 Okay, thank you very much. We're going to be, we did a lot of this, but we didn't do all of this and as we go through the semester will be sort of like filling in the structure of this classification scheme of Jewish humor. And it's my idiosyncratic idea, my scheme. It works for me. And I haven't had any, I've had a lot done a lot of articles on it, I haven't had any pushback so I guess it's benign. But please feel free, you know, to, yeah, challenge in this class as you know, I want to say it again. It's always okay to challenge to challenge your fellow student to challenge me. As long as we all do it with respect and respectful discussion. And I definitely have no problem with that. Okay. We did a little bit of this with the idea what makes a joke Jewish that's really what we're talking about here. What makes a joke Jewish. For the most part, we would like to concentrate on aspects of Jewish humor that are purely uniquely Jewish we don't always succeed. But certainly a lot of things make a joke Jewish, even if it could also be used in other groups. So Joseph Talushkin who wrote a lot of wrote a book on Jewish humor. His idea and it's a very good one is that Jewish humor has to express a Jewish sensibility, whatever else it does it has to be Jewish. That's why I remember in class I said I those series of videos and books of old Jews telling jokes. I don't really care for them. They're funny, but they're not that Jewish. They're only Jewish in the sense that a lot of older Jews like to talk about sex and marriage. But everybody wants to talk about sex and marriage. That makes for a lot of good humor. So had a Jewish sensibility. Sometimes we can figure out how to have that and why it has it sometimes we just have to say, I know it when I see it like a lot of art. And of course it has to be funny. So we need two things we need to be funny and we need to be Jewish for Jewish humor. So basically the overall structure of what I'm working with. We've looked a lot at self deprecation, something that I don't have a resolution to but it suddenly made me. I was interested in this semester is looking at the difference between self deprecating humor and deprecating humor which I kind of saw in the Modi Rosenfeld clip that ended with the Home Depot, but he had a lot of deprecating humor in it, and self deprecating and maybe that's how he got away with it. So, I categorize that under the attitude of the humor. A lot of Jewish humor is sarcastic. I say that others are not. Okay, but a lot of Jewish humor is sarcastic. There's a, you know, a lot of use of irony. And of course self deprecation is very, very Jewish. What kind of what do I mean by devices is things that we could use, you know, to make up humor to make humor to create it. You might use wordplay. Questions, rhetorical questions. Answering a question with a question which is typically Jewish. Arguing, we talked about how Jews feel, we feel that we argue a lot. And that even goes back to the Hebrew Bible with the Israelites arguing with Moses and with God all the time and even with Abraham arguing with God. And I think I mentioned that one in class, but we'll probably go over it again in a few weeks. And blaming and complaining also you also see that in the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites being saved from slavery in Egypt and then what's the very first thing they do, they complain they blame they argue. So, if anybody wants to know whether they really were the precursors to Jews, yeah, for me, that says it all. Yeah, and like I said, it's okay to challenge stop me anytime if you want to contribute or if you want to challenge either way. I'll give you examples. I'll try. Definitely, you know, stop me if you say I don't understand that can you give me an example. Talmudic logic is very, very involved logic. And it's so identified with the Talmud that the and the ancient book that that the ancient rabbis and other sages. I put a lot of the air learning into that when you have a joke that uses very involved logic and logical arguments. It has a very Jewish ring, or even a Talmudic ring. And of course, if you're referring to scripture, certainly if you're referring to the Hebrew Bible, not the New Testament, if you're referring to scripture, very, very Jewish. We haven't looked at this yet in class, but Yiddish curses, which are Jewish just by virtue of the fact that number one, they're in Yiddish and number two, they're unique. Yiddish curses, the kind of thing that starts out sounding like a blessing. And then the other shoe drops. So, well, I hope we'll talk about that all of these are worth worthy topics to talk about. Speaking of topics. Sometimes the topic makes it Jewish. We looked at some Holocaust humor. I think we looked at a little bit of a simulation humor. And circumcision humor. Some people we mentioned some of it. Certainly if you have circumcision in your joke. It's Jewish. I guess it could be Muslim, but it would be an older, an older boy being circumcised. I'm just trying to, I'm trying to think if, if I've seen Muslim humor involving circumcision, I haven't, but maybe there is. You might want to let me know if you know if you've seen anything. Of course, overcoming oppression, it doesn't have to be Jewish. However, the Jews have such a long history of being oppressed that just the humor itself is a way of overcoming oppression. And so, of course, jokes about overcoming oppression are somehow very, very Jewish. Then finally the characters. You can have rabbis. Certainly if you're rabbis in a joke, it's going to be Jewish. You can have a God in a joke God features in a lot of Jewish humor. It also features in a lot of Christian humor. In fact, sometimes this it goes back and forth where I'll see a site that has supposedly a Jewish joke. And I've already seen it before on a Christian site and vice versa. A bunch of tales of the wise men of Helm, and it's satirical or sarcastic, because basically they're as far away from wise as you can possibly get. Matchmakers, if you've ever seen Fiddler on the Roof, matchmakers. And there's a lot of humor about and much of it is Jewish. I probably should look at Indian matchmaker humor. It might be similar, but yeah, there's a lot of Jewish matchmaker humor. And a lot of it is related to Jewish mother humor. What's what's Jewish mother humor like if anybody want to want to give me an idea of when when we have Jewish mothers in a joke. What are they doing. Go ahead Mike. I guess I can I can give an example of my, my favorite I don't know if it's a classic or not but what is the difference between a mother and a pit bull. I can't think of anything. Pit bulls eventually let go. Yeah, overbearing mother. Yeah, see Jewish mothers protect their family with an amazing amount of stick to itiveness. And