Old Jews Telling Jokes (8 page)
Read Old Jews Telling Jokes Online
Authors: Sam Hoffman
Checks the front door, the door is open, he walks in, and out of the rear of the store comes this elderly fellow wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl. Of course he’s open on a Sunday; he’s Jewish.
So the man says, “Look, I’ve got a terrible problem. I’m traveling through Europe. I have many meetings to make. I have many train connections to make. I’m going to stop in Geneva next and then Paris. And my watch has stopped on me, and I really can’t function without the use of my watch. Can you please fix it?”
The man says, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t know a thing about watches. I’m a mohel. I perform ritual circumcisions.”
And the man says, “Wait a minute, though. Your window is full of watches and clocks.”
The man says, “Well, if you were in my profession, what would you put in the window?”
A Note About “Clock Shop”
I’ve heard this joke a number of times and, although the details change, one thing is consistent. The mohel or mohels always keep clocks in their window.
Why?
My first instinct was the similarity between the word
clocks
and the actual subject of a circumcision.
Here is Harry Zapolsky’s theory:
I don’t really think there is a connection. The businessman needs to have some item repaired to set up the joke—and what is more obvious than a watch—and that, of course, leads naturally to a shop with watches and clocks in the window.
This joke was first told to me by the wife of one of my grad school professors, at a student party sometime in the late fifties. At the time, it was considered to be highly risqué!
O tempore, O mores
. (Translation: “The times, they are a-changing.”)
Zapolsky can think what he wants, but I’m sticking with my theory.
Lauren Johnson
Converting the Bear
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi want to see who’s best at his job. So they each go into the woods, find a bear, and attempt to convert it. Later they get together.
The priest begins: “When I found the bear, I read to him from the catechism and sprinkled him with holy water. Next week is his First Communion.”
“I found a bear by the stream,” says the minister, “and preached God’s holy word. The bear was so mesmerized that he let me baptize him.”
They both look down at the rabbi, who is lying on a gurney in a body cast.
“Looking back,” he says, “maybe I shouldn’t have started with the circumcision.”
Annie Korzen is a writer and actress in Los Angeles. She has performed her solo show,
Yenta Unplugged
, on three continents.
“Why are Jewish men circumcised?”
“Because no Jewish woman will touch anything that’s not at least twenty percent off.”
Mike Schwartz
(as told to him by his friend Haig Shekerjian)
The Ribbon Salesman
There was an old ribbon salesman named Goldberg who would regularly visit a buyer he found to be quite coarse and even anti-Semitic. For twenty years Goldberg would knock on the door of the buyer, and for twenty years he would leave, never making a sale.
One day, even before Goldberg could open his samples case, the buyer says, “Goldberg, tell ya what I’m going to do. I’ll buy enough ribbon to reach from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis.”
Goldberg says, “Thank you very much,” and leaves the office.
The next day Goldberg gets a frantic call from the buyer. “Goldberg, there are tractor-trailer loads of ribbon coming into my warehouse. What’s going on?”
“You see,” says Goldberg, “my nose is here, and the tip of my penis is in Poland!”
FoodWhat’s in Our Mouths While We’re Talking
THIS PAST YOM KIPPUR MY DAD WAS FASTING AND SO WAS I. OUR
thoughts inevitably turned to food. From where we were sitting, we could see a poster announcing the new Jewish calendar year of 5770.
My father turned to me and said, “It’s amazing, the Jews have been around for five thousand, seven hundred and seventy years.”
I nodded, weak from hunger.
He continued, “You know the Chinese just celebrated their year four thousand, seven hundred and seven?”
I smiled. Even in my debilitated state, I knew where he was going.
“That means the Jews had to go the first thousand years without Chinese food.”
Of course, despite fondness for a Sunday night lo mein, the Jews have a rich culinary culture of their own. Granted, we’re not the Italians, but we’ve got a few winners.
I recently took an informal poll, asking friends to name the quintessential Jewish food.
The responses:
- “Pastrami on rye.”
- “Whitefish.”
- “Potato pancakes … it was the only thing my Jewish mother-in-law would bring to my house … my kids ate them like cookies! And that’s coming from a Catholic girl!”
- “Chocolate coins—the ones that come in the yellow net bag on Hanukkah.”
- “Chopped liver—’cause we kvetch about how bad it is for you and then ask for more crackers.”
- “Borscht and Mandel bread.”
- “Chulent … among the Hasidic set.”
