ABSTRACT
Modern American Jewish humor, the critic Albert Goldman has written, was therefore "the plaint of people who were highly successful in countless ways, yet who still felt inferior, tainted, outcast". The Purim spiel may be the distant ancestor of one emphatic form of American Jewish humor, whose line to high culture itself is a sinuous one—but it can be drawn. Among the Jewish comedians whose crossover dreams inspired them to achieve popularity in the wider society, the first two categories that have distinguished Jewish humor could not prevail. Indeed very few of the significant contributors to American Jewish humor enjoyed the benefit of much formal education. The major versions of American humor itself only rarely derive their force or offer pleasures by turning the forms of high culture inside out. Students of Jewish humor need not strike an apologetic note, even though their terrain seems so unpromising.
