656
PARTISAN REVIEW
subjective capacity). From its simplest to its most sophisticated
expressions, the comic is experienced as
incongruence.
Only human beings laugh, and only human beings are aware that they
will one day die. My hunch-and I suspect that Berger would agree with
me-is that this is incongruence enough. As my
zeyde
liked to put it: "How
do you make God laugh?" Answer: "Tell Him your plans!" By this remark
he meant to add a cosmic dimension to the thousands of more ordinary faces
that incongruity can assume. Indeed, Yiddish humor specializes in quips that
force theology and felt experience to take a full measure of each other. Put
a slightly different way, oppressed people, as Saul Bellow once observed, tend
to be witty; for them, jokes are what the fist or the gun are to their adver–
saries. In eastern Europe, pogroms against the Jews surely had an identifiably
political face, but unlike other oppressed groups one might tick off, they had
a heavenly one as well. Thus, when Sholem Aleichem's Tevye announces
that, "With God's help," he starved three times a day, he is engaged in the
curious brand of quarreling that most characterizes the best Yiddish humor.
Incongruence? Certainly, but incongruence of a special sort, one that Uriel
Weinreich, the great Yiddishist, identified as "internal bilingualism." Praying
in Hebrew, east European Jews took the idea of their "Chosenness"
seriously-both as legacy and continuing obligation. Only when the bitter
ironies of their impoverished, powerless condition intruded did they quip, in
Yiddish, that it would be far better
if,
next time, God chose somebody else.
Because they assumed that God was supposed to act as a
mentsh
(that is, as a
fully human, compassionate being) and because they felt comfortable pour–
ing out their hearts to His ears, they railed against His injustice in ways that
the comic only slightly masked. By contrast, much of Jewish-American
humor is a mean-spirited quarrel with one's mother (here, Borsht Belt
stand-ups and Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint
spring easily to mind as
examples). Berger probably laughs at a good many Jewish-American
comics, but to his credit, he knows why Yiddish humor both cuts deeper
and has more substance.
Whether he is talking about Erasmus's
In Praise
if
Folly,
The
Laughing
Buddha,
or the novels of
P.
G. Wodehouse, Berger makes it clear that incon–
gruity is the tie that binds disparate efforts at humor together-even
if
a joke
told on one side of the Hudson garners only quizzical looks on the other. Take
American humor, for example. Its richest achievements tend to explore the
often yawning gap between democratic ideals and actual practice. Here, Mark
Twain's
Adventures
if
Huckleberry Finn
becomes a central text, not only because
it unleashes Huck's delightfully idiomatic American
voice,
but also because it
takes a hard, satirical look at the racism and squalor of small town life along the
