovely circular stairway now ascended to the poor box making it easy to contribute.

Hershele Ostropoler

Hershele Ostropoler, also known as Hershel of Ostropol, was a legendary prankster who was based on a historic figure. Thought to have come from Ukraine, he lived in the small village of Ostropol, working as shochet , a ritual slaughterer. According to legend he lost his job because of his constant joking, which offended the leaders of the village.

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