yet they're always people, you know they're always the family doesn't exactly appreciate it let's put it that way. They're very very tough, but at the same time much maligned. My favorite Jewish mother joke is probably how many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb. Anybody. The answer is zero. I'll sit in the dark. So Jewish mothers manipulate they don't exactly come right out and say what they want except they're saying things like, Why didn't you call me last week to their children. Oh that's another great one. A guy calls calls his mom and says, Mom, how are you doing not too well. What's the matter. I'm feeling very very faint. I always have to sit down I can't do anything. How long has that been going on what's wrong. She said it's been going on for 40 days. I didn't eat anything for 40 days he said you didn't even think for 40 days why not. She said I didn't want my mouth to be full when you called. So that's also very typical Jewish mother joke and maybe even a general immigrant mother joke. It's interesting that Jewish mothers are tough Jewish grandmother is a sweet in the in the jokes and Japs if you've ever heard the term which is the young females before they come to become Jewish mothers. It stands for Jewish American princess. The Japs are terrible the Jap jokes. They're really an excuse for anti feminist humor. They talk about how the Jewish American princess is very self centered, and I can't do anything doesn't work wants to be supported. But in somehow and I look at this and I go these people turned into Jewish mothers. How did that happen. So I find I find that interesting. Jewish waiters anybody see Seinfeld the the soup Nazi. Okay, if you're a fan of Seinfeld, believe it or not, the soup Nazi is closer to the classic Jewish waiter joke than anything else, where they're sarcastic. They feel that they're better than the customer even though they're waiting on the customer. Okay, so there's a lot of humor there. Pious fools, see them a lot of different sects of Jews making fun of each other if you've got these characters and it's going to be a Jewish joke. They're part parts of the Jewish people. And of course anti semites we did talk about anti semites. And sinners. Chances are a lot of groups a lot of groups especially groups of faith have jokes about sinners I can't think of anything right now if anybody. If anybody can let me know. What about a Jewish mother in law joke. Does did anyone ever hear of a Jewish mother in law joke. I know the mother in law jokes are very popular right. Okay, then here's a classic. In a small town in Eastern Europe. A young man, a young issue of a boy is coming into town because he has a bride waiting for him. And he comes to the gets off the train gets onto the platform. What does he see, but a young woman and her mother, and on the other side another young woman and her mother. And he's the only young man who got off the train. And they both start fighting over him. No, he's mine. No, he's mine. No, he's not supposed to marry him. No, I'm supposed. And so finally they decide what are they going to do they go to a rabbi in a nearby town to adjudicate. He asks the first group for their story and he asked the second pair of women for their story. And he asks the fellow for his story and he doesn't know more than the fact that he's coming to get married. And then the rabbi says, we can only solve this the same way that Solomon did. I'm going to take this young man, and I'm going to cut him in half and give one half to that set of women, and the other half to that bride. And one of the, one of the mothers says, I think that's a good idea. That's okay. Which if you know the story of Solomon and the baby that was exactly the opposite of what you had. And what the rabbi says he says, oh, that's the real mother-in-law. So yeah, that that's probably the only real mother-in-law Jewish mother-in-law joke in existence. How is it Jewish, it makes reference to King Solomon. And a story about how he solved the problem of two women arguing over a baby. Did I tell you the one about. Maybe not. All right, we can we can save that because we're going to be going over many of these in more depth. All right. Here's a question. If we say that Jewish humor is a thing that there really is such a thing as Jewish humor, and we go back here and we identify different characteristics. Why? Why should that be? You know, Jews exist all over the world. They don't all eat the same food. They don't all live in the same country or come from the same country. They have different cultures because Jews spread out all over the world and took on the general culture that they were living in. What do Jews share? And also, what is this thing of Jewishness? The Nazis considered Jewish Jews to be a race. Some people consider Jewishness only a religion of faith. It could be a culture in which case boy, like I said, there's Jewish different Jewish culture is all over the place. It could be a nationality, which the only thing it could be would be Israel. And a clannishness. You know, the Jews consider themselves a family, no matter where they come from. And so when people, especially bigots, say, oh, Jews are clannish, what do they mean? For one thing, I don't see why that's a problem. I think everybody should be clannish. It means if you're going to take care of the people of the world, make sure you don't ignore your own people. So we could discuss this more in depth and in fact it would be nice for people who don't yet have a term project maybe to work on some of this. What else can we say about it? And one thing is that what do Jews all over the world from all different cultures have in common? Well, they have a common history in a sense on ancient history, not modern history. And they have common books. The Jews are called the people of the book. And so if we find that there is humor in the ancient texts, in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Talmud, and there is a lot, chances are it's going to influence a Jewish sense of humor in more modern times. And it could serve as the commonality of why Jews all over the world should share something. And also it could be, and obviously there's going to be a compare and contrast part, because Jews all over the world are also not the same. And sometimes there's humor out of comparing those and seeing what's different. I told you the COVID joke about the Sephardic Jews who ate at their Ashkenazi friends house, and they went to the emergency room because I couldn't taste anything. They thought they had COVID. Definitely different foods and different culture. Question? Okay. So we're going to fill this out eventually. May not come back to this table, but eventually I plan on filling that out. Question? Okay. We're going to stop recording.