No Joke by Ruth R. Wisse

Author:Ruth R. Wisse [Wisse, Ruth R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-11-11T22:00:00+00:00

Jews and Catholics are among the favored targets of cartooning, which can identify them visually by their clothing. Courtesy of Andy Singer.

Victimhood and the kosher laws figure in this version of gallows humor. Torture and the dietary laws represent contrasting methods of discipline and self-discipline. Courtesy of www.CartoonStock.com.

As Roth might put it: Does Portnoy eat pussy and warn against it, too? First exploit the vulgarity, indulge the eroticism, roll out the high-spirited comedy, and then extravagantly confess to having failed? A preachy edge to the satire occasionally attests to another kind of failure:

And instead of crying over he-who-has-turned-his-back on the saga of his people, weep for your own pathetic selves, why don’t you, sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass—I happen also to be a human being!29

When he loses control over the comedy, the narrator sounds like an ordinary sap. The same may be said of the novel’s final chapter, which consists in its entirety of Dr. Spielvogel’s “punch line”: “Now vee may perhaps to begin.”30 The book is reduced to less than the sum of its parts. Still, in the roll-out of American Jewish comedy, Roth’s book was the first to sound the warning that arises from among the best of its practitioners.

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