“Gor zeyer mis, meyn ikh zis”

I was reading this article about the origin of Jewish comedy in the Union of Reform Judaism magazine today, in which Dr. Mel Gordon of UCLA argues that Jewish comedy was born in 1661 when the leading rabbis of Ukraine and Poland met in Vilna to reform Jewish communities in response to Cossack massacres. They decided to outlaw all entertainer professions except for the badkhn, or lewd public jokster. Badkhonim made their careers out of using scatological humor and poking harsh fun at religious professionals (rabbis and cantors) and wealthy congregants.

Badkhonim in Eastern European Jewish towns and shtetls were similar to West African griots in their importance to preserving the oral history of the community and their roles as public entertainers. According to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, the tradition of joke telling centered around wedding celebrations as a mitzvah to entertain the bride and groom:

"Originally, this tradition was linked to fulfillment of the commandment to delight the bride and groom and dance with them on their wedding day. Badkhonim were also called marshelikes, leytsim, letsonim, narn, lustik-makhers, katoves-traybers, and freylekhe yidn, all terms evoking laughter, jokes, and comic songs. Some of the performers were simply jesters in the spirit of Jewish popular culture, appreciated for their humor, their gift for joke telling, and their clowning or comic improvisation. Others were poets or musicians, whose main function was to recite epithalamia (gramen zogn; lit., “saying rhymes”)—that is, poems in honor of the bride and groom. The badkhn was therefore a repository of Jewish religious culture and oral tradition, invested with the role of transmitting songs and music, moral messages, and wise counsel along with the fundamentals of Judaism."

Upon immigration to America in the early 1900s, badkhonim became some of the earliest vaudeville performers. To illustrate what Gordon describes of the Jewish American vaudeville tradition, here's a video of the very entertaining Willie Howard from 1941: