Joseph Epstein, reviewing the new book about Sid Caesar in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal, gave the best explanation I have ever read for why so many great comedians are Jewish. It starts, he writes, “with finding absurdity in the ordinary, humor in the serious. How could it be otherwise in a people said to be chosen by God yet throughout history persecuted more than any other? … Life itself, they sense, is a bit of a joke – one too often played on them. God himself, some Jews believe, loves a joke. This is reinforced by Jewish habits of criticism, irony, skepticism.”
