The significance of humour in Everything is Illuminated and Portnoy's Complaint 'Jewish wit' began to establish itself in the late

nineteenth century and came to define Jewish identity as much as it was based on Jewish preoccupations. The extent to which it has stayed intact after crossing the atlantic and after one hundred years of development and a century of trauma is testament to its distinctiveness but may also be a function of the Jews' need to hold onto their identity as the diaspora spread ever further. The novels chosen to shed light on the significance of humour, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, show how fast the Jewish Americans' fortunes changed in the late 20th century, and how the tropes established in Jewish humour are now strong enough to be able to be passed on to other characters and demographics. Susan Purdie's encapsulation of the function and effect of joking in Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse synthesises opposing ideas that humour reinforces social norms and that punning rebels against 'collective constraints' by evading discourse: 'Because joking marks transgressions on the site of their genuine occurrence, it confirms us strongly as able to keep the rule of same and different, as well as to break it. The effect of joking is to emphatically instate the law, and ourselves as those who master discourse in defining as well as producing the usages which conform to it.' This is interesting from the point of view of various characters' desire for acceptance in Portnoy's Complaint and Everything Is Illuminated and may anticipate the ultimate inadequacy of humour to reveal or convey the truth about life or ourselves.1 Jefferson Chase (2001, p. 43) points out that 'I am the son in the Jewish joke!' can be retranslated from the German 'Ich bin der Sohn des Judenwitzes' as 'I am the product of Jewish wit, of a particular type of discourse'.2 Portnoy's Complaint takes the form of a judenwitz. It closes with a PUNCH LINE (PC 274), making Portnoy's exclamation true in the most literal sense. Within the joke, the novel takes the form of a kvetch, or hyperbolic rant as implied in the 'complaint' of the title, and within the kvetching there are puns and one-liners. All of these jokes reflect the typical themes of the Jewish joke including sexual frustration, the dominating wife, erotically-charged mother-son relationships and the pressure to be a success. Chase also asserts that the hyperbolic quality of the kvetch relativises thematic discourse, meaning that the very extremeness of what he says shows that he is not serious about it at all. This is a self-aware heightening of the way every fictional character is conceived as part of a discourse with each joke revealing Portnoy to be a puppet for Roth's voice. Chase argues that humour is a form of assimilation for the Jews: creating their own distinctive voice
1 Quoted in Jefferson Chase, 'Two Sons of "Jewish Wit": Philip Roth and Rafael Seligmann', Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 45 (Oregon: Duke University Press) 2 Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (London: Random House, 1995), pp. 36-37

carves a space for that voice in American society. Portnoy's overwhelming experience in his youth is that of being part of the wrong discourse. He is obsessed with what his mother dismissively calls 'goyische taste' (PC 143), and loves baseball as an embodiment of what he perceives to be America's calm respect for the individual: 'Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is mine!' (PC 69) The American discourse is manifested in bodies, in a style of dress and tone of voice that Portnoy will never achieve. He envies goyim and shikses their parents because they represent a habitus that, by definition, will never be his. But the humour of Portnoy's Complaint is in the frenzied writing style, where undertones of paranoia, self-hatred, superiority and hypochondria can be made to crescendo into prolonged passages of hysteria. One of the most perfect examples is the episode at Bubbles Girardi's house, where his fear of catching syphilis, losing his penis, being caught by his mother and featuring in local headlines climax in an inability to get an erection at the hands of the girl and a spurt of semen in his eye: masturbation literally blinds him (PC 165-184). He does not recognise that the nature of every discourse is that it has its own constraints. Portnoy's primary mode of communication, the Judenwitz, is born of his claustrophobic home-life: 'In this household everybody tries to get a good cry in at least once a day' (PC 25). The freedom he finds in punning is born of the inescapability of a mother who demands to look through his faeces (PC 22), and his earliest fantasies are the product of trying to sidestep meanings and identities conferred on him: 'Portnoy, yes, it's an old French name, a corruption of porte noir, meaning black door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to our family manor house was painted.' (PC 149) He has in fact been afforded a greater power over language than the goyim who apparently had so much more freedom for their bodies. Critics have commented on the fluidity of Jewish identity in Jewish/American literature3. To be a Jew is identified in literature with certain motivations, desires and disappointments, which can be transferred to another character within the novel. If Portnoy's identification of himself as a 'Jewish son' hangs on his stifling home life, his desire to be part of American culture and his hankering after sexual experiences, Alex is the Jew in Everything Is Illuminated. Eliot Borenstein mentions Alex as an example of the 'yokel': the mythical Eastern European figure who has not reclaimed his voice unlike almost every other demographic in the wake of postmodernism.4 Foer certainly takes part in 'the abject humour of yokelisation' at the opening of the novel. When Jonathan keeps complaining of
3 Including Jonathan Rosen's introduction to The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003) 4 Eliot Borenstein, 'Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage' Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), p. 3

