Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust

by David Slucki (Editor), Avinoam Patt (Editor), Gabriel N. Finder (Editor)

Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust argues that humor performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. Co-editors David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries? Clearly, there have been comedy and laughter in the decades since. However, the extent to which humor can be ethically deployed in representing and discussing the Holocaust is not as clear. This book comes at an important moment in the trajectory of Holocaust memory. As the generation of survivors continues to dwindle, there is great concern among scholars and community leaders about how memories and lessons of the Holocaust will be passed to future generations. Without survivors to tell their stories, to serve as constant reminders of what they experienced, how will future generations understand and relate to the Shoah?

Laughter After is divided into two sections: "Aftermath" and "Breaking Taboos." The contributors to this volume examine case studies from World War II to the present day in considering and reconsidering what role humor can play in the rehabilitation of survivors, of Jews and of the world more broadly. More recently, humor has been used to investigate the role that Holocaust memory plays in contemporary societies, while challenging memorial conventions around the Holocaust and helping shape the way we think about the past. In a world in which Holocaust memory is ubiquitous, even if the Holocaust itself is inadequately understood, it is perhaps not surprising that humor that invokes the Holocaust has become part of the memorial landscape. This book seeks to uncover how and why such humor is deployed, and what the factors are that shape its production and reception. Laughter After will appeal to a number of audiences-from students and scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies to academics and general readers with an interest in media and performance studies.

Genres: Holocaust

358 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2020

Reviews

[Helyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

[3.5] I rounded this up to four because I don't want to critique the writers for structural weaknesses created by the editors. This is a solid collection. Like all anthologies, there are stronger and weaker pieces but overall the quality was there. However, the topics of each paper overlapped but at the same time they all talked about multiple things so it didn't seem intentional. I think they would have done better to isolate the major themes: Anne Frank jokes, the Soviet Union, American sitcoms, Mel Brooks, etc. and had various authors respond to specific prompts. It was weird for more than one essay to reference Larry David's 2017 SNL monologue as if no one else had discussed it in the book. Perhaps this book isn't meant to be read cover to cover but...why shouldn't it be?

I was also expecting more primary sources of actual jokes and jokes made by survivors. And more strong and impassioned critiques for and against Holocaust humor. Instead it was more about jokes in pop culture in the general postwar milieu. The title and subtitle are pretty unhelpful in actually telling you what the book's about. I also felt awkward when, in one of the essays, a writer explains why one joke is still funny to modern readers and the other one isn't and I had had the total opposite reaction.

Overall, I think this book scared itself into timidity. I understand that the topic is fraught, but by 2020 most of these arguments have already been made. Mel Brooks is iconic, but analysis of his work has been going on for like 50 years already. In my view, the most original essay was Ilan Stavans' piece on antisemitic comics in Latin America. It was both personal and innovative scholarship and compellingly written.

I honestly liked most of the essays, I just wish they didn't all blend together and I wish they had been a little more cutting edge/creative. Also, as a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fan, it really bothered me that CXG was mentioned twice but in one of the essays the author called it "My Crazy-Ex-Girlfriend," which is not only a careless editing error but a problematic misrepresentation of the thesis of the show. Overall, I think this collection is solid but it needed a few more passes of editing, a better structure, and a clearer focus.

[Full disclosure, I did meet Ilan Stavans very briefly at the Yiddish Book Center in 2014 and I had Marc Caplan as a teacher in the Tel Aviv University Kadar program in 2017. I'm not sure either would remember me, but I did have a little extra frame of reference when reading their pieces. That being said, there's a lot of rock star Jewish historians in this collection so I was vaguely familiar with a lot of the authors' work before reading these pieces.]

[Olive · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for school. Super interesting discussion about the role of laughter in tragedy. A bit disjointed due to the essay format but overall simple enough to get through.