Yom Kippur: It's ok to laugh you know, in fact I command it. Part 1

I command it

Gut Yontiff on this the most holy of all days in Judaism. Yom Kippur unlike certain holy days  is a deeply dour and incredibly introspective day. It is thinking about what you have done with your life and how you can be  less of a shmuck. Even the least observant try to make an effort for this one. What G-d wants you to do is fix yourself and mean it. Having had to sit through a few sessions of self examination and watched a few others going at it over the last two weeks, I can see something that does need to change, we need to laugh, we need to be less easily offended and shocked and appalled at things , so much so that we miss the point the humorist is trying to make. We miss the target of the mirth, the not so hapless victim of the larger or smaller needle aimed squarely at the deeply offending attitude, act or person or personages. This form of humour serves to shame and belittle the offender, it satirizes and soothes the victims, it frees the sufferer in the telling by showing that there is a moment however brief and private where they to have a bit of freedom and can fight back and never forget. By denying them and those who pass on the stories the right to tell them or feel ok about telling them, you say that laughter, humour, even gallows humour is not allowed and serves no purpose in dealing with pain, suffering or hardship.

By the way before I forget.... To those of you reading this or anything else I have written, to those who know me personally, I apologize with deep sincerity and great regret for anything I may have said, not said or allegedly said to offend you. How was I supposed to know you were the self appointed arbiter of taste and protector of infirm East Namibian honey badger farmers? How could I guess that my personal choice of food or faith or clothing was going make the humourless radar go off and make me the unwanted centre of attention of the tut tut brigade in the middle of an otherwise enjoyable occasion. Oh and sorry Jerry, I will even pay the fine for that book you took out for me, so sorry, just didn't have time to finish it.

Gallows humour, ironic humour, self deprecating humour, biting scathing cutting humour, like sarcasm, is wielded as a weapon and protects the teller from the very people and institutions that would quietly and effectively subjugate and isolate them all the while hoping the victims/targets don't grow a spine or fight back. Righteous indignation is like war, the last resort because all else fails. Talking failed, shaming failed, satirizing failed, politeness failed, turning the other cheek failed, being tolerant failed, so you turn to anger, indignation and petitions followed by the age old .... you can't say that, that's a biased opinion, you're generalising  and how can you assume and the classic, even it it's true you can't say that as it might make them feel bad. Awww didummms, so pointing out to a nasty piece of work that they are nasty is something we ought not do, we should wait for them to feel bad about it themselves and change , say sorry and do an act of contrition unbidden. I would point you in the direction of many martyrs over the millennia who even today inspire but prove that ultimately nothing is ever changed until it is either shamed or ridiculed into non existence.

 What's off limits?  Death? atrocities? mass murder? ethnic cleansing or demonization through laws? Well let me tell you something, survivors of the concentration camps and the gulags of Stalin laughed, they laughed in the camps, they laughed in the line to trains, in the trains, off the trains, digging holes, putting bodies of dead relatives and friends into said holes, they laughed to remind themselves they were human. Whatever it is they suffered on the inside even years after, the humour in our homes was always dark, always sharp and served to remind us, the children and the children's children , to never forget ,  to never let it happen it again, to never do it again ourselves. And those who went on to live through or observe the depravities of other later dictators, other modern day demagogues who would save nations; used the same wit , humour and fatalism to stick a pin into the pompous and the stupid before they could get to anything as bad as Hitler or Stalin. That many would not listen till it was too late is not important, what is important is that these people knew when to spot BULLSHIT, when to point it out and when to feel like they themselves suffered for nothing when they see their own who have forgotten the lessons of even the most recent history and go on to commit the same crimes. Step by step washing away the universal justification against evil for their own narrow purposes. They and their children tell these stories to keep us, and the generations who follow  but will not read the histories, from repeating the mistakes so often visited on ourselves. These cautionary tales are designed to make us see in others, blacks, gays, the poor, people of all nations, even Palestinians as fellow sufferers.

The jokes. the stories of the survivors, if you just go quiet and let them talk as if you're not there, would make your hair curl if you are of a deeply sensetive nature. They first of all think the alleged shocking material is tame and will tell you far funnier and starker stories , sharper and wittier things that would make Oscar Wilde ( also someone who was oppressed in his own way ) smile knowingly. Which brings me to the nub of the matter.... We remember Oscar Wilde, we remember his stories and we laugh at his victims and in so doing insure we never again do those things with full intent and malice. But do we remember the countless angry denunciatory speeches? the reams of indignant pamphlets on any subject be it voting, health care, tolerance of other people? Oh some can point to dust covered collections of political philosophy  seldom read but highly prized omnibus of editorials, but most of us will still recall with fresh and vivid attention Gilbert & Sulivan's "I've got a little list" or the self deprecating Chelmo stories. Most recently Russell Brand .These stories serve to hit us quickly , sharply and with effect to remind us that we are ourselves on the verge of doing unto others what we ourselves would not like, especially when it's been done to us.

