Should I Laugh?

Guest Author David Holzel, creator of the Jewish Angle webzine, ponders the real-life ramifications of ethnic jokes in a PC world. Must we stifle our laughter in order to appear politically correct?

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After three decades of collective sensitivity training, from All You Need Is Love in the 1960s to the more contemporary To every accidental sexual double entendre there is a litigant, is it conceivable that we're still insensitive about anyone or anything?

Hal Dresner looked into his soul and answered "Yes." A joke writer and humor teacher for years, Dresner recently vowed to drop from his repertoire any humor that could hurt. And so that no one should be confused about the kind of levity he was swearing off, he offered the following joke as an example:

Harry decides he's fed up with being a Jew. It's just too much trouble. Much nicer to be a Catholic. One day he leaves home, walks down to the nearby church and has himself converted by the priest. Simple as that. Next morning, Harry wakes up, puts on his tefillin and does his morning prayers as usual.

"What gives, Harry?" says his wife. "I thought you became a Catholic."

"Oy," Harry says, smacking his forehead with the palm of his hand. "Goyishe kop."

When I read this joke from Hal Dresner's letter, just before reacting with sorrow at this sweeping and unfair generalization of non-Jews as idiots - Goyishe kop literally means "gentile head" - I laughed. Out loud. For a long time. Then I read Hal's joke to some other people. And you know what? My delivery got better each time.

Well, it's funny. And I say this despite the fact that some of my best friends are gentiles. And none fits the generalization. Banish the joke, but the problem is still there. Humans need to laugh. So how do we laugh without it being at someone else's expense?

All of this reminded me of another joke. This one at our expense.

A Hebrew took his boy Ikey to the theater and went up in the gallery. The play was so exciting Ikey leaned over the railing and fell downstairs. His father got excited and hollered:

"Ikey, for God's sake, come back. It costs a dollar down dere."

Part of the after-dinner entertainment at a gathering of the Sons of the Confederate Fruit of Islam? Or maybe an excerpt from The Lighter Side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No, just a gem from The New Hebrew Joke Book, a 64-page paperback the size of a man's wallet. If you found the term "Ikey," the clumsy use of dialect and the stereotype of Jewish avarice offensive, don't dial the ADL yet. The New Hebrew Joke Book came out in 1907, and its author and publisher was a Jew.

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