A little girl of about five years old runs into her
house. She bumps into her mother in the
kitchen. “Mama, mama, there is an old
man crying in the street. Can I give him
ten cents, please.” The mother takes out
ten cents from her purse, hands it to the little girl, and says, “What a good
and kind child you are.” As her daughter
goes out the door, the mother asks, “What is the old man crying about?” “Oh,” says the child, “he is crying: Ice-cream
ten cents a cone, ice cream.”
What kind of a joke is this? It seems to turn on a pun, a misunderstanding
of words, e.g., crying, and a
misunderstanding of intentions. The
mother thinks her daughter is being compassionate to a needy fellow human being
and so she wants to help foster charitable feelings in her child. But then, when you think about, the real
heart of the matter is whether the little girl intended to fool her mother, to
engage in duplicity for selfish means, to exploit the desire of her mother to
inculcate such compassionate actions; or whether the mother over-reads the
child’s comments, a child who is too naïve to understand the play on words or
the ambiguity of the situation she sets up.
Further, should the mother have asked the question before she handed the
ten cents, so as to expose, if not the child’s trick, then the reality of the
circumstances—the daughter cannot ask openly for ice-cream because she is not
to have treats so soon before dinner or because money cannot be wasted in times
of hardship? Should the mother punish
the little girl for lying, for seeking to have what is forbidden, or laugh it
all off as a joke, a minor matter, a trivial game of foolery, and even perhaps
give her the ten cents as a reward for being so clever? The fact that the girl explains exactly what
the old man is shouting out on the street when asked a direct question by her
mother shows the limits either of her ability or desire to continue the ruse.
* * * *
Sometimes just silence can make a story turn into a
joke. Jack Benny’s famous hesitation to
answer when he is confronted by a robber on the street who demands “Your money
or your life.” The radio audience wait
for the response. The longer he says
nothing, the more they laugh.[i] He has spent years developing his character
as a grouch and a miser, so there is no need to explain. He says nothing which throws the men and
women who are listening at home, as well as the packed audience in the
Hollywood theatre, into fits of delight.
Or there is the way Menasha Skulnik could say, when on stage,[ii]
and asked to sit at the table for dinner, “I don’t know why. I like soup.
I just like soup.” Between each
statement a pause, and the pauses get longer, while the comedian repeats again
“Soup. I just like soup.” The accent has the sing-sing lilt of
Yiddish. His face is deadpan. “I just like soup.” The absurdity of the pauses drives everyone
into stitches.
****
A man walks into a bar with a dog on a leash. The dog climbs up on to a stool, puts his
paws on the bar, and barks.
“Get this dog out of here,” says the bar-keeper; “no
dogs allowed.”
“But this is a very special kind of a dog,” says the
man.
The dog barks again and the man says, “Did you hear
that: he wants a glass of beer.”
“Get out of here, both of you. What kind of talk is this? A glass of beer for a dog? Are you crazy?”
“Listen to this,” the man says and he prompts the dog
to bark again.
“Baar, baar, baar,” says the dog.
The bar-keeper looks at the dog.
“What kind of talk is that for a dog, baar, baar,
baar? I’ll give him a glass of beer if
he can speak properly.”
The man whispers to the bar-keeper: “Be careful what
you say. He doesn’t speak English, but
he will speak to you in Yiddish, if you talk to him gently.”
The bar-keeper laughs.
“I don’t know Yiddish, but let me hear what he has to
say.”
The man now whispers to the dog, gesticulates, points
to the bar-keeper, and says: “Go.”
“Whoof baar, vroomf baar, gree-grr—growf!”
“See,” says the man, “perfect Yiddish.”
The bar-keeper answers, “Don’t sound like no Yiddish
to me?”
“What are you an expert? I am telling you this is perfect Yiddish,
high-class as spoken in Chelm, Lublin and Warsaw.”
The bar-keeper fills a glass with beer and slides it
along to the dog.
The dog takes a slurp and says to the man: “Well, we
sure fooled him, didn’t we?”
****
Back in the days around 1958 when Van Cliburne the
young pianist was making his first performances in the great music halls of the
world, a long black limousine comes racing through the narrow streets of the
East Side in Manhattan, down near Delancy Street and Orchard Street. It is early evening in the autumn.
