Jeremy Dauber: Jewish Book Council Author Talk on November 16 at 1pm (“Jewish Comedy: A Serious History”)

Jewish Book Council Author Talk by Jeremy Dauber: Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (Norton, October 31, 2017)

Thursday, November 16 at 1:00 P.M.

Free and Open to the Public / Books sold by Eight Cousins Bookstore

“An erudite survey of the evolution and distinctiveness of Jewish humor. [Dauber] offers . . . a wide-ranging and insightful cultural analysis.” — Kirkus Reviews

“In this brilliant and groundbreaking book, Jeremy Dauber shows that Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah Silverman are just the latest members of an ancient tradition of Jewish humor that stretches all the way back to the Bible. Writing with dazzling scholarly insight and in a style as appealing as his subject, Dauber reveals what made Jews laugh over the centuries. In doing so, he tells a crucial part of the story of Judaism.” — Adam Kirsch, author of The People and the Books

FJC is delighted to welcome Jeremy Dauber just weeks after the publication of his already acclaimed study, a rich account of Jewish humor: its nature, its development, and its vital role throughout Jewish history.
In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing the product of Jews’ comic imagination over continents and centuries into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy―including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar―he traces the ways Jewish comedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history. Persecution, cultural assimilation, religious revival, diaspora, Zionism―all of these, and more, were grist for the Jewish
comic mill; and Dauber’s book takes readers on the tour of the funny side of some very serious business. (And vice versa.)
In a work of dazzling scope, readers will encounter comic masterpieces here that range from Talmudic rabbi jokes to medieval skits, Yiddish satires and Borscht Belt routines to scenes from Seinfeld and Broad City, and the book of Esther to Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song.” Dauber also explores the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the Jewish American Princess, and the schlemiel, the schlimazel, and the schmuck, and the classic works of such masters of Jewish comedy as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and Larry David, among many others.