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Start giftingJewish Comedy
A Serious History
Narrator
Jeremy Dauber
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Length
10 hours 49 minutes
Language
English
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.
Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University. He is the author of several nonfiction books on Jewish history and literature, and his Jewish Comedy was a finalist for the Natan Book Award.
Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University. He is the author of several nonfiction books on Jewish history and literature, and his Jewish Comedy was a finalist for the Natan Book Award.
Reviews
“Thoughtful…Fascinating.”
“A serious study and most interesting at its most serious and obscure.”
“Both erudite and breezy.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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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