At Mardi Gras time in New Orleans, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth, the two extremes of human emotion are made ever so obvious: Pain and Laughter. The two masks which serve as unmistakable emblems for every Carnival season say it all: the smile of joy and the frown of sorrow; the celebration of our living and the inevitability of our dying.

The fervor, the almost desperate effort to savor every ounce of carnal pleasure which life can afford before the midnight hour of the grim reaper's arrival at our door -- such is the drama being acted out all around us at this very moment. Time becomes shorter by the second and, all too soon, the feasting is forcibly curtailed, as reality replaces revelry, and the stark ashes upon the forehead replace the brightly colored beads around the neck. All masks are now removed as all illusions are shattered.

So much of Mardi Gras is outside of our Judaism. Even the most assimilated among us can be made to feel ill-at-ease and not quite at home with this season of the year. And yet, here is something worth a few thoughtful moments: those masks of Pain and Laughter. On this subject our Judaism has had something profound to say for many, many centuries.

We Jews have combined both of these masks - Pain and Laughter - into humor, a uniquely Jewish shield against bigotry, an outlet for aggressions, neuroses, anger, ill-fortune and just plain annoyance. Yes, Jewish humor has been, and continues to be, a mechanism of our People's survival.

Writing in a recent article in "Judaism Magazine," Irv Saposnik observes:

"Jewish jokes in particular emerge from historical and personal constraints. Jokes provide an indirect means for circumventing an obstacle. No wonder that the Jews became such skillful practitioners at using this passive/aggressive device to meet the hurdles of history. In Jewish mouths, jokes became a weapon, a defense mechanism, a way of defining the world, but with laughter."

Irish humor, for instance, tends to sound like utter nonsense when first considered in a literal sense. But, on second thought, is in fact perfectly understandable and highly descriptive.

There's the mother who says impatiently to her little son:
"You have a cap and you never wear it, and if you hadn't one, you'd be wearing it all the time."
 

Or the Irish mother who said to her inattentive son while on their errands:
"If you don't start behaving yourself, the next time I bring you I'm going to leave you at home!"

You see how it works? Humor has truth caught in it, communicating the best truths making sense at a level deeper than literal fact.

I was reading where a fellow by the name of Dave Serchuk did some research on the amazing proliferation of Jewish jokes in this age of the Internet. I don't know about you but I receive a good number of Jewish jokes each week. This fellow writes in a recent article in the "Forward" newspaper:

To take in the scale of Jewish Internet humor, I went to one of my favorite search engines, Google.com, and punched in 'Jewish jokes.' A full 1,780 hits came up. This number may not sound like a lot...but let's compare our Jewish yield to that of other religions...

'Catholic jokes' - 273 hits - this for a religion of more than a billion people. 'Islamic jokes' - two hits (need we say more!). 'Mormon jokes' - a surprising 316 entries.

So what's going on here? Well the fact is, we Jews are a whole lot more comfortable lampooning ourselves than are the adherents of other faiths. How so?

Again, quoting Mr. Saposnik's essay in "Judaism":
 

Throughout history, the Jewish mouth has been a weapon in the battle for survival. The Jewish American stand-up comedian is but a latter-day version of this ancestral heritage that repeats itself even unto these days...

The lone comic on a bare stage, slightly out of step with the world, shaking his/her verbal fist at the disparity between the should and the is, speaking in a voice of urban desperation, is likely to be an undisguised Jew... Jewish comics intuitively see the Jewish joke as a mechanism for survival.

But, my dear friends, don't think all of this began with Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser or Adam Sandler! Nor was it begun by geniuses the likes of Woody Allen, or Mel Brooks, or even the Marx Brothers.

There is a clearly voiced self-deprecating humor all the way back in the Torah's first book as the Biblical Abraham bargains with an angry Creator to try to save Sodom and Gomorrah, and as the wily Jacob wrestles with God's angel emerging with a blessing as well as a limp. And how about the Biblical mother, Sarah, who dares to laugh in God's very face (so to speak) when informed of her pregnancy at such a ripe old age.

Is it any wonder that Jewish humor has vastly influenced that of both the African- Americans and Hispanics because it rings true and summons the human spirit to rebound and to renew itself.

Humor is a way of putting things in their proper place and priority. There's nothing better than laughing at yourself, you know, acknowledging that we are not meant to take ourselves too seriously. I'd like to think that Moses laughed a whole lot. I hope he did. I'm sure that Pharaoh did not!

Dictators hate laughter. Says George Will, "Every laugh is a tiny revolution."   Tyrants know that to be able to laugh is to disengage and take a step toward freedom.

Malcolm Muggeridge used to quip that upon his death, if he didn't hear louder and louder the sounds of deep belly laughs as his soul grew closer to heaven, well then, he would know for sure that he was going to the other place!

The Jewish joke, and the Jewish comedian that gives it voice, testifies for all time and every place, that continuity amid the chaos of history is itself a victory, that adversity can be mitigated by words as well as deeds and that sometimes success is not to conquer the world but to learn to live with it. Laughter is the way we need to respond if you and I are to live in this world.

The other day I heard this story of a little school girl. The weather that particular day was questionable to say the least, and as the afternoon progressed, the winds whipped up, along with rain and thunder and lightning.

Of course, the little girl's mother was concerned that her daughter would be frightened as she walked home from school, and the mom herself feared that the electrical storm might endanger her child. Filled with maternal worry, the mother got in her car and drove along the route to her child's school.

And there she was - walking home. But the daughter's reaction was not at all what the mother expected. At each flash of the lightning, the child stopped, she looked up and smiled. As another and another flash followed quickly, the girl repeated her turning to the heavens and smiling.

When the mother's car drew up beside the child she lowered the window and called to her,

"Honey, what in the world are you doing? Why do you keep stopping?"

And the little girl answered her mother:

"Mommy, I am trying to look pretty because God keeps taking my picture."

You see, in each one of our lives there are storms. Everyone knows pain. We all take our turn wearing that mask with the frown. But, as with the child in the midst of the storm, the question is, how we face them.

For us Jews, as Mr. Saposnik put it so well in his article:

From generation to generation the joke begets the spritz; the spritz begets the shtick; the shtick begets the laugh (and) as Alan King once observed, if you don't laugh, you die.