ABSTRACT
Jewish witticisms, wrote Freud (1905c), 'know their real faults as well as the connection between them and their good qualities and the share which the subject has in the person found fault with creates the subjective determinant (usually so hard to arrive at) of the joke-work' (pp. 111-112). Here lies the difference between the witticism and the nasty joke. In Jewish humour the tension between the two registers—antisemitic accusation and Jewish self-defence—is enormous, to the extent that very little is needed to distort the meaning. But on a second reading, an analysis of the message reveals something more, aimed at the very basis of the accusation. And so the same joke, when told by non-Jews in a non-Jewish context, can have quite the opposite effect. The person who split his sides laughing at a joke told by 104friends at their home the day before might easily feel uncomfortable at hearing the same joke elsewhere—in a cabaret, for example—and perceive the old, undying aggression towards the Jews In the audience's laughter.
Nor is this a mere reflection of the traditional, more than justified, Jewish hypersensitivity. The delicate nature of the witticism requires all the necessary elements to be present in order for its meanings to be fully conveyed. First of all it needs its own special audience, who know it is 'one of us' who is telling the joke, in a 'heimlich' [familiar] context. Otherwise the joke, especially if it is one of the nastier kind, is liable to have its meaning distorted. Freud himself (Jones, 1953-57, Vol. 1), who was something of an expert on Jewish humour, once, in his old age, believed a sick joke against the Jews to be true. It concerned the Jews in Berlin under Hitler, who organized a demonstration with placards, saying. Throw us out'. On this occasion Freud vented all his grief and resentment against what he most condemned in German Jews, who were 'more German than the Germans'.
Many scholars have studied Jewish humour, starting from Freud (1905c, 1927d) who thought that humour was particularly relevant to understanding the Jewish cultural ethos. After Freud, every psychoanalyst, in his clinical practice or cultural reflection, has felt the need to confront himself with the problem of the meaning that should be conferred on humouristic communication in its multiple aspects. These are metapsychological aspects of defence from archaic anxieties, which would otherwise be unbearable, and aspects of the attempts that have been made to integrate and elaborate them (Reik 1929, 1954, 1962; Sacerdoti, 1988a; Meghnagi, 1989a, 1991).
Humourisrn presents a number of analogies with creative processes of literary and artistic genre.
In his re-evocation of the period when he was working during the 1930s on the preparation of the Trattato di psicoanalisi (Musatti, 1957), right in the middle of the 105antisemitic campaign, the pioneer of Italian psychoanalysis had occasion to remember the difficulty he found in looking for an analogous product in other cultures and the decision not to give any demonstrative example in the chapter on the Witz. Musatti distinguishes three types of Jewish humour: (1) the original humour of the ghettos and the Jewish forced residence areas; (2) that of the period of emancipation, of which Chaplin's cinema was to be the most representative (although Chaplin was not Jewish himself, all his themes are Jewish and were related to Jews); and (3) the cinema of Woody Allen, expressing a condition of confidence that is new and hitherto unknown to Judaism in the western world. The triumph of Woody Allen's films is evidence of the fact that Jewish historical experience has everything in common with his characters and situations.
Musatti's argument acquires greater relevance if one takes into account that in the early days of American cinema a Jewish director (this happened to William Wyler) was dissuaded from using in a film with a Jewish theme an actor who was too openly Jewish, such as Paul Munni, In America in the 1930s a Jew playing the part of a Jew could seem to be going just too far, and in a film in 1937 on the life of Zola, the reasons behind Dreyfus' persecution remained mysterious and unspecified. America had to wait until the end of the 1940s for the first two films openly denouncing antisemitism: 'Crossfire' and 'Gentlemen's Agreement'. Only from the 1960s onwards did American cinema put forward a new, proud, open image.
[ED.]
