Book review

Stand-up comedy as we know it is largely a Jewish invention, with the children of immigrants developing the craft in mid-20th Century America in the nightclubs of the Catskills and in the early days of TV. 

Fast-talking, judgmental, self-deprecating, gently absurd, it drew on the Jewish oral tradition and proved an effective way for this second generation to integrate while maintaining a separated cultural identity. 

In his latest book, veteran French intellectual Michel Wieviorka charts the origins of Jewish jokes in the shtetls – small Eastern European towns of predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations –and the urban ghettos of tight-knit, Yiddish-speaking diaspora. 

An example he cites has a client walking into a wholesale clothing store and ordering hundreds of pairs of trousers, jackets and shirts, after which he requests: ‘I’ll need a receipt.’ ‘A receipt?’ replies the bewildered owner. ‘What kind of scam are you trying to pull?’

Wieviorka, a prominent sociologist, argues that the golden age of Jewish gags like this is over, and not just because those social enclaves have been eroded. Another reason is that as the collective memories of the Holocaust faded and other injustices came to prominence, Jewish people ‘lost their monopoly’ on victimhood to other ethnic and social groups. And the militaristic actions of Israeli state hardly scream ‘victim’.

The rise in antisemitism from both the left and the right is also to blame says Wieviorka, not unreasonably, and given he’s spent a lifetime researching hatred against Jews, he’s well-placed to comment.

He says Jewish jokes only work outside the community if there’s an  ‘assumption of empathy between Jews and non-Jews and a coexistence that is, if not harmonious, at least tolerant and above all democratic’. However, he believes we now live in ‘a space in which suspicion and hatred destroy empathy and kindness and in which humour, when it exists, can no longer contribute to bringing together intellectual and political communities.’ In his view, the age of jokes building bridges has gone.

That era, he suggests peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps with the most notable trope to cut through being that of the domineering Jewish mother, which ‘arose in a context of empathy for an increasingly visible Jewish culture and history’. Since women were more generally moving from being housewives to having more power in society, this stereotype was even more potent – but now that change is largely complete, the stereotype has gone the way of similar mother-in-law gags, Wieviorka suggests.

He also says that traditional Jewish gags are defined by an absolute absence of malice – in conflict with the common belief that jokes always contain at least a ‘small share of meanness’. At one point he says that this means that they can be told by non-Jews ‘without stoking antisemitism’. Though earlier he insisted Jewish jokes ‘can only be told by a Jew - if not, antisemitism soon surfaces’, so there’s a contradiction there.

The writer’s background means this is less an analysis of the state of Jewish humour and more an essay about how wider social attitudes to Jewish people have changed over the decades – which he then extrapolates to the context of jokes. Whatever the title suggests, it’s hard to suggest Jewish humour is over, just the particular type of Jewish gag he specifically has in mind.

There’s no acknowledgement, for example, that people still lap up Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm or that the acclaimed new Netflix animated comedy Long Story Short puts Jewishness front and centre (and with the supposedly long-dead domineering mother archetype writ very large indeed). 

Despite the actions of certain Edinburgh Fringe venues, Jewish comics still punch above their weight for representation in stand-up in the UK and especially the US. Alex Edelman just had a Broadway run of his stand-up show Just  For Us, explicitly based on his Jewish identity, for example, and the new West End version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers both celebrates and mocks Max Bialystock’s Jewishness.

Even historically, what of the likes of Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason (pictured) and Lenny Bruce? Were their jokes defined by the same lack of meanness that Wieviorka thinks exemplified Jewish comedy? Hardly.

Rather he’s defined a ‘Jewish joke’ by a narrow metric and therefore everything that falls outside of that is evidence of its death. You might as well say English humour is dead because Carry On innuendo has long gone  out the window. 

Wieviorka actually has in mind a particular story as being ‘the last Jewish joke’. Told to him by a rabbi, it involves an imam, a priest, a vicar and a rabbi playing cards for money when the police burst in. Each man is asked if he has been gambling; each swears in turn on their holy text that he has not. All except for the rabbi, who says: ‘Seriously, you don’t really think I am gambling all alone?’

Wieviorka thinks that while this gag portrays its Jewish subject as smart and cunning, it does not have the generosity of spirit he believes is required, so could be used by antisemites as well as Jews themselves. 

The point might seem abstruse –  as indeed is much of the book, which seems written with an academic audience in mind, making it a demanding read sometimes. Wieviorka cites all sorts of sources that would be obscure to a layman, while also being very keen to emphasise his own role in ongoing social issues, His background is admirable, but it comes across as immodest, even egotistical, when he starts  issuing a snippy response to review one of his earlier books received, for example. 

The book laments for a lost time when Jewish people had a stronger cultural identity, separate from the mainstream and a cause for curiosity, but not hatred. But Jewish jokes will surely evolve with society and Jews’ place in it, not come to an end entirely.  

• The Last Jewish Joke by Michel Wieviorka and translated by Cory Stockwell has been published by Polity. It is available for £15.99 in hardback from Amazon  – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.

Review date: 17 Sep 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett