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Jewish humour is the long tradition of humour in Judaism dating back to the Torah and the Midrash from the ancient Middle East, but generally refers to the more recent stream of verbal and often anecdotal humour originating in Eastern Europe and which took root in the United States over the last hundred years, including in secular Jewish culture. Beginning with vaudeville, and continuing through radio, stand-up comedy, film, and television, a disproportionately high percentage of American and Russian comedians have been Jewish.〔While numbers are inevitably fuzzy, Paul Chance, reviewing Lawrence Epstein's ''The Haunted Smile: The Story Of Jewish Comedians In America'' (''Psychology Today'', Jan-Feb, 2002) wrote "While Jews make up only about 3 percent of the U.S. population, 80 percent of professional comics are Jewish." Accessed (online ) 25 March 2007. Comedian Mark Schiff, (reviewing the same book on Jewlarious.com ), writes "Most of the comedians that made us all laugh in the 1950s, '60s and '70s were Jewish." Similarly, Drew Friedman (author of ''Old Jewish Comedians''), in a March 22, 2007 (interview on Fridays with Mr. Media ): "Somebody said, 'You could do an Old Protestant Comedian book,' and I said, 'Well, that would be a pamphlet, wouldn’t it?'"〕 ==History== Jewish humour is rooted in several traditions. Recent scholarship places the origins of Jewish humor in one of history's earliest recorded documents, the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Talmud.〔Hershey H. Friedman and Linda Weiser Friedman, God Laughed: Sources of Jewish Humor, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2014.〕 In particular, the intellectual and legal methods of the Talmud, which uses elaborate legal arguments and situations often seen as so absurd as to be humorous, in order to tease out the meaning of religious law. Hillel Halkin in his essay about Jewish humour〔("Why Jews Laugh at Themselves" ), an essay by Hillel Halkin, ''Commentary Magazine'', Vol 121, April 2006, No 4, pp. 47-54〕 traces some roots of the Jewish self-deprecating humour to the medieval influence of Arabic traditions on the Hebrew literature by quoting a witticism from Yehuda Alharizi's ''Tahkemoni''. A more recent one is an egalitarian tradition among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly, rather than attacked overtly—as Saul Bellow once put it, "Oppressed people tend to be witty." Jesters known as badchens used to poke fun at prominent members of the community during weddings, creating a good-natured tradition of humour as a levelling device. Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, a scholar of Jewish humour, argued: After Jews began to immigrate to America in large numbers, they, like other minority groups, found it difficult to gain mainstream acceptance and obtain upward mobility (As Lenny Bruce lampooned, "He was charming... They said, 'C'mon! Let's go watch the Jew be charming!'"). The newly-developing entertainment industry, combined with the Jewish humour tradition, provided a potential route for Jews to succeed. One of the first successful radio "sitcoms," ''The Goldbergs'', featured a Jewish family. As radio and television matured, many of its most famous comedians, including Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Jack Carter, Henny Youngman and Milton Berle, were Jewish. The Jewish comedy tradition continues today, with Jewish humour much entwined with that of mainstream humour, as comedies like ''Seinfeld'', ''Curb Your Enthusiasm'' and Woody Allen films indicate. Sigmund Freud in his ''Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious'', among other things, analyzes the nature of Jewish jokes. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jewish humour」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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