‘We told jokes in the camps' – but is Jewish comedy doomed?

Telegraph

01-07-2025

It begins, like so many conversations about Jewishness, with a joke. An imam, a priest, a vicar and a rabbi are playing cards for money when the police burst in. Each man is asked if he has been gambling; each swears in turn on a holy text that he has not. All except for the rabbi, who says to his accuser: 'Seriously, you don't really think I am gambling all alone?'
The French-Jewish sociologist Michel Wieviorka overheard a rabbi tell this joke to his ­fellow French religious leaders at a conference on assisted dying in France. All four men were friends, but the joke left Wieviorka uneasy. 'Because in the joke, the Jew is the only one who avoids perjuring himself,' he says. 'He's no longer a victim. And he exhibits no solidarity for the others, only cunning. It's a joke that cuts itself off from a certain universalism, which is troubling for the ­Jewish community.'
Prompted by this encounter, Wieviorka has written a book called The Last Jewish Joke, which argues that the great Jewish comic tradition – one that historically appeals to empathy through gentle self-mockery – is in danger of dying out. His book is both an homage to that humour, which he sees as rich in generosity, absurdity and self-­ironising asides, and the story of its evolution through the 20th century, jumping from the shtetl to Hollywood to France to Britain and beyond.
Wieviorka also believes that the space for Jewish joke-telling is under threat – from a combination of increased hostility towards Israel, growing ignorance about the Holocaust, and the rise of other ethnic groups pleading a victimhood that Wieviorka argues was once historically Jewish. 'For centuries, there has always been room for humour in the Jewish experience, even in the most appalling situations,' he says. 'Even the Torah is full of humour. But I fear the Jewish jokes I know and love are struggling to exist.'
So, is he right? As the old joke goes, ask two Jews and you get three opinions. 'It's true that Jewish culture tends to find comedy in ­carrying the worries of the world on our shoulders,' says the Welsh-­Jewish stand-up Bennett Arron. 'I have this joke I tell when people ask me if Jews drink alcohol. I say, 'Yes, we are allowed to, but we often don't. Firstly because it takes away valuable eating time. And ­secondly because when you drink, you ­forget all your troubles. But our troubles are all we have.' Yet increasingly I find that people respond by saying, 'Well, others have got it worse.' There's a sense that empathy [for the Jewish condition] is being eroded.'
Others, however, reject what they see as a narrow view of Jewish wit. 'Jewish comedy is sometimes about victimhood, but often it's about a state of mind,' says the ­Jewish comedian and author David Baddiel. 'If people are turning away from the idea of Jews as victims of history – which, by the way, they always have – then I'd argue there was only ever a brief window where people accepted that [kind of humour] in the first place... I wouldn't want to write jokes that position Jews as victims and invite sympathy. As a Jewish comedian, you are trying to invite people [to realise] that my experience as a Jew is part of the human experience, it's not over there and nothing to do with you.'
Ask most Jews what constitutes Jewish humour in the first place and (on this at least) they agree: it's about finding light in the dark. 'It's always been used as a way of speaking truth to power,' says the ­Orthodox Jewish stand-up Rachel Creeger. 'If they're laughing, you can say anything. We told jokes under persecution, in the shtetls, in the ghettos, in the camps. Humour has a physical impact on the body, raising endorphins, giving the joke-teller a dopamine hit. For a culture like ours, this is definitely part of our survival.'
Historically, this humour in ­Britain has occupied a marginal position. It overlaps with our comic sensibilities in its instincts for self-deprecation, but diverges in motive: British humour tends to be more apologetic and tied up with class anxiety. And Jewish humour has nothing like the centrality here that it enjoys in ­America. As Baddiel notes, 'The American sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm can do a whole episode in which Larry [David], ­trying to get in with some very ­religious Jews, eats some non-kosher food from a plate, is caught doing it, and has to bury the plate for three days in his garden to cleanse it.' He continues: 'No one says, 'Larry, nobody will understand this because it's too Jewish,' because there's an assumption in American comedy that the lang­uage of comedy will include Jew­ishness. That's not the case in the UK.'
