Not Everyone Was Laughing Last Week

Not feeling quite100% this week, but  considering how lousy I was feeling last week, this is a  vast improvement.  Now, if only I could breathe...

Our Founder, Ziggy

I never expected last  week's column to unleash a small firestorm about humor. I am not the comedy guy in this family. My dad was exceptionally funny, my brother thinks he's funny, Ziggy wrote  Ziggy's Joke o'the Day for pity's sake, and the Senior Son briefly (thank G-d) entertained the idea of being a stand-up comic when he was a kid. (Just ask him to do his James Mason as the 4th Stooge routine. Kills 'em every time.) Being the straight man in this family has its advantages. 

These days, comments on the page are much rarer than I would like, but the emails have always been kinda constant. Usually, they are short, often sweet, and to the point. This week, a little less so. One reader advised that alcoholism is a disease and I should not take it lightly. Another wrote that even a joke about Superman being a murderer was untoward, cruel, and downright mean. A third found it disturbing enough to  question my own sense of humor. And  a friend sent me a joke.  

I will address these in order.

First, both my in-laws (yes, that includes FIL) were alcoholics. My husband was many things, but first and foremost, he was the adult child of alcoholics. He never shied away from talking about that or hid it or diminished its importance. That addiction had an enormous, HUGE, and indelible impact  on his life, and by extension, mine and the boys. FIL ultimately dried out and became a highly functional member of this family, but it took a long time. The specter of alcoholism never fully disappeared. I take alcoholism very seriously, but the Superman joke is not about alcoholism. It's about a guy getting drunk. Ziggy would tell you there is a huge difference between the two. 

Casting Superman in a less-than-heroic role is fair game. Superman is a comic book character. He is not real, cannot  be considered real, and cannot stand up in a court of law to say squat. You didn't like  the joke? No problem at all. You're entitled to your own sense of humor and that's great. Just make sure you're laughing aloud at stuff you find funny in case others want to share your laughter. That's a good thing to do. 

As for the one who questioned my sense of humor? Harrummmppphhhh. And the horse you rode in on. As I tell the Senior Son all the time: NSOH

But what I really want to talk about is the joke that was sent to me:

Two beggars are sitting side by side on a street in Rome, Italy.  One has a Cross in front of him; the other one is holding the Star of David.

 

Many people go by, look at both beggars, but only put money into the hat of the beggar sitting behind the Cross.

 

The Pope comes by. He stops to watch the throngs of people giving money to the beggar who holds the Cross while none give to the beggar holding the Star of David.

 

Finally, the Pope approaches the beggar with the Star of David and says, "My poor fellow, don't you understand?  This is a Catholic country; this city is the seat of Catholicism. People aren't going to give you money if you sit there with a Star of David in front of you, especially when you're sitting beside a beggar who is holding a Cross.  In fact, they would probably give more money to him just out of spite."

 

The beggar with the Star of David listened to the Pope, smiled, and turned to the beggar with the Cross and said, "Moishe, would you look who's trying to teach the Goldstein brothers about marketing!"

This is a mild, clean, seemingly harmless little joke. When I got to the last line, I frowned. There  it was: the trope.

The sender, not Jewish, is the most gentle , kind, good-natured guy who would never do something to intentionally offend anyone. Seriously. The man worries about this stuff. And having just sat through a whole bunch of discussions about Jewish jokes, punchlines, and cultural appropriation, I had to sit and think about this for a while. How should I handle this? Should I say something and risk hurting his feelings? Keep silent and not acknowledge the joke at all? Or write back "cute," and let it go at that? 

This was really hard and I had to pull it apart from nine directions. 

Had  a Jew sent this joke, would I be offended? No. If someone Jewish had sent it, I would've chuckled, but that's about it, and maybe sent something snarky back about being thankful they weren't in Palermo. But that would've been just as stereotypical. 

Would Ziggy have used this joke in Joke o'the Day?  Not very likely. The last line would probably have crossed a line for him, and I think he would've passed on it for the very reason I was uncomfortable with it. 

I ultimately decided to say something:

I suppose that might be considered funny in some circles, perhaps if told by one Jew to another Jew. But honestly, I don't find it funny at all. I hear an old trope that is about as offensive as the N word is to Black people. 

The joke implies that the two men are dishonest, and they are swindling money out of non-Jews by posing as something they are not. Oh, you know, Jews just go for the money any way they can get it.  This joke laughs at us, not with us,  and really says something unpleasant.

I understand your aim was the laugh, not this response. 

He responded with a most genuine and sincere apology which included the line "I apologize for my insensitivity."