the smell in the car, Alex's diplomatic skills eventually give way to his despair and he cries It is only Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. She gets terrible farting in the car because it has nor shock absorbers nor struts, but if we roll down the window she will jump out, and we need her because she is the Seeing Eye bitch for our blind driver, who is also my grandfather. What do you not understand? 5 The fact that this is Alex's description of the situation, however, shows perhaps with Jonathan's influence he is beginning to understand the comedic value of drawing out such moments reflecting one's own incompetence or powerlessness to an audience: the self-deprecating yokel. This anticipates Alex's symbolic transformation from the abject yokel figure to the real hero, and indeed mensch, by the end of the novel. Foer has said in interview, 'The person who we think is the fool...becomes the hero'.6 Foer allows his namesake in the novel unkindly to exploit Alex's unsophisticated tendencies, apparently encouraging him to make 'more protracted' his deluded self-portrait in the opening chapter, so that the reader is complicit in a bullying process. Foer does make amends, however, by allowing Alex to go through the psychoanalytic growing-up process of expelling his father from his life, as well as allowing him to be a father figure to Jonathan by being a 'funny person': '(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not- truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)' (EII 227). Zizek, assessing Benigni's La Vita E Bella, says 'The fantasmatic protective shield is the benevolent fiction allowing the son to come to terms with harsh reality': perhaps Foer had Zizek's, if not Lacan's, father figure in mind when he created this dynamic.7 Thus Alex participates fully in a process of intersubjectivity from which he may initially have appeared to be excluded by imperfect command of the discourse. When comedy becomes tragedy Alex emphasises that he does not want to be funny any more, or 'disgusting' (EII 219), showing his awareness of himself as what he may represent to readers. The revelation that Alex understands his appearance to the reader and that he has been holding this understanding back in order to present a certain impression of himself for Jonathan's sake takes us by surprise. When Jonathan and Alex are talking outside 'Augustine''s house, Jonathan says 'I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.' Alex has realised this but also knows that we have to be protected from the world in some way. If the act of laughing at someone is subtly problematised earlier in the novel, Foer makes more and
5 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (London: Penguin, 2003) 6 Connie Martinson Talks Books, Everything is Illuminated Part I (June 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=XQxElQbEupY) 7 'Laugh Yourself to Death: the new wave of Holocaust comedies!', Did somebody say totalitarianism? Five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion (London: Verso, 2002)

more explicit his distrust of joking and laughing as means of communication. 'They pulled down her panties, and one of the men put the end of the gun in her place, and the others laughed so hard, I remember the laughing always....and they shot my sister in her place....HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA' (EII 187). Foer seems to have chosen an act that would be the most offensive and evil to anyone reading: a rape and the murder of a child at once. This shows that humour can be employed by anyone, and anyone will laugh, but this does not make the joker intelligent, and does not necessarily signal communication. The laugher is just as complicit in the joke as the joker, which is why both writers must treat the subject of the Holocaust delicately as long as they still want people to laugh. The novel becomes increasingly about the difficulty of drawing boundaries between different people and different acts, so that 'I also pointedatHerschel and I also said heisaJew and I will tell you that you also pointedatHerschel and you also said heisaJew...and we all pointedateachother' (EII 252). The 'end of the world' moment merges all acts together, leading to a collective judgement: can humankind be forgiven for its imperfection? Laughing as an embodied act is emphasised by the spelling out of the words, its violence reflected in the capitals. The same laugh is used in A Streetcar Named Desire before Stanley rapes Blanche. To laugh at a joke is active as making it, and the audience is morally implicit in the joke. There is also a scene in Portnoy's Complaint in which humour and rape are intertwined. Portnoy is rejected by Naomi, who reminds him of his mother and, decides to take her by force, all the while fantasising about giving her the sexually-transmitted disease he is convinced he has (PC 268). The effect of this is very nearly endearing: in that it shows concern for her health and reminds the reader of his mother's-boy hypochondria. His fantasy of being the rapist/avenger is undermined by his moral upbringing and again he cannot be the self he wants to be, and insult compounded by the fact that he is in his 'homeland'. The audience is saved the reality of having laughed at the jokes of a rapist as in Lolita only by Portnoy's inability to 'get a hard-on', but it seems to be enough. The lesson from Naomi, his would-have-been victim, does hint at the dangers of treating one's life as a joke. "The way you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do...In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. Selfdepreciating?" (265) Roth uses the same metonymic translation trick as Foer to convey an extra meaning to Naomi's words: she means self-deprecating, but he is also self-depreciating, or reducing the value of himself and his actions. Portnoy's Complaint deals with the splitness of the self between what we present and what is going on inside our bodies. Portnoy sometimes sees himself as the civilised, educated Portnoy he tries to present, and sometimes as the physical infant, purely led by his penis. Portnoy's fear of humiliation

