ABSTRACT
Engaging in scholarly discourse on humor is probably the surest way to put one's audience to sleep and to actually not be funny. Scholars and other mavens return repeatedly to consider whether there is such a thing as Jewish humor. Conversely, if the Jews in a joke can easily be replaced by individuals of some other ethnicity, that should not really be considered Jewish humor. In fact, according to Mel Gordon, the humor industry in pre-Nazi Berlin was almost entirely Jewish. The Nazi propaganda machinery considered self-deprecating Jewish humor a way to fool the public with regard to the Jewish proclivity toward criminality and was "yet another tool in the Jews unending quest for world domination." Still, of all the characteristics of Jewish humor, perhaps the one that is most definitive is the ability of Jews to laugh at themselves—and, of course, at each other.
