ABSTRACT
The Seder, which means order, tells the story of the escape of the ancient Jews from the Pharaoh in Egypt and offers contemporary Jews an opportunity to relive the experience existentially. Jews all over the world read the Passover Haggadah—a guidebook that tells them how to conduct the Seder service. In the USA, Jewish humor is considered one of the mainstreams of American humor, and a couple of decades ago 80 percent of the most successful humorists were Jewish. Ziv alludes to a number of aspects of Jewish humor that are worth considering in more detail. On the general level, humor offers individuals a means of resisting suffering and guilt and the need to repress their impulses, sexual desires, and drives—a repression that Freud described as the "discontents" of civilization. There is also an element of identity reinforcement in Jewish humor: many Jewish jokes allude to Jewish customs, dietary proscriptions, history, cultural practices, and identity.
