I recently gave a talk at a synagogue in Miami on the subject of Jewish humor—specifically on the jokes Jews tell about themselves. Freud, in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wrote: “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character [as do the Jews].” Other ethnic and nationality groups tell jokes about themselves, not only currently but throughout history. The classicist Mary Beard, in Laughter in Ancient Rome, recounts some of the jokes found in the anthology called the Philogelos (Laughter Lover) about “doctors, men with bad breath, eunuchs, barbers, men with hernias, bald men, shady fortune-tellers, and more of the colorful (mostly male) characters of Roman life.”
In our day, the Irish are known for telling jokes about themselves: An Irish homosexual, a notable one goes, is a man who prefers women over whiskey. In Irish Alzheimer’s, a friend of mine named Pat Hickey told me, one forgets everything but one’s grudges. Contemporary Greeks and Italians also joke about themselves. But Freud was right: Jews do so more than any others.
In my talk I attempted to account for the ample reasons for this, and I illustrated my points by telling a number of Jewish jokes. Before telling these jokes, I felt I had to say that, while there are truly meanspirited and even vicious jokes, I wasn’t sure that there was such a thing as a tasteful joke and, if there were, that anyone would wish to hear it or be likely to enjoy it. This led into my saying—and here I quote from my talk—”that jokes can also, and usually do, violate the canons of political correctness—at least many of the better ones do.” I then found myself adding: “Political correctness, should it spread widely enough, should it sink its roots deeply enough in our culture, would of course eliminate jokes and all other humor.”
Political correctness has already made it impossible to discuss with the complexity they deserve many of the most serious issues of our time. Under the reign of political correctness, one cannot talk about black-on-black crime, or knock the more violent lyrics of rap music, without being called racist. Women’s issues, it is understood, can only be discussed by women; sexist dogs need not apply. Point out that much of the diversity lauded by contemporary universities is as artificial as the language of inclusivity used to promote it—in a scholarly book I not long ago read that the author had put in many “person-hours” getting up her subject—and one is straightaway written off as a troglodyte. Find silly recent student claims that Halloween costumes and exclusive fraternity-party invitations made them feel uncomfortable, or that having the word “Trump” printed on the campus sidewalks, as happened recently at Emory University in Atlanta, made them feel unsafe, and one is written off as an insensitive beast. All this nonsense and more is owed to the rise of political correctness.
Looking over the jokes I told in my talk in Miami, nearly every one of them would have failed the correctness code. Here are some of the categories of my jokes: Jewish mothers, rabbis, waiters, parvenus, Jewish women, Jewish immigrants (dare I say “greenhorns”), antisemites, and marital sex.
As I told these jokes, I looked about the audience for a disapproving face, someone, as I imagined, in his or her 20s looking sternly on the proceedings, lockjawed by political correctness. Such a person was sure to loathe every punchline I uttered: “He had a hat”; “I had no idea how much Buster had done for Israel”; “Nothing to worry about, it’s a disease of the gentiles”; “Oedipus, schmoedipus, just so long as a boy loves his mother.” I didn’t, I’m pleased to report, discover that person, but then the crowd of a hundred and forty or so people who came to hear my talk was an older and good-natured one, and generous with their laughter. I could never have given the same talk at a contemporary university, where the spirit of political correctness rules.
Jokes about political correctness exist, but there are not enough of them. Comedians ought to realize that they have no greater enemy and get to work attacking it. A minefield in a cow pasture, political correctness has put nearly every significant subject out of bounds. Under political correctness, once-innocent jokes are now considered ugly and dangerous. If political correctness continues to make further inroads in American life, the day may not be far off when we shall all sit around, nothing to talk about, nothing to laugh at, nothing to do but quietly contemplate our own extraordinary virtue.
