Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials by Jennifer Caplan
The 2023 Pew Research Center survey of Jewish Americans, like others before it, found that many Jews consider a good sense of humor to be essential to being Jewish. In Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials, Jennifer Caplan illustrates the range of forms and content that American Jewish humor has taken and situates them in their social and historical contexts from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Caplan argues that each generation of American Jews since World War II has created humor about Jews and Judaism that reflects that generation's way of managing the tensions of being Jewish and American.
The book contains close readings of short stories, novels, television programs, films, and even an Instagram feed providing deep and detailed analysis of each author's literary or cinematic tools and forms. The book's introduction sets the stage for the succeeding analyses of Jewish humor across generations. Caplan notes that there are lots of ways to define "Jewish humor," but for Caplan's purposes Jewish humor is "about Jewish things, including ritual, texts, and Jewishness itself" (2), and it contains elements "that could not exist without Judaism" (6).
Caplan regards the case studies as representative of their authors' generations, reflecting the differences among humorists since WWII. In doing so, she captures their changing ideas and feelings about Jewish identity. As many postwar Jews continued to move from cities to suburbs and to increase social integration with non-Jews, they also dwelled amid the spiritual, psychological, and emotional aftermath of the Holocaust. Caplan argues that both the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers displayed negative attitudes toward Judaism as a religion but were concerned about the well-being of Jews as a people. In subsequent generations, spatial and social integration with non-Jews came to feel more natural, and the Holocaust felt more distant. Generation X and Millennials felt more at ease with their positions as Jews in American society, and their humor made fun of Jews but treated Jewish religion with respect and even reverence. The humor produced by each generation addressed in this book reveals, Caplan argues, "a shift from prioritizing Jewish peoplehood to protecting Judaism" (3) that reflects American Jews' shift from identifying as Jews to identifying as Americans.
The first two chapters address the Silent Generation (born 1925–45) with analyses of short stories by Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud. These Silent Generation authors, Caplan shows, satirized American Jews' self-consciousness about their status as Americans and their fear that the "Old World" ways of religious Jews might diminish non-Jews' precarious acceptance of more assimilated Jews.
In Chapter 3, Caplan demonstrates how Baby Boomers are what she calls a "Copycat Generation" because their humor is influenced heavily by adjacent generations. This chapter examines 1970s and 80s fauxmercials and [End Page 107] sketches from Saturday Night Live and the 1990s television show Seinfeld. It engages with audience reception as well as the works themselves: television programs with antisemitic tropes angered many viewers, while ones that mocked Jewish religious rituals did not.
Chapter 4 turns to Generation X, with analyses of the films Kissing Jessica Stein, The Big Lebowski, and A Serious Man; the novel This Is Where I Leave You; the short story "Sister Hills;" and the television show Curb Your Enthusiasm. In contrast to earlier generations that mocked Judaism but treated Jews and the Jewish people with care, most Generation X creators featured in this chapter portrayed Jewish characters as dysfunctional fools but Jewish religious elements as sacred and deeply meaningful.
Chapter 5 studies work produced by Millennials so far: the television shows Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the Instagram feed @Crazy-JewishMom. Millennials featured in this chapter differ significantly from the creators in earlier chapters because they are all women, and they achieved success by developing their own online audiences or by appearing on reality shows, unlike creators in earlier generations who started in standup comedy. For Millennials, Jewish religion can be good or bad depending on the context, and Jewishness is a positive trait for individuals. Caplan identifies two new developments for this generation. First, there is a shift from portraying Jewish women as "JAPs" (Jewish American Princesses) to "Modern Ashkenazi-American Women" (131), who are "well-educated and success-driven…socially liberal but supportive of the State of Israel, and maintain[ing] "Jewish" as only one of many identifiers of an intersectional identity" (132). Second, the role of Holocaust memory in U.S. Jewish identity is satirized (132–33).
Readers will find this text valuable because it offers a set of analytical tools and categories that will help move forward research in the study of contemporary American Jewish culture. Caplan's analysis of how American Jewish humor has changed across four generations provides a crucial understanding of the different ways Judaism and Jews can be expressed and reckoned with. The idea that Jewish cultural and religious forms and expressions change over time should be uncontroversial, and yet this viewpoint is not a given in some social-scientific research and cultural discourse about contemporary Jewry. Further, Caplan's analyses of different forms of Jewish humor suggest useful starting points for empirical social-scientific research about what people mean when they say a sense of humor is essential to being Jewish. The analytical approach in Funny, You Don't Look Funny is literary criticism rather than social science, but its insights nevertheless are valuable for social science: the works discussed in the book have rendered Jewish experience into cultural expressions that have resonated with millions of Jewish and non-Jewish readers and viewers. The book's insights also align with both old and new discussions in social scientific literature, e.g., Raul Perez's The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford University Press, 2022) and Marshal Sklare's extensive work on intermarriage in the 1960s and 70s. [End Page 108]
Funny, You Don't Look Funny is suitable for use in undergraduate courses that focus on American Jewry or popular culture. The book is very readable and the writing style in this book is accessible and lacks jargon. Specialized language and concepts are defined succinctly whenever they are introduced. The analyses in each chapter assume that the reader is familiar with the short stories, novels, television programs, and films discussed and can serve as a helpful model for students being trained to conduct such analyses. [End Page 109]