So next time somebody tells you a story that is funny and yet sends up bad behavior or points out suffering in a sarcastic or self deprecating manner.... do us a favour..... laugh for G-d's sake...... the teller wanted you to, the now dead or incredibly old relative of the teller who told it first wanted you to. They told much worse to survive... show some respect...laugh. The ones who suffered laughed, the survivors laughed to survive, the survivors remembered so we could remember and keep the reality the pathos, the humanity amid the inhumanity alive. By being so damned serious, we deny their experiences and deny humour as a tool we can use to fight every kind of societal ill and evil. Please please please buy yourself a sense of humour and take that stick you've got up your backside out. Smile man....smell the flowers and laugh at the jokes. If you do, the bad guys won't win, the bad guys won't find it so easy to pull the wool over your eyes. Humour is the shorthand, the Index at the back of the book of civilization. Humour is like early science fiction , it serves to do what others cannot , will not or fear to do. When enough people have understood the shorthand, the real awful, nasty unpleasant things can be rolled back or stopped in their tracks.

So what am I asking you today regardless of your faith or lack thereof? Take this one aspect of your life, give it a shake, learn to laugh. Be comfortable with your desire to laugh, it's not going to kill you and it will more often than not, bridge otherwise unbridgeable diferences.

It's at this point I need to remind some of you that I'm not Jewish, I'm a Catholic. My wife is Jewish and like me, Polish. We both have families that suffered in the concentration camps, we both have family and friends that were sent to Siberia or the killing fields of Katyn and countless other killing fields in Poland and Russia. My wife's maternal grandfather was the only survivor of the mass extermination of his village by playing dead , my father and grandfather avoided death at Katyn by being arrested two weeks later than the rest, then along with almost every Pole, Jewish or Catholic in then Eastern Poland that wasn't killed on the spot, sent to Siberia followed by the long deadly march to freedom and Persia. My father's 2nd wife, as a 12 year old, was held in Ravensbruck concentration camp and saw most of her friend's and family murdered. All this to say that while we are both engaged politically and take life incredibly seriously when we need to, we are still first and foremost humorists. We are humorists because our relatives are, because the people who raised us and went through  Hell were humorists.  And it is for them we prefer to laugh than to cry.

Tomorrow in part 2 my wife will tell in uncensored detail, the anecdotes and attitudes of survivors who settled in New York, Brooklyn, Midwood. The same place and people who created Mel Brooks and moulded Woody Allen to name but a few.

Funny Britannia, the state of the Jester

The other day on one of the forums I live in, I posted an anecdote. It really did happen and every Polish family, Jewish family and family of anybody who ever lived through the camps and Siberia found this joke not only funny , but they laughed with abandon and total honesty. But when I told it to a group of highly intelligent people with a strongly developed sense of humour and irony, people who habitually tell the most elaborate and often beyond the pale bad taste stories, there was the kind of silence you get when you've just informed somebody they've got months to live and will die of cancer.  Clearly some subjects are too sensitive outside of the community of those who suffered, to be considered funny or to take the piss out of. But that's the point isn't it? To survive you need to take the piss out of things or they will get you.

Let me step back a bit and explain why  this post today. My wife and I are writers, we have over the last two years been writing a series of scripts for an adult comedy to be broadcast at some point when the stars align and BBC3 or ITV throw some money at us and make us as big as French and Saunders or Armstrong and Miller. We have drawn from a rich well of Slavic and Jewish humour that runs so vast and so thick in our respective families we barely know sometimes when we're being funny or just saying perfectly normal things any body else  would say.  I mention this only because we tend to say things as they are and try to find the joy in most situations even if they may sometimes appear on the surface not to be the most comfortable situations. It's when we're among the customers and staff of a little shop we like, our stories get the kind of reaction we least expected, we make them laugh, they don't want us to leave and they look forward to our next visit. Any comedian's definition of paradise wouldn't you say? And yet there is problem, while we have spoken to some industry types who have liked our style, we have been asked time and again "will this sell in the US?" " Won't THAT be offensive?" . You have characters who smoke???!!! And the short answers are.... No it won't sell outside of NYC and Seattle, yes it's offensive and why the hell not smoke , it's vile and dangerous , but go to an asian newsagent and ask him or his family  just how much of their life has been paid for by smokers. Just becuase the PC police and the Ministry of don't do that it's bad for you would like us to excise certain human activities from any representation of reality, doesn't mean they don't happen or we don't think of them.

