Bookforum - Adam Wilson
"Sharp and wide-ranging.… Dauber finds comedy in unexpected places."
Booklist (Starred review)
"From Kafka to Mad magazine, [Dauber] delicately mixes scholarship with comedy in what is an entertaining and even profound book."
The Economist
"Dauber recognizes the multiplicity of Jewish humour and wisely resists any single characterisation of it. . . . [He] deftly surveys the whole recorded history of Jewish humour."
Weekly Standard - Joseph Epstein
"An excellent new survey of Jewish humor from the Old Testament through Adam Sandler."
Buffalo News - Jeff Simon
"Hugely smart and hugely readable.… Here is a serious book full of the reasons Jewish humor is as funny and influential as it is, whether it’s a response to persecution or a social satire or intellectual or raunchy or ironic or folksy."
BookPage - Harvey Freedenberg
"A comprehensive, accessible treatment of a complex subject. As the famous 1960s ad campaign for Levy’s rye bread told us, you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it."
Forward - Adam Rovner
"Both erudite and breezy.… Dauber’s breadth left me breathless and his depth left me in his debt."
Mark Horowitz
"Thoughtful.… Fascinating."
Times Literary Supplement - David Baddiel
"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."
New York Review of Books - Cathleen Schine
"A serious study, and most interesting at its most serious and obscure."
Jason Zinoman
"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. From the Bible to Kafka to Seinfeld and beyond, Jeremy Dauber’s incisive wit and deep erudition makes Jewish Comedy an essential read for anyone curious about what makes us laugh."
Sam Lipsyte
"This book is brilliant, endlessly revelatory, and Jeremy Dauber is that rare scholar and critic of real depth who doesn’t just make his subject accessible but animates it with the strength of his prose. He’s also one of the few writers I’ve encountered who can explain a joke without killing it. Bravo."
Adam Kirsch
"A brilliant and groundbreaking book."
DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
This audiobook grew out of the author’s course at Columbia University, and it retains much of the analytical depth of its precursor without the dry stretches that plague much academic writing. Of course, any history of humor must include some jokes, and Dauber knows how to tell a joke. The stretches of history are mostly less funny, but those who aren’t interested in history won’t be listening to this, 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. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-07-03
An erudite survey of the evolution and distinctiveness of Jewish humor.Dauber (Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture/Columbia Univ.; The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, 2013, etc.) offers a thorough, authoritative examination of Jewish comedy "in all its vast and variegated forms, from antiquity to yesterday," which is the subject of a course he has taught for the last 15 years. Although sprinkled with jokes, the book is not a compendium but instead a history of Jewish culture, theology, and literature focused on the function of satire, irony, and wit in Jewish life. The author begins by locating humor in the Talmud, Torah, and Old Testament. The Bible, he admits, "is actually Not Funny." Nevertheless, he finds much evidence of biblical wit, parody, and laughter, citing, for example, Esther, Solomon, and Job. He notes Sarah's laughter when she is told that she will bear a son with her aged husband, Abraham. "Her laugh," Dauber writes, "is a laugh of irony: Sarah knows the way the world works, and she's mocking her foolish husband for his fantastic beliefs." After Isaac ("whose name comes from the Hebrew word for laughing") is born, Sarah's response is not "comic laughter of superiority but a humbled grin." Dauber discusses three main theories of comedy: incongruity theory (Sarah's laughter is an example); relief theory, referring to jokes that relieve tension; and congruity theory, joy that "bespeaks divine harmony." The author gleans insights from philosophers (Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin), Freud, and many novelists (Bellow, Kafka, and Roth, to name a few). He analyzes Woody Allen's "curmudgeonly neurotics" and the work of generations of comics, including Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, Nichols and May, Mel Brooks, Gilda Radner, and Jerry Seinfeld. Male comics, he finds, "were happy to turn out stereotypical portraits" of Jews, while women invented a broader range of characters but still might include "the self-deprecating schlimazel" and the Jewish mother. A wide-ranging and insightful cultural analysis.
