Jewish Humor Sigmund Freud Understood Term Paper

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"Inner-directed mockery, Jewish self-satire, and self-criticism are found in the Pentateuch itself, as when the Children of Israel look up at Moses just before the parting of the Red Sea and say, "Are there no graves in Egypt, that you have taken us to die in the desert?" (Ex. 14:11, cited by Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Wex).

Laughter becomes a healing salve, which is uniquely human. Freudian views of Jewish humor are among the richest and most accurate interpretations of the phenomenon of masochism because Freud was unafraid to explore the darkness of the human experience. Jewish humor is "dipped in tragedy," ("Laugh and the World Laughs With You" 2011). As Ben-Amos states, "The current conception of Jewish humor originated, as many modern ideas have, with Sigmund Freud," (112).

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The Freudian view of Jewish humor is absolutely applicable to Jewish humor in America. American Jewish humor begins with the premise that a mortal human being "has the moral and intellectual courage to recognize and then ridicule his own weaknesses," and therefore "sees no reason to spare the sensibilities of his adversaries for their own deficiencies," ("Laugh and the World Laughs With You"). Freud understood that when anger and aggression cannot be psychically metabolized, they must be transmuted or projected in some way. Neurosis is one of the potential outlets for suppressed emotion, and humor serves a similar function. Suppression, repression, projection, and sublimation are all Freudian concepts that can be used to describe what is uniquely Jewish humor.

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