Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials by Jennifer Caplan (review)

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• Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials by Jennifer Caplan
• Rachel B. Gross (bio)

Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials. By Jennifer Caplan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2023. x + 175.

In Funny, You Don't Look Funny, Jennifer Caplan skillfully applies literary theorist Bill Brown's Thing theory to American Jewish satire. A Thing, in Brown's usage, is "something broken, abandoned, or no longer useful," and Caplan traces how American Jewish writers and filmmakers represent Judaism and Jewishness as vital and meaningful, or as "dead and dysfunctional" (3). Without resorting to essentialism, Caplan draws a valuable distinction between humorists' treatment of Judaism, the religion of ritual and text, and Jews themselves. Her application of Thing theory in this way is a powerful new framework for analyzing American Jewish writers and creators that helps scholars—and hopefully American Jews themselves—move beyond tired Jewish communal conversations about pop culture, such as asking whether certain creators are "good for the Jews" or even how Jewish or how religious their creations are. Fundamentally, Caplan moves us away from declensionist views of American Jewish "assimilation" into a generic Protestant America. Instead, her analysis illuminates which aspects of American Jewish traditions and life humorists see as invigorative and which bear the brunt of their biting critiques.

In contrast to several other theorists of Jewish humor, Caplan rightfully refuses any one model of Jewish humor that transcends time and space. In order to do so, Funny, You Don't Look Funny is organized around generational groups of humorists. While Caplan acknowledges that defining a generation is, at best, a slippery task, this structure helps her trace change over time. She finds Silent Generation humorists (Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud) caustically disparaging of Jewish sacred texts and rituals while protecting the amorphous concept of "Jewish peoplehood." Crucially, they have a profound understanding of the Judaism they Thingified; Caplan compellingly describes Allen and Heller's fiction as "midrash for atheists." Their stories ridicule scripture, faith, and religious practice but, in focusing on "the human stories behind the religious texts and traditions," they evince "a desire to preserve, and even protect, the Jewish people" (41). Like blasphemy, satire is not a lack of engagement but rather a certain kind of deep, if [End Page 793] ultimately dismissive, encounter with the object of its scorn. "You cannot properly make something a Thing if you do not fully understand it," Caplan explains. "For how can you know that something both had a function and has now lost it if you do not have any real knowledge of the subject?" (46). Caplan's Silent Generation humorists, and some Baby Boomers—whom she sees as fluctuating between the generations on either side of them—know both Judaism and American Jews well, perhaps all too well.

Caplan's analysis particularly shines in her study of Gen X humorists and Boomers working in the twenty-first century (Jennifer Westfeldt, Jonathan Tropper, Nathan Englander, the Coen brothers, and Larry David). These writers and filmmakers, Caplan argues, overturn the dynamic of the Silent Generation humorists by finding religion to be useful, serving emotional and psychological purposes, while making Jews themselves the butt of their jokes. Caplan's analysis of life cycle rituals in their work is especially powerful, including depictions of circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. In particular, her astute analysis of Jennifer Westfeldt's 2001 film Kissing Jessica Stein helps me understand why this film's depiction of pushy Jewish mothers and neurotic Jewish daughters felt so refreshing to American Jewish women at the turn of the twenty-first century. In contrast to many older satirists, Westfeldt's film contains warm and sympathetic depictions of Jewish women's social lives and family rituals, even as it gently relies on stereotypes.

The book's wonderfully titled concluding chapter, "What Will Millennials Kill Next?" is short, suggestive, and leaves readers wanting more. Caplan labels millennial Jews with the insightful moniker "Generation 'Chanukah Song,'" a cohort shaped by Gen X Adam Sandler's landmark ditty to understand "Jewishness as something that is cool and...