Oy vey!

Does everyone else have this childhood memory: sitting at the top of the stairs or right outside the living room door when your parents have guests over, listening in to the grown up conversation, riveted by the illicit nature of what you’re doing and compelled to continue due to the very silliness of the content of this exclusively ‘grown up’ gathering. It’s got to be a common experience as I’m sure it’s partly what bedtimes were invented for – when parents can become people and embrace the contradictory, ridiculous, cheeky and downright rude in themselves that a lot of the time they have to keep in check because of ‘the children’. This is precisely what More Old Jews Telling Jokes feels like, and it’s rather a lovely old-time experience.

With contributors ranging in age from their 60s to their 90s, delivering their shaggy dog stories apparently to their contemporaries off camera (listen to the laughter), you can hear the rich tradition of storytelling coming through with the pace. It’s not rushed, the punchlines are delivered right, and every teller thoroughly enjoys the story almost as much as their audience does. Whether this is an exclusively Jewish tradition, who can say, and quite why all of the Jewish storytellers are from New York is another mystery, but the themes are good with sex, religion and family running through a lot of them, and every one weighted down with a humorous pragmatism.

“These are still our parents’ friends, giggling together illicitly…”

Maybe it’s this stoicism that marks it out as Jewish humour, with icons like Woody Allen and Rabbi Jackie Mason using this very trait as the backbone to a lot of their material. With a rich history of persecution it wouldn’t be unrealistic to claim it as a prime element of Jewish storytelling. But to be honest, apart from the odd “schmuck” thrown in, these are still our parents’ friends giggling together illicitly all over again.

This is the second bulk of Old Jews Telling Jokes for the BBC, and disappointedly there are only two episodes in this lot. Still, if it’s anything like last time (and BBC4 scheduling in general) they will be repeated into infinity, much like many old family members’ stories. In fact, one of these tales from the first episode was told to me many times growing up regardless of occasion, location or time of day (again, just like the BBC4 scheduling) by an older member of my own clan, and it’s still nice to hear it again after all of these years.

I’m not quite sure what the BBC is trying to do with this programme. It has no introduction, no particular format except a group of people standing up one by one in a studio and speaking to the camera. Is it a sociological study? Is it a collection of shorts that’s simply been released as a visual EP? Whatever it is, it’s engaging and somehow comforting. Bed is just around the corner, and although sometimes these older folk are a little bit rude, they’re never crude, always using tempered language with just the right vocabulary. Well they should do, they’ve told the stories enough times.
More Old Jews Telling Jokes, BBC4, Wednesday 28 November 2012.