Traditional Jewish Jokes and Anecdotes, No. 10

The Way Not To Tell Jokes

Not only are there all kinds of jokes in the world, there are all kinds of ways to tell jokes.  So though this is not a true story, and I am making almost everything up out of nothing, it still can be a true representation of how jokes work.  For instance, my mother (not really: but a typical Jewish mother you find in books) could not separate her own laughter from the story she would try to tell.  She identified each anecdote by its punch line and so would begin by saying, “Here, let me tell by you, a story, it’s so funny, about a man who opens his refrigerator and finds an elephant sitting in the butter.”  On the other hand, my father (again not really like my own father, but a fitting complement to the woman who is pretending here to be my mother) , very meticulous in all things, and always trying to be articulate and precise in his speech, would “recount” his “amusing anecdotes” in  a deliberate order, emphasizing and explaining each object, person, place, and action, so that he often never got to the end of the story, followed every by-trail he could find to give a full accounting of everything, and eventually gave up when everyone walked away or fell asleep.  He would admonish mother, “No, no, no, you don’t start there.  You ruined the whole story.  You have to build up with a rhythm,, create suspense, create atmosphere…”  My mother would look very puzzled and say, “But it’s so funny this joke.”

So all the little jokes, anecdotes, sayings, rhymes and riddles that went on in school, I actually heard them, first from my mother or sometimes from my father, though both of them avoided those topics that other kids snickered and guffawed about most: those about how stupid schwartzas were, about idiotic girls with blond hair, about husbands who beat their wives or vice versa—what  I still find offensive and cannot stand to hear or read.  One week it was all knock-knock-who’s-there? And the week after how-do-you-know-such-and-such-is-in-the-refrigerator? Then came a series of what-happens-when-you-mix-a-this-with-a-that?  My mother never knew what the point was when she heard these kinds of riddles, and when she tried to tell them she got all mixed up, giving the answers first, forgetting the right question, and yet laughing heartily all the while.  My father, for his part, tried to straighten out the syntax, clarify the semantics, and raise the tone from smut to sensibility, so by the time he was finished there was nothing to chuckle about, although he would manage wry smile.

“Now make a guess,” my mother one day said, “why was there a green mouse with two tails inside the glove compartment of a blue car?”  Everyone—that is, my sister or I—would ask what was the point?  My mother laughed and laughed, until she almost fell off the chair: “How could a dirty little mouse get in the car that was the wrong color?” We all looked at one another and then, not at the joke, but at her, we laughed too.

“Here is an amusing anecdote one my patients told me this morning,” my father said on a different day, rushing in between dental sessions, my mother and the rest of us sitting around the kitchen table eating lunch.  “A famous actor, whose name it is not important to know, but you can imagine someone you know, such as Carries Granite or Humphrey Blogut, enters an eating establishment, well, he thinks it is kosher, because he sees religious people with beards and women with scarves around their heads, and he orders from the waiter, a middle-aged gentleman, or maybe you need to conceive of him as quite elderly, someone of the old school, probably from the Old Country, I would say, if pressed, it was Romania…”  So on and on he went.  We usually sat there eating our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drinking our milk, and waiting for him to say something humorous. Then, when he noticed the clock over the sink or heard the door to the waiting room open with a little buzz, he would conclude his anecdote: “So the customer isn’t always right, is he?”  My father rushed back into the office, leaving us all collapsing with laughter, and yet wondering what the joke was all about.  “But,” my mother said, catching her breath from so much excitement, “he never said whether the restaurant was kosher or not?  Maybe that’s the funny part.”  She would laugh again.

