ABSTRACT
A look at Jewish jokes and Jewish folklore from Eastern Europe shows that the humor deals with a remarkable variety of comic types. There are schlemiels, schlimazels, schnorrers, shadkens, fools, nitwits, and other kinds of eccentric characters in the jokes and folk tales. In A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, Nathan Ausubel explains why Jewish humor has so many different kinds of absurd characters. The confined ghetto of bygone days, in which Jews led their own semi-autonomous existence, was an entertaining as well as a tragic microcosm. The philosopher Henri Bergson, who happened to be Jewish, had an explanation of why we find types comical. Stanley Brandes, in an article titled 'Jewish-American Dialect Jokes and Jewish-American Identity', points out that in the 1950s, a rather large proportion of Jewish-American jokes used the Jewish dialect. Ornstein-Galicia cites two other important factors relative to telling Jewish jokes.
