Humor and Identity in Elie Wiesel’s <i>Day</i> and Mordecai Richler’s <i>The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz</i>

Drawing on various theories regarding humor such as Freud’s analysis and the incongruity theory of humor, this essay will explore the humor in Elie Wiesel’s Day and Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, along with the conundrum of identity involved in this type of treatment. It analyzes the deployment of humor that appears in Day such as the “incongruity theory of humor”, the logic of the illogical, the “return of the physical into the metaphysical”, and the unique type of humor that Gyula represents, the implication of that humor and the consequent dungeon of the self that Eliezer is sentenced into. The essay then argues that Duddy, in his restless chasing of his goal, represents to some extent an escape from the humors of self-deprecation and self-punishment that characterizes the Jewish literature, and the dungeon of the self in which Eliezer in Day is caught, but is still portrayed as entangled in the Canadian-Jewish-Quebecois set of codes.