JUMOR Laughing Through the Ages:
A Complete History of Jewish Humor, Its Roots, Its Forms, and Its Eternal SpiritBy Daniel Schwartz
Length1h 12m
About this audiobook
JUMOR: Laughing Through the Ages is, at its heart, a love letter to a people who looked at two thousand years of exile, persecution, impossible theology, overprotective mothers, and shtetl poverty — and responded by being extremely funny about it. Beginning with Sarah laughing at God in a tent and ending with a man on a desert island who has built a synagogue he refuses to enter, this book traces Jewish humor from its ancient biblical roots through the medieval badchen, the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the Borscht Belt, the television screen, and the internet meme, arguing along the way that the kvetch, the pun, the self-deprecating joke, and the question answered with another question are not merely forms of entertainment but a complete philosophical system
Audiobook details
GenreHumor
Length1 hr 12 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateApr 15, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Introduction: What Is Jewish Humor, and Why Does It Hurt So Good?
3Chapter One: In the Beginning Was the Punchline
4Chapter Two
5The Wandering Joke
Show all chaptersShow less
6The Shtetl Laughs
7Chapter Four: The Grammar of Jewish Jokes
8Chapter Five: The Pun, the Wordplay, and the Klezmer of Language
9Chapter Six: Self-Deprecation as a High Art Form
10Chapter Seven: The Jewish Mother and Other Sacred Comic Archetypes
11Chapter Eight: From Borscht Belt to Broadway
12Chapter Nine: The Philosophers of Funny
13Chapter Ten: Holocaust Humor and the Ethics of Dark Comedy
14Chapter Eleven: Israeli Humor
15Chapter Twelve: Jewish Humor in Film and Television
16Chapter Thirteen: The Future of Jewish Humor
17Afterword: A Final Joke (You Have Earned It)
18Summary
19Bibliography and Further Reading
20Primary Sources and Anthologies
21Historical and Critical Studies
22On Yiddish Language and Culture
23On American Jewish Comedy and Popular Culture
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