Jewish humor

Jewish humor dates back to the compilation of Talmud and Midrash. In the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, theological satire was a traditional way to clandestinely express opposition to Christianization.

During the nineteenth century, modern Jewish humor emerged among German-speaking Jewish proponents of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), it matured in the shtetls of the Russian Empire, and then, it flourished in twentieth-century America, arriving with the millions of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and the early 1920s. Beginning on vaudeville and continuing on radio, stand-up, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American comedians have been Jewish. Time estimated in 1978 that 80 percent of professional American comics were Jewish.

Jewish humor is diverse, but most frequently, it consists of wordplay, irony, and satire, and the themes of it are highly anti-authoritarian, mocking religious and secular life alike. Sigmund Freud considered Jewish humor unique in that its humor is primarily derived from mocking the in-group (Jews) rather than the Other. However, rather than simply being self-deprecating, it also contains an element of self-praise.