A case in point is the programme on BBC last night. "Are you having a laugh" examined the treatment of disability in language and humour. It demonstrated clearly that the group about whom off colour jokes are being told aren't offended as they are telling them themselves. It's ok to laugh people, take a chill pill for Christ sake. The feminazis and politically correct brigade of the 70's and 80's sucked all the life out of us. We can't say merry Christmas to another Christian for fear of supposedly offending some Jew or Muslim or Hindu. Well don't believe a word of it, my wife wished me a happy Easter and I wished her a good Passover and nobody died of embarrassment. When asked where is he in a crowded room, I pointed out for ease of identification , "next to the black kid"Was fast simple and allowed the worry friend to spot their child right away. Was I trying to offend? no. I was trying to communicate in concise honest language a picture of reality . When we stop auto censoring, maybe we will be as a society be more tolerant and accepting of others. As a Pole surrounded by a sea of other ethnics  living in a white anglo saxon society, I had to adapt and be open to a lot things or I would have been lost ages ago. But my anglo saxon mates aren't that lucky, they tend to be ignorant of the ways of others or so sensitive they need to consult a book to see if it's ok to react one way or another.

While irony is well known in English humour and is nothing new, ( watch Rude Britannia on the BBC ), the art of fatalism is less so.  Oh yes the we bang on about how we know we're going out on pens to the Germans, but when you compare that to jokes about starvation and death at the hands of organized genocide, the English tend to get all preachy and sensitive. Let me tell you something. . My family, both sides, have lost everything so often and been kicked out of our lands so often by one power or another, we've lost count . If it weren't for fatalism and irony  working in close tandem, most of my relatives would have gone barking mad ages ago. The fact some think we have, is testament to the fact we can laugh at most anything life throws at us. We draw the line at some things , but that has more to do more with the rawness of any given situation. The reason we do laugh at some of the most horrific things humans have done to each other is simple .....So we will not repeat it again, so we will never forget and be wary of it. Fatalistic humour is our survival instinct telling us to be careful and never take our liberties and freedoms for granted. It's why you find Jews and assorted Slavs for example the first ones to sound the alarm bells of totalitarianism. Those of us who forget this are ourselves doomed to repeat the same crimes on others.

This of course begs the question, WHY LAUGH AT ALL? Humour is the sword that slays despots, bullies and pedants. Humour is the instrument with which we surgically remove offensive people and laws from the public place. Regimes with guns and soldiers have shrunk back in fear at the awesome power of humour time and again... Social injustice and rank stupidity have also come under the sharp eye of the satirist. Georgian England saw the rise of ribald but politically sharp commentary on the Royals, politicians merchants and landed gentry that had forgotten the tenets of noblesse oblige and had given in to base greed and personal excess. This tradition is alive and well on programmes like Mock the Week and the Tory version , Have I got news for you.  Somebody has to pierce the pomposity of the ruling classes or else we end up with untouchables we never ever question.

Is that it ? Humour for defence? Of course not, it's also to deflate the silly little loops of habit and ritual we all get into that become so great in our lives we no longer question them. It's there to serve to remind us to get off our high horses and see the bald unadulterated truth that only small children see . While duty honour and obligation are what made our way of life so much more stable and civilized, it was the sense of humour that poked fun at ourselves that kept us in check. Humour teaches a child what is acceptable and what is not, what is silly and what is deadly serious. Humour teaches each and every one of us to look at ourselves a bit more critically and see our own flaws. As the Bible says, let he who is without sin tell the first joke. Well if we had to wait for that , there wouldn't be any comedians. It's all about intent. If you choose to do something "funny" to insult and humiliate with extreme prejudice to seek trouble where none exists, like racists do, then you are scum and not in the least bit funny. But if you choose to be funny to make a point, highlight something unfair, to lighten a tense situation, to unload the stress of a long day or even longer week, then by all means, please laugh. If you don't you'll die of an ulcer at 30. look at all those emo saddos who committed suicide or shot up a school in the USA, they would still be alive and lot more level headed if they had just laughed....How many racists do you need to screw in a light bulb? None they enjoy being in the dark.  Sarcasm. Hindsight and brutal honesty can be found in that joke. A joke told during the later part of 40 years of Communism in Poland; What do you call a group of people under a bridge sniffing an empty spam tin? Drug addicts. Fatalism and irony at it's best.