manifests itself in his envisioning of his actions appearing as newspaper headlines. Each element is part of the other, however, with his longing for 'shikse' women being an embodiment of his desire to escape home and be part of gentile America, and his public face as a member of New York's mayoral office compensates for the primal desperation going on in his head. The sensation is of being turned inside out, so that his most private habits are made as public as possible. Only women, including his mother, witness both sides. The humour that Portnoy directs at himself anticipates his failure to reconcile the two conflicting parts of his character. The subject may be able to take retrospective ownership of his actions through self-satire and become part of the rest of society in castigating his own aberrations, but Naomi points out that it is 'of no value to a man to disapprove of his life'. It could be a process of self-abjection in which the subject can choose the parts of himself he wants to expel from his own self-image, which is how Portnoy the rapist can still feel so sorry for himself. Portnoy's same self-doubt is evident in Foer's ambivalent presentation of his namesake, but it is not treated humorously. Part of the humour in Everything Is Illuminated is derived from the struggle to know what to talk about and where to begin the village is always wondering which facts will take us closer to the truth, leading to a preoccupation with writing and keeping letters and recording every thought. In the Book of Antecedents, entries vary in tone from encyclopaedic to pompous to cranky, depending on the mood of the entrant. The novel as a whole is preoccupied with what to categorise and what is the paradigm, although 'God' seems to be the answer to a lot of the mysteries and miscellanies recorded in the Book of Antecedents (EII 196). Brod recorded 613 'sadnesses' (EII 211) all of which could probably have been turned into jokes by Alexander Portnoy. There is perhaps a desire not to 'abject' anything a reverence for the past brought on by its drawing out of reach with each new death. Behlman says What stands out about the recent fictions under discussion here [including Foer's first novel] is the degree to which they emphasize the now-vast temporal and cultural distance between late twentieth and twenty-first century America and the Holocaust, as well as the gap between our time and the American experience of the Holocaust for previous generations. While distance has always been a prevalent theme for writers addressing the aftermath, it has newfound importance given the loss of many tangible linkages to the past. Alex feels it too, but the humour of miscellany for him seems to be replaced by the sadness of miscellany. 'Humour' becomes a lost part of the fridays rather than something still relevant to him: Tell me more about these Fridays. Tell me about measuring and humor and hiding beneath her dress. Both novels employ humour but both see it as a potential barrier to true communication rather than a way of connecting. Everything Is Illuminated treats humour with care and criticises its own jokes.

Portnoy's Complaint ends defiantly with a punchline, refusing to learn any lessons. Everything Is Illuminated attempts to go beyond humour and ends in tragedy. The bleak implication may be that the opposite of humour is tragedy or death, but it could also mean that to stop joking is to attempt to look past discourse and find a truer form of communication. The book seems stuck in symbol, with the casting out of the father and the death of the older generation to make way for the new. Perhaps we can only give way to grander signifiers, or perhaps love and self-sacrifice do exist outside of our perception of them. The portrayal of love in the shtetl especially Brod's relationships with Yankel D and the Kolker seem to urge us to try to find out rather than hiding behind humour. Portnoy's Complaint is self-consciously written in the style of a Jewish joke, which undermines the extremes of what is said, but if the joke is left untold there is nothing left to be said. The implication for Jewish/American fiction could be that it feels more uncomfortable for the 21st Century Jewish/American writer to write with levity about being a Jew, when memory is such an integral part of Jewish culture (in the Book of Antecedents: 'When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?' [EII 199]). As memories of the Holocaust are lost with every death and as Holocaust jokes become more prevalent and apparently acceptable, the modern writer has more of a duty of respect to dead and to the survivors alike. Laughing at others has become more problematic, too, with the prominence of anti-semitic terrorism and with the sense that an experience like the Holocaust in the cultural memory should increase empathy rather than thickening the skin, and make prominent moral and ethical responsibility. However, humour is still celebrated as part of 'that wonderful and terrible world', and sometimes the right thing to do is to see the funny side.

Bibliography Behlman, Lee. "The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.3 (2004) pp. 56-71 Borenstein, Eliot, 'Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage' Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 1-7 Chase, Jefferson, 'Two Sons of "Jewish Wit": Philip Roth and Rafael Seligmann', Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 42-57 (Oregon: Duke University Press) Malamud, Bernard, The Assistant (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003) Martinson, Connie, Connie Martinson Talks Books: 'Everything is Illuminated Part I' (June 2010,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQxElQbEupY)

Roth, Philip, Portnoy's Complaint (London: Random House, 1995), Safran Foer, Jonathan, Everything is Illuminated (London: Penguin, 2003) Zizek, Slavoj 'Laugh Yourself to Death: the new wave of Holocaust comedies!', Did somebody say totalitarianism? Five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion (London: Verso, 2002)