- “Well, I’m not Jewish but I love apricot Hamentashen cookies.”
- “Challah.”
- “Noodle kugel.”
- “Kreplach [dumplings].”
- “My father still eats gefilte fish every morning. Ick.”
- “Nova on a bagel. Also lox.”
- “Brisket—I think we all use the same recipe passed down from our great-great-grandmothers. Of course the sauce is actually from the back of a Heinz bottle but no Jewish grandmother in her right mind would admit that.”
Personally, I vote for chicken soup with knaidelach, or as they are more commonly known, matzo balls. I always loved them as a child, despite the fact that some cruel cousin showed me a cartoon depicting the poor animal known as the “matzo”—he looked a little like a sad moose—who had to sacrifice his very own testicles for this ethnic soup.
In actuality, the balls, originally a Passover dish, are made of matzo meal (ground up matzo), eggs, oil, and water (or seltzer). They grow fluffy and round in a pot of boiling water and become a dense, delicious, sphere of, well, not-bread. They bob in the chicken soup, mingling with the little puddles of fat, the mushy carrots, and the limp stalks of dill—absorbing it all gently into their not-breadness.
Why do I believe the matzo ball is the quintessence of Jewish food?
Jews take great pride in divining rules from the scripture and then creating clever and ingenious ways to circumvent these rules. The matzo ball symbolizes that quality in the form of a meal. On Passover it is forbidden to eat bread or anything with flour. Except
matzo. You can eat matzo because it hasn’t risen and it’s been rabbinically supervised. So we grind up the matzo until it’s not-flour. Then we combine it with eggs and oil and make this delicious not-bread. Then we complete it by soaking it in the most nutritious broth on earth—the broth that has literally become cultural shorthand for nurturing.
It’s clever, it’s complicated, it’s a little bit sneaky, and it’s damn good for you.
Fred Rubin says that words with a hard
c
or
k
sound are inherently funny.
Buick
is one of his favorites, especially as used in a particular scene in
Annie Hall
. He once wrote that “it’ll be a sad day for comedy writers when General Motors goes under.”
Two old Jewish friends meet on the street. Max and Abe. Abe’s got a grin on his face.
Max says, “What’re you so happy about?”
He says, “I’ll tell you what I’m so happy about. Down the block, I found a brothel, and—in this brothel, if you go in there—you pay fifty dollars, you ask for Gina, a gorgeous girl comes out. Huge breasts! She takes your penis, and she puts chocolate ice cream, nuts, syrup, whipped cream … and then she eats the whole thing off. It’s fantastic!”
So his friend says, “Oh, I think I’ll try that.”
A couple of days later they meet on the street, and his friend is pissed as hell.
Abe says, “What’s wrong with you?”
Max says, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I went to that brothel that you recommended.”
He says, “Yeah, so?”
Max says, “I asked for Gina, I paid my fifty dollars, beautiful girl with big breasts …”
He says, “Yeah, so?”
Max says, “She takes my penis, she puts on cream cheese, a bagel, lox, onion, tomato …”
He says, “Yeah, so?”
Max says, “It looked so good, I ate it myself!”
Ricky Cohen is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. At Princeton he played on the golf team. As a judge he sat on the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court. He is also an avid sailor.
Schwartz had a chicken farm and he had a longtime customer, Gottesman’s Kosher Butchers. Gottesman had been a customer for years and they always did good business together but Schwartz noticed Gottesman was getting slow on his payments. When it got up to about eighty thousand dollars, Schwartz was upset about it and he spoke to Gottesman and said, “You gotta get me some money.”
Gottesman promised him a ten-thousand-dollar check by the end of the month. The check never showed up. He promised him again; the check never showed up. So Schwartz went to his lawyers, McCarter & English, and told them to sue. They start suing. Gottesman files an answer. He says, “The chickens were no good, he didn’t give me as many chickens as he was charging me for, the chickens wouldn’t sell because they were so out of date, and anyway I don’t know anybody named Schwartz, and I paid him.”
Schwartz is angered by this reply and tells his lawyers, “We’ll get him.”
His lawyer says to him, “You know, Mr. Schwartz, we got a problem. You got a nice family business, but you got no records. You got no invoices, you got no sales records, you got no shipping records. You got nothing. We’re gonna go to court and it’s gonna be your word against Gottesman’s.”
“I don’t care. The son of a gun is not playing fair with me. I’ll take care of it. I’ll send a chicken.”