While modern comics and comediennes have embraced the the full lexicon of four letter words, some slipped away from the subtly of sarcasm, irony and fatalism in favour of shock. Shock for the sake of shock is only funny for a second and grows tired very fast.  Comediennes in particular for the longest time in the 80's and 90's were about as funny as a root canal.  Being preachy and angry at men just didn't go over well, it's when comediennes joined comedians in laughing at the world from their own personal political and cultural stand point, that they became funny. Handicapped people have learned this lesson as well, they sit in that comedy frontier were we as a society are just now learning to laugh with people who are crippled ( YES CRIPPLED) by debilitating conditions that make life less than ideal. One comic last night put it best, children ask you  does it hurt, once you tell them it doesn't , they want to know how you do things differently. It's called curiosity, the opposite of fear. They themselves will tell you they aren't differently abled or challenged, they are in fact crippled and have accepted the life given them by circumstances.  They are also fatalists in their humour now having crossed over from simply being unfunny advocates for change. The basic problem is that between the illness known as political correctness and the cultural invasion of all things American, much that made other peoples unique and interesting has been washed away over the last 30 years, including the ability to laugh at many things, that is only now beginning to return. Ask a person who lived through the blitz what is funny and you'll be shocked by the answers. Not so much for the answer itself, but how much what is funny and how you react to hardship has changed.

Where I find the greatest offence on telly today, is the freak show called Big Brother, some choose to be humiliated on there for money, fair dues. But others are mentally ill, in fact I'd say a good half of them have had some kind of psychotic condition that needs care not ridicule .  Producers have found it easier to eschew actors an writers and replace them with sad delusionals, mentally ill persons and other assorted non entities. That some of us watch such train wrecks speaks to our desire to seem smarter and better than others. A perfectly normal thing, that fact we need to laugh at bad trannies  the dim witted and the mentally ill, speaks to how little we think of ourselves.

My wife and I were shaped by  a lot comic inspirations, The Marx Brothers, Python, The Goons, Air Farce, 2nd City, Mad Magazine, Gilbert & Sullivan,  19th century Russian writers, Mel Brooks and  Polish / Yiddish comedians and comediennes you would never have heard of like Boris Tomashevsky, Sholom Aleichem or Gertrude Berg, but who influence the very comedies you watch today. These past practitioners of the great art of satire blended music, wit, irony, fatalism, sarcasm along with a sharp blade to get their points across. 

After a lot of thought, we came up with some laws , while not yet as famous as Asimov's laws of robotics, they should explain at east in part what makes us laugh.

Laws of Comedy

1. Yellow is the funny colour. Anything yellow is instantly funny, and a person dressed in yellow instantly has funnier actions or dialogue.
2. If your characters are in an easily escapable situation, they cannot escape until it has reached the maximum impact of funny.
3. If you feel the urge to say something at inappropriate times, say it.
4. If you believe you have gone too far... keep going.
5. If you can't say it, sing it.
6. The hard K sound is funny.
7. When in doubt put a man in a frock.
And finally ...The Zeroth Law of comedy - All things no matter how inappropriate or serious can be made to be funny.
*the Zeroth law of course supersedes all other laws as long as it does not go against them.

Remember people, it's all about intent. As long as you aren't just having a go at some innocent person or group to wind up out of ignorance, it's funny. And another thing, if you go see a comic who advertises him or herself as rude and the show is called "I'd like to kick you all in the balls", please don't be surprised if they are in fact rude and offensive.

So maybe now I tell a story already? My wife's Bubbie  who had survived the camps, had finally after much badgering from her own family accepted a long standing and very gracious offer by the German government to stay at a health spa.  This was to care for her leg injury she had suffered during the death march from one camp to another, staying just ahead of advancing Russian troops. Upon her return to New York  they asked her what it was like. She replied with a smile "You know I think I've had had enough of German showers".

Then there's the one where my wife was sitting in the office of a Jewish travel agents office, who was offering her a trip to Auschwitz. She decided to think about it and called her Aunt who had spent time under the care of Dr. Mengele . When my wife returned for the next meeting, and the travel agent  asked her what her decision was she said.  "I spoke to my Aunt about Auschwitz as a holiday destination and she said ,the food was awful and the hospitality left a lot to be desired"

I hope you laughed, the rest of us did.