Edgy, Schmedgy

As the people of the Bible, we Jews take humor seriously. Where laughter is treated in the Holy Scriptures, it's with reverence. For example, the Biblical patriarch Isaac's name in Hebrew—Yitzchak, meaning "He laughs"—was bestowed on the boy because his elderly father and mother laughed at the absurd news that they would become parents. And the sound of the shofar, a ram's horn blown on Rosh Hashanah as per the commandment in the book of Numbers, is meant to sound like laughter.

Of course, Jewish humor is legendary. As Saul Bellow said, "Oppressed people tend to be witty." Among the oppressed and witty are titans like Woody Allen, Jackie Mason, Milton Berle, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Rodney Dangerfield, Billy Crystal and Jerry Seinfeld. But some new Jewish humor books have led me to reflect on the state of Jewish humor. The problem is, they're not very funny, and not very Jewish.

Oh, they strive to be both. "We regard ourselves as the South Park of the bunch, rather than the Jackie Mason brand of Catskills humor," Bryan Fogel told me. He's the author, with Sam Wolfson, of Jewtopia: The Chosen Book for the Chosen People (Warner, Sept.). "This book is particularly edgy," said Caryn Karmatz Rudy, an executive editor at Warner. I assume that by invoking South Park and "edginess," the folks behind the book mean that Jewtopia is filled with juvenile sexual and potty humor, like the illustration of how a knish enters the digestive tract only to exit later as a... well, never mind.

Then there's Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman's Yiddish with George and Laura (Little, Brown, Oct.), a follow-up to the authors' successful Yiddish with Dick and Jane. The new book is a parody that puts Yiddish phrases in the mouths of stodgy gentile characters, basically telling the same joke over and over again—and reflecting the authors' disapproval of the president and first lady. "We've been seething all the time at these people, and you should be too," Weiner explained. Alas, the book is too angry to be funny.

Or consider the parody Yes, but Is It Good for the Jews? (Bloomsbury, Oct.), by Jonny Geller, a literary agent in the U.K. This book applies a calculation based on various factors to decide whether Star Trek, Ben Stiller, the Wimbledon Tennis Championships and other random people and things are "good for the Jews." The result is clever and even informative, but far from side-splitting.

By contrast, there's something refreshing about the forthright, unapologetic traditionalism of a joke book. William Novak, an author of The Big Book of Jewish Humor (with Moshe Waldoks), argues that jokes as an art form have fallen on hard times. Their book is a classic and classy volume first published in 1981, recently out from HarperCollins in a 25th anniversary edition. Novak points out that in today's comedy—Jewish and otherwise—first-person "material" now takes the place of jokes: "We live in a narcissistic culture. A joke doesn't call attention to the performer the way his own material does. People would rather talk about themselves."

The Big Book of Jewish Humor, the only one of the aforementioned books that made me laugh out loud, sums up what it is about a joke that makes it Jewish. Jewish humor, write Novak and Waldoks in their introduction, is fascinated by "the short if elliptical path separating the rational from the absurd."

Absurdity assumes a rule or expectation against which the rational is compared. When the expectation is violated, that makes us laugh. And Judaism, with its 613 commandments, is nothing if not rules-oriented. This is a rather humorless way of saying that current Jewish humor books would be funnier, and more Jewish—if they followed tradition.

For example:

"A waiter comes over to a table full of Jewish women and asks, 'Is anything all right?' " The expectation, of course, is that the waiter will ask, "Is everything all right?"

It may not be edgy, but come on... you're laughing.