A big Texan is sitting in the front seat wearing a
huge Stetson and smoking a big cigar. By
the old Fulton Fish Market, he pulls over where he says a little old man slowly
shuffling along. It is a Friday and
almost Shabbos, so the old man is carrying his little bad with his siddur, tfillin and talis.[iii]
The Texan rolls down the window of his fancy
Cadillac. He beckons the old man. When the old man shuffles towards him, he
says: “Howdy, partner. I’m trying to get
to hear the Van Cliburne concert. Can
y’all tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Eh?” says the old man, cupping his ear with his hand.
“Eh?” says the old man.
The Texan leans out of the window of his Cadillac and
shouts: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Ah,” says the old man, “prektiss, prektiss.”
****
Into a modern urban synagogue, a temple, walks a
middle-aged gentleman, clearly middle-class, with an expensive suit, a silk
tie, and pure leather shoes. He walks
into the nearly empty and dimly lit building.
He goes about half-way down the aisle, turns into one of the pews, sits
down, hands extended in the attitude of prayer.
Turning around to make sure no one is there, he begins
to speak in a low voice:
“Dear God, please, I know I have neglected you often,
but I need your help. I am at my wit’s
end.”
He pauses for a moment, glances about again to see if
anyone is listening, then begins to speak:
“Lord, please help me.
I have an only son and he is now on in his late twenties. He has always given me troubles, but nothing
like what is happening these days. He
was naughty in primary school, so I sent him from one private finishing academy
to another, and somehow he got through. I
had various friends who were doctors, lawyers, certified public accountants,
all try to reason with him. I sent him
to a big state university. Then I sent
him to a small Liberal Arts College. Even
though it was a school, he got mixed up with the wrong crowd, drinks, drugs, the wrong kind of
girls. I sent him to a different college,
one way up in the wilds of New England, where liberal Christians study. Again he was wasting his time and my money. I paid for tutors to help him. I made big donations to the institution. He got through, who knows how? So I tried to
make a place for him with my firm, but he was lazy, made stupid mistakes, got
several secretaries in trouble, was almost arrested for drugs—that took some
doing on my part—and raced around in fast cars, went to parties with
professional criminals…”
The man, somewhat out of breath, stopped for a moment,
took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.
“I could have accepted all this. He was determined to break my spirit, but I
wouldn’t let him. He was sowing wild
oats, and I hoped that in a few years he would settle down, find himself. But now… The last straw.”
He looked up at Aharon haKodesh where the Torah
scrolls are stored and saw the images of holy things.
“Now, he has broken my heart, I don’t know what to
do. He has found himself a shiksa, a non-Jewish girl and threatens
me he is going to convert. What can I
do? My wife died years ago. He is my only child. He won’t go into my business, wanders around
like a hippy, consorts with riff-raff, and this religious business, please
excuse me, is breaking my heart.”
At that, there is a rumbling all about, a powerful
beam of light starts to shine through the stained glass window highlighting the
scene of the Akeda, the Binding of
Isaac,, and a voice speaks:
“You think you have troubles? I had a son once, and look at what happened
to him.”
[i] In films and early television,
Jack Benny would stand with his arms folded under his armpits, purse his lips,
and then make ready to speak: sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. If
Rochester, his housekeeper, companion and friend, were with him, he would
prompt Benny with “Yas sir, boss. Dats what you say.”
[ii] This was in a play
I saw called The Zulu and the Zayda in
the mid-1960s. According to Wikipedia: “The Zulu
and the Zayda is a play-with-music by Howard Da Silvaand Felix Leon, with music and lyrics by Harold Rome (his last musical score), and directed by Dore Schary. It was based on a story by Dan Jacobson. Described as a comedy with music, the play has
two acts and 18 scenes. Produced by Theodore Mann and Dore Schary, the Broadway production, opened on November 10, 1965 at the Cort
Theatre, where it ran for 179 performances. The cast included Menasha Skulnik, Ossie Davis,
and Louis Gossett. It also featured Yaphet
Kotto in his first Broadway
appearance.”
I love these jokes, Norman!!! Need more.
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