Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials

This perceptive debut from Caplan, a Judaic studies professor at the University of Cincinnati, examines how “Jewish satire and American Judaism have interacted over the last half century.” Unpacking the works of Woody Allen, Rachel Bloom, and Nathan Englander, among others, Caplan argues that some Jewish authors of the Silent Generation, exemplified by Joseph Heller, displayed in their fiction an irreverence toward the faith while figures such as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth demonstrated concern with Jewish people’s ambivalence about their heritage. Baby boomers, Caplan contends, served as a bridge between these sensibilities and those of Generation X, who tend to be skeptical of Jewish identity, as illustrated by Larry David’s depictions of the faithful as “liars and hypocrites” on his TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The discussion of millennial Jewish humor is more disjointed and offers fewer takeaways, among them the observation that younger Jewish people “are moving away from Israel and the Holocaust as the touchstones” of Judaism. The wide-ranging analysis skillfully synthesizes cultural themes from novels, films, and tweets, while the insightful takes illuminate what it means to be Jewish in America. The result is a discerning perspective on the recent evolution of American Jewish identity. (Mar.)