The Big Book of Jewish Humor by William Novak
Moshe Waldoks and William Novak edited The Big Book of Jewish Humor. This book contains many funny jokes in the margins along with short stories, novel excerpts, and other sporadic bits. Jewish humour anthologies are a recent development; they weren’t always available.
Jewish collectors followed not long after the Grimm Brothers and folklorists in Europe started compiling tales and songs, and one of the first things they noticed was the prevalence of humour. In fact, some of the intellectuals of the era dedicated themselves to amusing literature, and there are some excellent collections of jokes, witticisms, and proverbs in Hebrew and Yiddish as well (many of which are pretty humorous).
The Big Book of Jewish Humor by William Novak
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The industry benchmark for its genre is this book. I’ve bought it several times for other people. More effectively than I’ve seen in scholarly treatments, the editors’ marginal remarks provide explanations for the historical, literary, and logical background in many places. A significant portion of the book is made up of extracts from longer works, some of which I really enjoy and others of which I could do without. However, each sample has a justification that ties to the cultural and historical settings of Jewish comedy. And the marginal notes frequently contain extra, pertinent jokes that are just as funny as or even funnier than the jokes in the highlighted portions.
A lot of the content is humorous, but some of it is more interesting than funny. If you don’t understand the jokes right away, this is the kind of book that, with repeated reads, can help you eventually pick up on the humour. This remarkable collection of Jewish tales and jokes by authors from antiquity and modernity, including Woody Allen, Doonsbury, The Wise Men of Chelm, and Sholom Aleichem, is hard to put down. The book is an incredible collection of jokes and stories from practically any area you can imagine, all in one location.
