Jewish Comedy
- Author Jeremy Dauber
- Narrator Jeremy Dauber
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date 31 October 2017
- Run Time 10 hours and 50 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Comedy and stand-up, Humour, Religion and beliefs, Social groups: religious groups and communities.
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What to expect
In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter.
Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy—including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar—Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel. And he explores an enormous range of comic masterpieces, from the Book of Esther, Talmudic rabbi jokes, Yiddish satires, Borscht Belt skits, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm to the work of such masters as Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Sarah Silverman, and Jon Stewart.
Critics Review
“Thoughtful…Fascinating.”
“A serious and good philosophical work…that doesn’t consist entirely of jokes but has an awful lot of them in it…Some of its jokes are laugh-out-loud funny, and some of them are poignantly beautiful.”
“Dauber recognizes the multiplicity of Jewish humor and wisely resists any single characterization of it…[He] deftly surveys the whole recorded history of Jewish humor.”
“A serious study and most interesting at its most serious and obscure.”
“Dauber takes in a wide swath of intellectual territory—from Kafka to Mad magazine—but he delicately mixes scholarship with comedy in what is an entertaining and even profound book.”
“Both erudite and breezy.”
“Could well be the gold standard for understanding what people of any ethnicity, nationality, or political persuasion find funny, and why.”
“An erudite survey of the evolution and distinctiveness of Jewish humor…A wide-ranging and insightful cultural analysis.”
“Any history of humor must include some jokes, and Dauber knows how to tell a joke…In any case. It’s not a joke book. Humor comes mostly out of everyday life, and Dauber weaves the narrative of everyday Jewish life (from the Babylonian exile to the present) and the literary record into a story of why a nation laughed—and needed to.”
“You can’t understand comedy without knowing Jewish comedy—and you’ll find no smarter, more intrepid, and surprising analysis of the subject than in this book.”
“Brilliant and groundbreaking…[Dauber] tells a crucial part of the story of Judaism.”
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