#81 - A Timeless Joke and Why it Works

The Eternal Joke; Staging a Name; Time Machine

Hello, my friends,

Los Angeles is enjoying a late summer heatwave. My colleagues all across LA County were checking in from their home offices and library locations and the fire emoji was used a lot because going outside made one feel like spontaneous combustion was a real possibility. On a cooler note, Michael had a yearning for cucumber water this weekend. In case you are not aware, drowning slices of cucumber and a little bit of lemon in icy cold water is very refreshing! Apparently the mother of one of his former classmates used to put cucumber slices in her son’s water bottle, which Michael stored away in his prodigious memory. On Sunday, he was watching Tiny Time Travel, a delightful show on PBS Kids where they had a picnic with cucumber water. So yeah, I made cucumber water and have been drinking it all week. Such a simple way to make a health drink more luxuriant!

As an aside, that episode of Tiny Time Travel also contains Michael and my favs, The Lettuce Brothers, who have a very catchy theme song. I’d totally buy a t-shirt if it went on sale.

“Stage design for Gogol's Comedy ‘Revisor’” (1920) by Konstantin Yuon

The Eternal Joke

I was listening to the audiobook of Jewish Comedy: A Serious History by Jeremy Dauber (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017) and came upon a joke that, I suspect, captures everything I think and feel about humor:

A Jew survived the gas chambers, having lost everyone his relatives. The resettlement officer asked him where he would like to go.

“Australia,” he replied.

“But that’s so far,” said the officer.

“From where?” asked the Jew.

Clearly, this is not a laugh-out-loud kind of funny and yet there’s something about the unexpected punchline holding back an avalanche of pathos that makes it all the more meaningful and subsequently effective as humor. “Far from where?” can be interpreted in several ways as explained in a 1997 academic article from the journal American Jewish History (kindly retrieved for me by my library’s references services unit). One reading is as a reference to the rootless or “wandering Jew” stereotype — an emblem of a diasporic people who have no fixed address. The second brings forth the historical context, seeing the punchline “…as a reply to a given nation's indifference to the plight of the Jews, and would imply that the country in question does not deserve to be taken as a frame of reference of any kind” (146). My own gloss pushes the second option even further. I believe that “From where?” refers to the Holocaust’s total decimation of the speaker’s sense of location, so being asked to account for distance is simply nonsensical.

The brilliance of this joke is that it forces the listener into a kind-of theoretical physics using words. For a moment, we must take the existence of over four dimensions into our mind at once. Finding that impossible, all we have left to do is be amused.

The opposite is true of jokes from a genre I call “low-hanging fruit” that make up the majority of humor found on shows like Big Bang Theory or Blackadder and clean sketch comedy YouTube Channel, Studio C. The commonality between them is that there is very little conceptual distance between the set-ups and punchlines; the jokes are just so dang obvious there’s nothing left to the imagination. No one ever asks “from where?” because everything is already there.

Part of the issue with the two sitcoms above is that, at least to me, the insane laughter of the studio audiences gives me the creeps. Why, I think over and over again, are they laughing so very hard at this mild bit of wordplay? Am I the crazy one here? Am I so dumb I just don’t get how funny these jokes are? Instead of cracking a smile at Rowan Atkinson (a gifted comic) in Blackadder, I become and more and more sullen with each unearned audience reaction.

Studio C is a different matter. This is Brigham Young University (BYU) TV’s answer to SNL. That being the case, it’s the kind of clean comedy where anything even a little bit transgressive is verboten. This makes for sketches with dull premises. So even when individual parts are amusing, they are buried amid predictable repetition. For instance, the channel’s most popular video with 93M views over nine years is about a soccer goalie who keeps getting a ball to the face over and over in a penalty shootout. As his face gets more battered, the announcers get crazier. I think the things the announcers say are funny, but after two minutes I was like, “Oh boy, now there’s going to be three more minutes of the exactly same thing.” And I was right. In the end, the goalie’s team wins and he’s carried off unconscious. Which would be ‘just-so’ if he wasn’t first dragged off unconscious at less than two minutes into the skit.

The key is not so much that Studio C does clean comedy. Dry Bar Comedy is a YouTube channel full of clean sets. Comedians like Gabriel Iglesias, Jerry Seinfeld, and many others work clean and they’re hilarious. The key is that while the comedians above and better sketch comedy groups say either what no one else has ever thought to say or what everyone is thinking but doesn’t say, Studio C says what everyone is already saying. And only rarely in an unexpectedly funny way.

A version of “Far from where?” was first heard on a radio broadcast between February and April 1939 before WWII began. It was in support of an immigration bill to get 20,000 mostly Jewish child refugees to the United States (it did not pass). By that point, the Nazis had been in power and passing anti-Jewish laws in Germany for over half a decade. Clearly, the feelings underlying “far from where?” aren’t funny at all, which makes the ending all the more unexpected. Since it was first heard, the joke was published in several popular anthologies in the 1940s (following WWII) and beyond.

I’m no comedy expert, but like most people with a sense of humor, I have an intuitive sense that something is funny, and I’d like to think I can tell why. There are several factors that make “Far from where?” a classic joke for me. It’s transgressive (being a refugee joke, after all), perfectly minimal, and unexpected. There’s more to it than that, of course, but it’s getting late and I’ve done enough.

Staging a Name

I’m going to an open mic to do five minutes of jokes next Wednesday. I’ve been thinking of using the stage name dell pickles.

Comedy unknown, dell pickles, photographed (without permission) under a kitchen sink circa June 2024.

Time Machine

Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #28):

• An Anatomy of a Sumo Match: An explanation of how a sumo match works.

• Tuned-In Sophie: A note on how Sophie came up with a little melody.

• End-of-Summer Haiku: A selection of seasonal haiku by Issa.