Jews have given the world so many of its best comedians

Jerry Seinfeld. Given thousands of years of persecution and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust, it’s not surprising that Jews have given the world so many of its best comedians. Picture: Getty

The life of the laugh. A serious riff on the human counterpart to a dog wagging its tail, though not always as amiable.

It seems that humans are the only species to comprehend our own mortality. That is our tragedy and, to some extent, our triumph. Tragic in the shadow it casts, triumphant in our heroic efforts to delay, deny and defy it. It’s the driving force behind our art, science and faiths. Because of our dread of death we build pyramids, mosques, churches and synagogues, and the soaring cathedrals of science.

And yet evolution has given us the gift of laughter. To laugh in the face of the Reaper. It’s better than the bleak alternative of screaming. But laughter can be cruel, too, not an expression of delight but of derision. Think of its dark variants. Mock laughter. Mocking laughter. Cruel laugher. The laughter of contempt. Superior laughter. Bitter laughter.

It all begins innocently enough. Decades ago, in the foreword of our improbable best-seller The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, I speculated on the birth of the laugh, that odd little detonation in the throat. Surely, I argued, it begins with the game every proud father plays with a baby, when he tosses it aloft. As the infant soars in the air it gasps in alarm. And as it’s saved from the forces of gravity, as its father catches it, there’s an explosive release of breath, in astonishment and gratitude.

Laughter can neither save you from death nor delay it - but it can deny its total victory. Picture: istock

The first laugh. And the child now possesses the last laugh on mortality. Laughter can neither save you from death nor delay it – but it can deny its total victory. You see that in the phenomenon of black humour, as seen in the great movie M*A*S*H and its telly derivative. You see it even more in Jewish humour.

Given thousands of years of persecution and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust, it’s not surprising that Jews have given the world so many of its best comedians. In the US alone the likes of Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Mort Sahl, Jon Stewart, Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield, Jerries Lewis and Seinfeld, Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Roseanne Barr, Garry Shandling, Nichols and May, Shelley Berman. Fran Drescher. And yes, the cancelled Woody Allen. (Charlie Chaplin wasn’t Jewish but when anti-Semites used it as an accusation, an insult, he refused to deny it.)

But you don’t need to be a professional comedian to be funny. We can all be comics in the bad jokes of life. Using laughter not as a weapon but a defence. As a defiance. Laughter may well be, as the saying goes, the best medicine. Let Dr Adams prescribe it to you in daily doses. (I bulk bill.)

Maxims abound of varying veracity. “Laugh and the word laughs with you; cry and you cry alone.” Milton Berle described laughter as “an instant vacation”. Jean Houston wrote that “at the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities”. Victor Borge opined that “laughter is the shortest distance between two people”. And a special favourite from Shirley MacLaine: “A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.”

On that happy note, good morning. The laugh’s on me. And I’ve noticed that “few ­right-wingers have a sense of humour”, citing Gerard Henderson.