Book Highlights

This book is funny, clever and, at times, heartbreaking. In other words, Jewish

David Baddiel

[Baum is] intellectually luminous, psychologically penetrating, existentially anxious, and wonderfully funny

Zadie Smith

Hilarious and thought-provoking

About the Jewish Joke

The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, but still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as "funny"? And how old can a joke get?

Overview of the Book

The Jewish Joke is a brilliant - and very funny - riff on Jewish jokes, about what marks them apart from other jokes, why they are important to Jewish identity and how they work. Ranging from self-deprecation to anti-Semitism, politics to sex, it looks at the past of Jewish joking and asks whether the Jewish joke has a future. With jokes from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho mostly), this is both a compendium and a commentary, light-hearted and deeply insightful.