Certainly, when Robert Popper was writing Friday Night Dinner, Channel 4's long-running and much-loved sitcom about a Jewish family (starring Tamsin Greig and the late Paul Ritter), his producers asked him, perhaps with a touch of nerves, just how Jewish the show was going to be. 'To which my answer was, well, as Jewish as I am,' Popper says. 'Which was to say, we're normal people, so get used to it. I mainly saw Friday Night Dinner as being about a specific family, inspired by my own, rather than about a generic Jewish one. And I saw it as very different to what we used to get with Jewish stories on TV, when you had Yiddish violin music over the lighting of the ­Shabbat candles and Maureen ­Lipman saying 'oy vey, oy vey'.'
As a result, many viewers watched Friday Night Dinner without realising the show was Jewish at all: or, if they did realise, they didn't regard the Jewishness as its defining feature. 'I was out in Soho after the first season came out,' says Tracy-Ann Oberman (who plays Auntie Val), 'and this Islamic cleric came running up to me. He said, 'I love it! It's just like my family.' I think there's a universality in Jewish humour that speaks to the absurdity of the human condition, which is something we can all recognise.'
Nor does she see this quality as being under threat, as Wieviorka fears; in fact, she believes it's enjoying a resurgence. 'Given that comedy has changed so much in the past 20 years, with ­people becoming more and more scared about what they can say, I think Jewish humour has fared ­better than most other types. Jewish humour is not about punching down, but about observational wit and storytelling.'
That Friday Night Dinner did not announce its Jewishness perhaps reflects a certain tentativeness ­that Jewish people have long felt about their relationship to Britain's broader ­culture. 'We live in a time when all minorities, not just ethnic ones, have been encouraged to own their minority and not be in the closet, and this is all to the good,' says Baddiel. 'But Jews find it very difficult to do that, particularly now, and that includes being openly funny about being Jewish.'
Yet this argument isn't borne out by today's thriving Jewish stand-up circuit – which was non-existent when Baddiel was starting out 30 years ago. 'Over the past 15 years, I've seen a huge growth in the number of comedians who have been public about their Jewish heritage and use it in their material,' says Creeger, who runs the UK's only ­regular Jewish comedy night, at the north London venue JW3. 'It feels like there's an understanding now that Jewish comedy is something positive and engaging. There's an awareness that it has status in the US as a genre, which helps. And where previous generations were often advised to keep a low profile about their ethnic and cultural identity – some even changed names – now, this is far less common.'
However, Creeger also agrees that Jewish comedy is under pressure in an era that, as Wieviorka puts it, is 'not a time for smiling or laughing, or for the Jewish jokes that it was once poss­ible to share with ­others'.
In fact, she thinks, 'Jewish comedians have gone in one of two directions recently. They've either become much more expressive of their identity, on and off stage, or removed it almost entirely from their material. There's definitely an external expectation of being seen to be 'the right kind of Jew': one who conforms to the widely held and loudly shouted views. There isn't a great deal of knowledge or understanding of the rich diversity in Jewish history, thought and ­opinion, and this means that labels get placed on ­Jewish people without nuance or critical thinking.'
She herself has openly experienced anti-Semitism as a stand-up, including one instance when she came on after an act that had made reference to the Middle East. 'I've had a gig where some of the crowd literally turned their backs at the reveal of my Jewish identity,' she says. 'It's a real problem when [other comedians include] ideas that are not factually correct, or include tropes and stereotypes.'
'I've lost a lot of comedian friends, sadly, over the past few years: ­people who, if I've made a comment about anti-Semitism, yawn and say change the subject, we've heard it all before,' adds Bennett Arron, whose forthcoming Edinburgh show, I Regret This Already, is about precisely this scen­ario. And yet he doesn't see anti-Semitic attitudes as a threat to Jew­ish comedy itself. 'Jewish hum­our has always been about trying to adapt to changing circumstances. It's a coping mechanism. A way of fighting back verbally rather than physically.'
None of this is sounding as though the great Jewish comic trad­ition is approaching extinction. 'By definition, there cannot be a last Jewish joke because a Jewish joke is nothing else,' says the great comic novelist Howard Jacobson. ''The last Jewish joke' is an oxymoron. The black finality of things is what every Jewish joke confronts. The harder things get for Jews, the more jokes we tell. They are our survival strategy, the only victory we know.'