Why do we love Jewish jokes?
Mel Brooks in New York, 1976. Photo by Getty Images
By Chanie Kirschner October 5, 2023
What is it that we love about a good Jewish joke?
When my kids were little, I found it absolutely essential to introduce my kids to the world of one of the founding fathers of Jewish jokes, Mel Brooks. When my oldest was barely in double digits, we showed him the clip of Brooks dropping commandments 11-15 in The History of the World: Part 1. I still remember his pancakes spraying out of his mouth when he watched it. It was a crowning parenting moment.
Indeed, whenever my kids encounter Jewish jokes in mainstream media, they are positively tickled that there are others like them who “get it” when it comes to some of the crazy things we do. Just the other day, I showed them this clip of Elon Gold talking about Jewish people’s weird obsession with time.
A lot has been studied about the science of humor, why we find things funny, and what makes us laugh the most. Jewish jokes are particularly funny to members of the tribe — which is a good thing, because self-deprecating humor has been linked to greater psychological well-being. Jokes we can relate to and see ourselves in make for enjoyable reels on Instagram and TikTok. We trade them back and forth with our friends with captions like “This is totally me!” or “Yeeeees!!”
Twenty-five years ago, I stood in front of my freshman speech class in college and talked about author Norman Cousins and the healing power of laughter. Just last year, a friend from college told me how that particular speech resonated with her. Cousins published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1964 about laughter. He discovered that laughing was an effective pain relief for his degenerative collagen illness and even slowed the disease’s progression. How did I start my speech? With the following quintessential Jewish joke:
A rabbi, a priest, and a minister met one day to talk about the problems they were facing with their congregations and if they might be able to help each other solve their respective issues.
Among the most pressing issues that day were the recent mice infestation in each of their buildings.
When asked what he was doing to combat the issue, the priest sighed and said that he’d set up multiple mouse traps to kill the mice, but the mice were stealing the peanut butter off the traps and escaping unscathed.
The minister went next, and said that he tried fumigating his church to no avail — the mice came back after just two days.
The rabbi waited a moment, looked at the priest and the minister and smiled, his eyes dancing. “I don’t know if you can do this too, but I single handedly solved my mice infestation,” he began.
“What did you do?” they asked him?
“I gathered up all the mice in the synagogue, brought them to the bimah, gave them a bar mitzvah, and they never came back!”
So much of today’s news is gloom and doom. I often find myself on my phone “doomscrolling,” binging on news about terrible things. All that dwelling on real-life tragedies isn’t great for our mental health, but you know what is? A bit of self-deprecating humor. Bring on the Jewish jokes.
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