Jewish Comedy: A Serious History

In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauberexamines the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblicaltimes to the age of Twitter. Organizing Jewish comedy into “seven strands”—including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar—he traces the ways Jewishcomedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history.Persecution, cultural assimilation, Zionism—all of these, and more, were gristfor the Jewish comic mill. Dauber’s book takes readers on the tour of the funnyside of some very serious business (and vice versa).