Why Are Jews so Funny?

Does God have a sense of humor?  Do jesters go to heaven?  Why are Jews so funny?  Who better to answer these questions than a statistician?!  On this episode, we warmly welcome Prof. Linda Weiser Friedman, a professor of statistics and computer information at the City University of New York, who co-authored God Laughed: Sources of Jewish Humor with her husband Hershey Friedman, a finance professor at CUNY.  While one might not normally associate business or statistics professors with laughter, this dynamic duo discuss their decades-long labor of love in compiling a large mound of Jewish jokes and other humorous stories and then using them to explore what it means to be Jewish, religious, and (ultimately) human.  (Bonus alliteration in today’s description comes free of charge.)

We start off with a bit of computer humor (?!) as a means of figuring out what humor really is and who it may appeal to at times.  Tony reveals a little-known secret of his past during this interchange.  Linda discusses the difficulty in getting publishers to take an academic book on humor seriously and this leads to all sorts of ruminations about the role of popular scholarship.  We then plunge headlong into an examination of Jewish humor with a tale of a Jewish grandmother on a beach and her relationship with God.  Indeed, prepare to be delighted throughout the conversation with some of Linda’s favorite pieces of comedy.