Jennifer Caplan. <i>Funny, You Don’t Look Funny Reviewed by Melissa Weininger</i>

What is “Jewish humor”? This phrase gets tossed around enough that there appears to be some tacit consensus that a thing called “Jewish humor” exists. But, like everything else Jewish, no one seems to be able to agree on what Jewish humor is, or why Jews are so funny. Jennifer Caplan’s new book, Funny, You Don’t Look Funny, approaches the topic of Jewish humor from a different angle, examining the way that American Jewish humor, specifically, has engaged with Judaism as a mode of charting the changing circumstances of Jews in America and the evolving relationship of American Jews to Jewish practice, affiliation, and identity. Funny, You Don’t Look Funny crosses religious and cultural studies to use humor as a lens to understand American Jewish religious life and attitudes.Caplan uses commonly accepted American generational categories, from the silent generation to Gen Z, to chart a relationship between Jewish humor and Judaism. Her argument is that over time we can see a shift in American Jewish humor from “prioritizing Jewish peoplehood to protecting Judaism” (3). The primary theoretical model is Bill Brown’s Thing theory, which labels as “Thing” an item, concept, or idea that is no longer useful. In her words, Caplan explores the “Thingification” of certain aspects of Jewish life in America as reflected in the humor of different generations of American Jews to understand the shifting importance of various elements of American Jewish life over time.To document these changes, Caplan’s book is organized chronologically, with approximately one chapter devoted to each generation from the silent generation (who actually get two chapters, reflecting their foundational importance as well as changes in their generation over time) to millennials, with a nod to the emergence of Gen Z. Caplan appears to take an expansive view of what qualifies as “humor,” although it is never precisely defined, and includes literary satire and parody as well as television sitcoms, films, and even Instagram. The first two chapters focus on silent generation writers Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, not all of whom are primarily known as humorists. Caplan samples lesser-known works of many of these writers to establish a foundational approach to American Jewish humor. The silent generation established a Jewish humor that takes a critical view of organized religion and Jewish religious institutions, while protecting, even sanctifying, Jews and Jewish peoplehood. Working in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, these writers used humor to mock or dismiss religion while upholding the value of maintaining a particularist Jewish identity.The following chapters map the ways that subsequent generations began to depart from the silent generation’s valorization of Jews at the expense of Judaism. Beginning with the baby boomers in chapter 3, Caplan explores the way their approach to Jewish ritual practice evidences a new willingness to laugh at themselves, to make fun not just of Judaism but of Jews. Through examinations of Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld, in particular, she notes the way that baby boomers, like members of the silent generation, depicted organized religious practice as useless while also “opening up the door to satirize Jews as people,” a phenomenon she links to increasing distance from World War II and the Holocaust.Chapter 4 demonstrates how the balance between practice and peoplehood began to tip with the humor of Gen X. In what is the most robust chapter, Caplan delves into a wide variety of materials, from the films Kissing Jessica Stein, The Big Lebowski, and A Serious Man, to the short stories of Nathan Englander. These texts, according to Caplan, demonstrate an increasing willingness to criticize, satirize, and mock both individual Jews and the Jewish community as a whole, while recuperating religious practice and traditions. In marked contrast to the silent generation humorists Caplan began with, Gen X portrayals of Jewish rituals and traditions are often not the object of the joke but rather the “humanizing antidote to the joke” (98). The chapter concludes with an analysis of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as an example of the way that this humanizing influence of Gen X has even had an effect on the Boomer comedy of the previous generation, bringing it into the twenty-first century. The wide variety of materials in this chapter, as well as its clear depiction of the innovations of Gen X comedy, make this chapter the fulcrum on which the book turns, and brings new understandings to the materials analyzed in earlier chapters.The final chapter also serves as a kind of conclusion, although, perhaps by design, the book does not end with any neat and tidy resolution. Chapter 5 focuses on some examples of contemporary humor by millennials, although as Caplan notes, there are several decades ahead of us in which millennials will be driving American Jewish humor, so her conclusions are preliminary. However, using the examples of the TV shows Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as well as the “Crazy Jewish Mom” Instagram account, Caplan shows the ways that technology has begun to change the landscape of comedy. With regard to the content of millennial humor, the chapter documents the blossoming of the Gen X trend toward embracing Jewishness. Caplan notes that millennial humor exhibits what she characterizes as a “fierce” attachment to Jewish identity but “with much less interest in having that be defined by affiliation with a synagogue, ritual performance, or attitudes about the Holocaust and Israel” (133). The final words of the book suggest that this reflects a certain safety American Jews feel about Judaism in America and challenges the notion that millennials (and future generations) are any less Jewish in their humor or their lives than those who came before them. This challenge, crucially, intervenes not just in contemporary religious and cultural debates but also recent conversations about Jewish “continuity” and the definition or centrality of that idea in the American Jewish community.Funny, You Don’t Look Funny is an important contribution to the study of Judaism in America in that it approaches Jewish life through culture, which as the study itself shows is an increasingly important way for Jewish Americans to not just represent Jewish life but to actually practice their Judaism outside of the traditional institutions and organizations of American Jewish society. It is an engaging and accessibly written book that could easily be used in the classroom, and perhaps most importantly for a book about humor, Caplan herself is often funny. The book does an excellent job of signaling both backward and forward in its analysis, linking each piece of the chronological puzzle to what comes before and after, which is particularly important in a work such as this, which relies on documenting change over time.There are some elements of the analysis that could be more deeply explored: for example, Caplan gives no clear definition of what constitutes humor or why certain texts are considered comedic for the purposes of the study, particularly in the early chapters. Through the analysis of the texts, especially in chapter 3 and beyond, it is evident how humor operates in each of them, but a brief typology of the varieties of humor under consideration would have been a useful guide. However, even without such a guide, this book is an extremely useful text in considering a new angle on old questions of American Jewish identity and self-expression, as well as new, contemporary materials that have not yet been extensively analyzed in scholarship. Funny, You Don’t Look Funny will certainly be an important foundational text, as well as a teaching text, for studies of American Jewish culture and religious life, especially as it is transformed by new technologies in the twenty-first century.