Quotes
“Thoughtful…Fascinating.” New York Times Book Review
“A serious study and most interesting at its most serious and obscure.” New York Review of Books
“Both erudite and breezy.” Forward magazine
“A serious and good philosophical work…that doesn’t consist entirely of jokes but has an awful lot of them in it…Some of its jokes are laugh-out-loud funny, and some of them are poignantly beautiful.” Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Dauber recognizes the multiplicity of Jewish humor and wisely resists any single characterization of it…[He] deftly surveys the whole recorded history of Jewish humor.” Economist (London)
“Any history of humor must include some jokes, and Dauber knows how to tell a joke…In any case. It’s not a joke book. Humor comes mostly out of everyday life, and Dauber weaves the narrative of everyday Jewish life (from the Babylonian exile to the present) and the literary record into a story of why a nation laughed—and needed to.” AudioFile
“Dauber takes in a wide swath of intellectual territory—from Kafka to Mad magazine—but he delicately mixes scholarship with comedy in what is an entertaining and even profound book.” Booklist (starred review)
“Could well be the gold standard for understanding what people of any ethnicity, nationality, or political persuasion find funny, and why.” Publishers Weekly
“An erudite survey of the evolution and distinctiveness of Jewish humor…A wide-ranging and insightful cultural analysis.” Kirkus Reviews
“You can’t understand comedy without knowing Jewish comedy—and you’ll find no smarter, more intrepid, and surprising analysis of the subject than in this book.” Jason Zinoman, author of Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night