In other people’s houses or on the way to school, there were jokes about travelling salesmen whose cars broke down and had to stay over with a farmer who had only one bed to share with his daughter. In the morning something happened that made the father take out a shot gun and shoot at the visitor.  But I could never figure out why.  Someone would start to talk about a rabbi, a priest and preacher who were in the same car and a policeman pulled them over because they were weaving up and down the street. The traffic cop asks each of these clergymen why they didn’t stop the one who was tipsy, and they all give crazy answers that made no sense to me.  Or there was that stupid kid from around the corner who joined us as we crossed Fourteenth Avenue and would start to tell a story, it always seemed like the same one, about girls who forgot to wear their underwear to class and boys, he meant himself, who made believe he dropped a pencil or an eraser or something, so he could crawl on the floor and look to see her naked bottom.  Why did he find this funny?  It sounded ridiculous and pointless. Who wants to see such a thing?

One day my mother came home from a meeting with her lady friends and said she heard a wonderful joke from the president of her association.  She must tell it to us, but she wanted to wait until my father popped in for a snack. A few minutes later, as though on cue, he opened the door and came in, wearing his special white dentist’s gown. 

“Listen,” she said, “this is what I heard today frim Mrs Plotkin, our president. It’s a very funny story.”

Everyone groaned a bit, yet always ready to listen in case this time she got it right.

“Nu,” she began, “a husband of the lady what the story is about goes on an airplane to make business in Florida, but he doesn’t take his wife because probably it costs too much, but maybe, the woman thinks, he has got a girlfriend, a shiksa down in Miami, he’s such a person that does such things.”

Everyone at the table gasped.  What kind of a joke is this for a mother to tell at home to her family?

“So this lady who is suspicious her husband is running around like a real Don Juan decides as soon as he leaves to go by taxi to the airport to fly in his airplane to Florida that she should call a defective agency in Miami and maybe Sam Spade or someone like that can follow him around and find out what’s what with this no-goodnik of a husband.”

“Wait a minute,” says my father, interrupting her, “is this a story to tell in front of the children or even to me, a husband that never runs around?”

I think he is shocked that her story is starting from the beginning and may even get to the end before she pops in a punch line.  For me, whatever this story is about, I don’t understand, but it sounds a little interesting for a change.

“Shaa-shaa, a little quiet, I am telling you what Mrs. Plotkin said this afternoon.”

Everybody tries to keep quiet, but in my house such a thing is not so easy.

“This lady calls up long-distance and asks the operator for a defective agency she can speak to.  It comes on the line a man’s voice, very deep, like this”—and she tried to sound like a man with a deep voice—“’Hello, I am the detective agency in Miami.’ So the lady explains what she thinks about her husband and what a bum he can be and will the defective please follow him and make a report she can show to a lawyer for a divorce if he is really tsotsking about with this shiksa who lives down there in Florida.”

My mother looks around in triumph.  She realizes she is telling the story in a correct form and with proper details, everybody, including my father should be happy.  No one says a word to make fun of her.  There are some mumbles and grumbles, but basically a positive silent response, so she goes on.

“Well, let me tell you what Mrs. Plotkin says next.  I think the next thing is that a few days or maybe a week goes by, and the lady who called up gets a telephone from the defective agency and he says he has a report.”

Well,” says my father, “and what did this Shylock Homes have to say?”

“Who?” says my mother.

“The slooth, the private eye,” he answers her and prompts her for further details.  He senses there must be a punch line coming.

My sister and I stare uncomprehendingly at all this.

“Oh, yes,” says my mother.  “The defective tells her he is sorry but he has no information on the trollop he was looking to find making whoopsie with the husband of the lady that called him up. He will send his bill anyway, he says.”

We all stare in silence, real silence now.

“But, but what is the joke,” we all say in our different ways and voices.

“But that is the way Mrs. Plotkin told her story.  I am sure those were her exact words.”

My father bangs on the table.  Everyone jumps.

“There is no amusement in it.  Where is the witty turn?”

My mother says in a very low and shaken way, “You think I forgot something?”

My father rolls his eyes.

My sister and I roll on the floor with laughter.  We have never seen something so funny in our lives.

My mother looks at us and says: “Maybe something else happened.  I can’t remember. Tomorrow maybe I will call up my friend Esther and ask her if she remembers.”