Now, I felt really badly and felt that I needed  to clarify my response. Of course, I coulda  just shut up, but I didn't. I wrote:

Until one has been part of a minority continually used as a  trope for mean-spirited or patently false characteristics or conditions, one is conditioned to laugh at the trope. 

When one identifies  the trope as racist/hurtful/false, the identifier is usually accused of lacking a sense of humor....at oneself or people. "Oh, I didn't mean anything by it; you need to lighten up."

Too often we, the intended butt of the joke, smile, chortle, or otherwise dismiss the joke without saying anything. But when an armed gunman comes into your place of worship and demands to know where you (the rabbi) keep all the money, then we had to admit we brought some of this on ourselves with our silence. 

I'm glad to know your sensitivity has been raised, but it is not all Jewish jokes; it's about Polish jokes, Italian jokes, and Japanese jokes. This isn't being woke or cancelling culture; it's about assigning labels that ultimately do perception damage. 

Personally, I used to tell "ethnic" jokes until someone said,  "How would YOU feel if..." That has become my yardstick. 

Let's  just say his response was polite silence, not  that I expected any sort of answer. But I did want him to understand it's not just about Jewish jokes. 

Which brings me to the next link in this thought chain: how did we get here?

Linda LeClair: Photo: Bettman/Getty Images

This is something everyone in these here United States is struggling with whether one wants to  admit it or not. As a child coming of age in the 60s, I remember the paradigm shift with great alacrity. I may be one of the few people who still grins at the name Linda LeClair. She was my hero. I barely knew what sex was, but I knew I wanted to be able to have it when I wanted it and Linda LeClair took on the world for our bodily freedom. Life as  we knew it was changing so fast and so dramatically. Demonstrations, rallies, school strikes...as we slid from the 60s into the 70s, everything changed. 

I remember boys in school making  lewd comments about Linda LeClair. I remember sex jokes once relegated to the boys' gym locker room were suddenly everywhere. This was a harbinger of changing times. That which was escaping some  private place  and slamming  into the public forum was not necessarily a move toward freedom of speech. In fact, it was moving into a language of marginally recognized hate speech.

Ethnic jokes were becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Polish jokes, Jewish Princess/JAP jokes, Italian jokes, Irish jokes, Swedish jokes....substitute any minority and you have a joke. We all laughed. No one thought anything of it. Or did we?

I remember the first time someone called me a JAP. I was on a stage, a hammer in my hand, straddling a ladder, fixing a set piece. Some jackass yelled up to me, "Hey! JAP! You sure you know which end of the hammer to use?" Several guys tittered. I was livid. I waved to the guy, leaned over the ladder, and said, "Come 'ere. Let me check that against your skull." 

Later, I was reprimanded by the head of the theater. "He didn't mean anything, you're being too sensitive. We're not used to Jewish girls hanging off ladders." If he had just said  girls, I probably would've been merely annoyed. But he said Jewish girls and I resented that like hell. Had he said, "New York Jewish girls..." I probably woulda slugged him.

Did that make me politically correct or woke? Nope. I still told my share of ethnic jokes. What I perceived as a slur against me as a Jewish girl did not immediately translate into any advanced state of thinking. But eventually the inequity of the speech caught in my head and I slowly began the move toward not practicing specious speech. 

It started small...discussions between Ziggy and me about what made stuff funny, laughing AT you or WITH you, what is an anti-Semitic joke and what is harmless? Is anything harmless? These were not lighthearted romps; they were deep, soul-dredging conversations in which we did not always agree. Ziggy was particularly aware of anti-Semitic tropes and I remember him going head-to-head with a well-known comic about it. Sometime in the early 90s, I stopped finding Saturday Night Live to be funny. I would occasionally watch the opening monologue with Ziggy, but then we'd turn it off. Were we getting old and crotchety? When did some of the stand-up comics stop being funny? We found we preferred to Dennis O'Leary and Dennis Miller. Dave Barry was funny. So were Billy Crystal and Bill Maher. 

The common thread? Situational humor. 

I suspect we were getting tired of potshots. In our endless dissection of humor, we kept coming back again and again to AT you or WITH you. The older I get, even without  Ziggy at the kitchen table (which, after 13 years, I still hate) I find I am significantly less tolerant of ethnic slurs. That stuff is so embedded in our national conversations that we should be embarrassed by it. And, it needs to stop now.

Do yourself a favor: go back and watch an old western, something like Fort Apache or The Searchers. It's a bellwether. Your response to the films might surprise you. 

This isn't really about being woke or politically correct; it's about perceiving people around us. The operative word in that sentence being PEOPLE. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

If you don't like being labeled with an ethnic slur,

don't do it to others. 

It's  just that simple.