“Jews have always turned and continue to turn to humour as a cultural touchstone and a way to make meaning,” said Dr. Jennifer Caplan, author of Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials, which was published earlier this year.
Caplan, who is an associate professor and the Jewish Foundation Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, was the second presenter of the 2023-24 L’dor V’dor (Generation to Generation) Zoom lecture series organized by Victoria’s Kolot Mayim Reform Temple. On Dec. 3, she spoke about the past several decades of Jewish humour. Similar to the approach she took for her book, her presentation explored the changing relationship to Judaism of four generations of Jewish funny people.
According to a 2013 report by the Pew Foundation, called A Portrait of American Jews, 42% of American Jews thought that having a sense of humour was integral to their Jewish identity, said Caplan. In the survey, in terms of what American Jews deemed important to their identity, a sense of humour came out far behind Holocaust remembrance and intellectual curiosity, just under support of Israel, and well ahead of belonging to a Jewish community or eating traditional Jewish food.
“The report set off little bells in my brain which pushed me to say that there’s something here and that there’s something I want to think about,” she said.
There were Jewish commentators who pointed to the Pew survey as an alarm bell for the dangers of the rise of cultural Judaism. To Caplan, the TV show Seinfeld, which premièred in 1989, encapsulated what worried some about the culturally Jewish experience.
“It was this group of people who seemed Jewish, even though Jerry (the title character) is the only character on the show who is actually Jewish,” she said. “They all sort of felt Jewish, but they never did anything Jewish and nobody ever went to synagogue and they didn’t even have a menorah like Rachel and Monica did in their apartment on Friends.”
In Caplan’s view, this fear of cultural Judaism aligned with the way that Jews were being portrayed in popular comedy and media, as Seinfeld led to a boom in Jewish sitcom characters – in shows like Mad About You and Anything but Love, for example. She thought there was something important in the way Jewish comedians were using Judaism in their humour to think about themselves and their Jewish identity, and what it means for them to be Jewish.
Moving forward to the present and, according to Caplan, one finds that the younger generation, the millennials, are even more culturally tied to their American generational cohort and less so to being the grandchild or great-grandchild of Jewish immigrants.
“It’s a story about comedy and it’s a story about the way that Jewish comedians have related to Judaism in their comedy, but it’s also a story about Americanization. It is a story about the way that Jews in the United States became more and more embedded within their broader cultural milieu,” Caplan said, explaining the thought process that led her to write her book.
Caplan pointed out that counterculture, in Jewish comedy, was represented in the 1950s – a time generally associated in the popular sense with Leave It To Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet – by books like those by Philip Roth. His works, well before the broader 1960s counterculture movement, were critical of institutions but defensive of the Jewish community – viewing organized religion as something that was hurting Jews, but seeing the need for Jews to be protected.
What intrigued Caplan was that the pendulum had swung in the other direction for Generation X. “What I found was a fascinating reincorporation of Jewish ritual into the writing and the movies and the comedy of Generation X comedians. Jews themselves are being made fun of, but their engagement with Judaism is actually the thing that humanizes them,” she said.
In the 2001 film Kissing Jessica Stein, for example, the characters can be perceived as stilted, neurotic, self-absorbed Jewish caricatures, yet scenes at a Shabbat dinner and a wedding ground the characters and are not the subject of ridicule.
“It’s not that Generation X suddenly believes in God more than the previous generations did. It’s that they believe more in the power of ritual and tradition because it binds you. You’re not doing it necessarily because you have some sort of theological belief,” Caplan said.
As for millennials, among whom the oldest in the cohort is presently 42 years old, their story is still being written, she said.
“It seems as though they are willing to ridicule both Jewish identity and Jewish religious interaction at various times, depending on what suits the comedy,” she said. “They neither have a sense of oppression about their Judaism, nor do they have a sense of embarrassment about their Judaism.”
Caplan is currently researching and writing her next book, Unmasked: Jewish Identity in Comic Books.
The next speaker in the L’dor V’dor series is psychotherapist and author, and member of the second generation, Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone on Jan. 14. Firestone will talk on the topic Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma. For more information, visit kolotmayimreformtemple.com.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.