Humour, if not downright hilarity, is important to our lives. Levity leavens the burden of the human condition. Science has pointed out how vital it is that we exercise our sense of humour, to lighten moods and circumstances, to give us breathing space between episodes of difficult times, to make us appear to our peers as moderate, engaging and pleasant to be around.

Since we are, as a species, given to 'being around' others as a genetic inheritance reflecting in part survival techniques, humour is a way we can share ourselves.



We need to laugh at ourselves and the human condition. Sometimes gently, sometimes pointedly with a view to deflating received wisdom and urban legend alike. Children do it naturally, seeing the absurdity and contradictions in life through their clear, unsophisticated eyes. It is why they sometimes ask the most intriguing questions revealing the depths of social shibboleths for the empty veneer they represent.

Of course children are also thrilled with the deliberate pricking of social prohibitions. The forbidden has its own allure, and to allude to it within the safety of a humorous context provides a special sense of one's own daring and cleverness. For children nothing seems as useful a target as normal bodily functions, particularly the excretion of food by-product via the bowels.

The giggles elicited in children with the use of scatological humour reveals their rejection of the forbidden in human discourse and the underlying social courtesies they recognize no need of supporting. As they become older, that gravitates toward other forbidden subjects, most notably those of a sexual nature, as they begin to explore the mysteries of hormonal changes in themselves, and join the ranks of the physically mature.

The older we become the more need there is of laughter, however wry and ironic it may be. Humour helps us to deal with situations that might otherwise seem impossible to fathom, let alone live with. Certain ethnic groups gravitate toward a typical kind of humour and this seems most pronounced in Jews. One might feel abhorrence that a Jew could write a black humour-tinged book about the Holocaust, but the reason is obvious enough; it represents a way of dealing with the spectacularly incomprehensible.

There is also an instant recognition among Jews about a particular type of self-disparaging humour that excludes those who have never lived the life of a Jew. With an underlying tinge of melancholy, a wish to belong, yet a defiance in clinging to an ancient heritage, even exclusive of religion, with a shared set of values and traditions and a history of unrelenting rejection by the world's other ethnicities and religions.

Only a Jew, for example, could fully and immediately catch the yearning absurdity of David Bader's little Haiku:

Look, Muffy! I've found
the most splendid tchotchka for
our Hanukkah bush.