The Jewish penchant for humor, suggests Meir Soloveichik, can be traced back to the Bible itself—specifically, the passage from Genesis read on Rosh Hashanah, which describes the birth of Abraham’s son Isaac. Since Abraham laughs when God tells him the improbable news that he and his ninety-year-old wife will have a son, God instructs him to name the child “Isaac,” which derives from the Hebrew word for “laugh.” Seeing this as evidence for Immanuel Kant’s theory that “the essence of humor lies in incongruity”—that is, in the unexpected—Soloveichik proposes a theological interpretation of Jews’ love of the comic:
The late sociologist Peter Berger wrote that if Jews loved jokes, it was because “the comic experience provides a distinctive diagnosis of the world. It sees through the façades of the social order, and discloses other realities lurking behind the superficial ones.”
In other words, Jews loved jokes because they expressed the idea that there is more to life than meets the eye, that a pattern is not eternally set in stone, that our expectations can be uprooted—that . . . there is a completely different way of seeing [a given] situation.
Superficially, the Jews appeared to have been rejected by God, doomed forever to wander the earth, if not worse. To many it must have seemed that they lived lives devoid of any reason for joy, for celebration, for laughter. But to think this is to miss an essential part of the picture, to ignore an Almighty who maintained a close connection to His people, to miss out on a life of Torah that even in the [bitterness of exile] could bring joy, and to fail to understand what every Jew in prayer once confidently predicted: that one day the pattern would shift; that one day an incongruity would occur, a surprise would suddenly take place; one day the expectations of anti-Semites would be shattered, and the prediction in Psalm 126 of a return to Zion would be vindicated: “When the Lord returned the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter. . . . ”
Jewish laughter is bound up with Jewish faith, and Abraham’s child is named for laughter because his birth inverted expectations, vindicated Abraham’s faith, and laid the foundations of a people who would confound those expectations again and again, thereby vindicating this faith throughout the generations. Which is why, for centuries, on the first day of the Days of Awe, Abraham’s children have gathered in synagogues all around the world, remembered the birth of Isaac, and beseeched Almighty God to grant them a year of life, love—and laughter.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/may-inscribed-good-laugh/