Dean, Andrew; (2025) Sons of the Jewish Joke. In: Stephen, Frosh and Devorah, Baum, (eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Jewish Studies. (pp. 469-483). Routledge: New York, NY, USA.

Text Dean_Sons of the Jewish Joke_chapter_AAM.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 31 October 2026. Download (373kB)

Abstract

In Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Portnoy complains that he is ‘the son of the Jewish joke – only it ain’t no joke.’ Later, while reading Freud’s collected works, he reflects on his pursuit of degradation in his erotic life. Meanwhile, Bernard Malamud’s archive at the Library of Congress reveals that he told his students at Bennington College in the early 1960s to read both Sigmund Freud’s ‘dream book & joke book.’ Malamud’s characters from this period sometimes seem to have emerged straight out of jokes: the shadchan in ‘The Magic Barrel’ (1958) attempts to encourage the rabbi to overlook a candidate’s flaws, cavilling with logic while the divine hovers at the edge of the tale. In this chapter, I explore the influence that the psychoanalytic tradition had on postwar Jewish writers in the United States, specifically Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. These writers, I show, found in the legacies of psychoanalytic approaches to the joke the resources for an ambivalent comedy that handled the contradictions of Jewish life after the Shoah.

Download activity - last month

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item