There have been a lot of great Jewish humourists - Woody Allen, Sid Ceasar, Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman - but is there such a thing as Jewish humour? Ben Eliezer - a great authority on the subject (he has countless commendations from relatives and friends) - thinks there is. It is the ultimate in ethnic humour - the humour of minorities everywhere. Over-anxious, seeing insults where none are intended (sometimes), obsession with identity - boasting of it or trying to hide it, the struggle to emancipate, the fight against emancipation, and, as the people of The Book an obsession with logic that goes wrong. And there are recurring characters, mostly taken from the old, vanished Yiddish-speaking world of eastern Europe - Jewish beggars (always arrogant), marriage brokers (unbelievably pushy). There are the usual obsessions with sex, mothers, money (of course) and, above all, making light of disastrous circumstances. Sigmund Freud started to make a collection of Jewish jokes but never published it. Ben Eliezer wrote two previous books - "The World's Best Jewish Jokes" and "More of the World's Best Jewish Jokes" - and he has plundered these long out-of-print books, taking the best of them, while adding new stories.
