08/14/2017
"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."
Buffalo News - Jeff Simon
"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."
"An excellent new survey of Jewish humor from the Old Testament through Adam Sandler."
Weekly Standard - Joseph Epstein
"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."
Times Literary Supplement - David Baddiel
"Sharp and wide-ranging.… Dauber finds comedy in unexpected places."
"From Kafka to Mad magazine, [Dauber] delicately mixes scholarship with comedy in what is an entertaining and even profound book."
Booklist (Starred review)
"Both erudite and breezy.… Dauber’s breadth left me breathless and his depth left me in his debt."
"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."
BookPage - Harvey Freedenberg
"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."
"A serious study, and most interesting at its most serious and obscure."
New York Review of Books - Cathleen Schine
"In this brilliant and groundbreaking book, Jeremy Dauber shows that Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah Silverman are just the latest members of an ancient tradition of Jewish humor that stretches all the way back to the Bible. Writing with dazzling scholarly insight and in a style as appealing as his subject, Dauber reveals what made Jews laugh over the centuries. In doing so, he tells a crucial part of the story of Judaism."
"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."
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
DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
2017-07-03
