Can Ari Shaffir's jokes about the Holocaust ever be funny?

All the jokes that make people laugh are, by definition, funny. But humour can come at an unacceptable cost.

Comedian Ari Shaffir was raised an Orthodox Jew, and his father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors. Source: FilmMagic/ Getty Images

A couple of years back I got into a heated debate with a male comedian at a writer’s festival. The comedian – a young man who sat on stage with his hands behind his head looking for all the world like this entire experience was beneath him – was insisting that no topic is off limits. Jokes about death can be funny, he said. Jokes about dead children can be funny. Even jokes about the Holocaust can be funny if done well enough.

I disagreed. I felt that some topics should be off limits, that some subjects were simply too awful to laugh about.

I thought about this debate on Sunday night, as I listened to New York comedian Ari Shaffir’s envelope-pushing act. Shaffir was raised an Orthodox Jew, and his father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors. His set included jokes about dead children, the Holocaust, and Jewish culture and practices.

As a Jewish person, I found much of Shaffir’s humour to be hilariously funny. I’m familiar with the rituals he mocked, and I have considered their oddities many times myself. But seeing other, non-Jewish people laugh at my culture left me feeling deeply conflicted. Is it really a good idea to add fuel to the anti-Semitism fire?

The Holocaust joke left me even more conflicted, particularly considering my companion was the child of Holocaust survivors. The joke made most of the audience laugh, and I felt nervous laughter rising myself. The comedian at the writer’s festival had insisted that any joke which elicits laughter is funny, so, by definition, Shaffir’s Holocaust joke was a success.

Half the laughter in the Holocaust joke came from the audience’s discomfort

But is eliciting a laugh justification for a really offensive joke? Is anything okay, as long as it’s funny?

Humour is an artform, but it is also a science. Certain techniques will make people laugh, for example, the juxtaposing of the expected (sad Holocaust story) with the unexpected (funny twist). I use this technique frequently myself and elicit much laughter. Sometimes I even do it on purpose. Some comedians employ the juxtaposition of the expected and unexpected whilst riffing on perfectly vanilla topics  (think Seinfeld discussing watermelon seeds, or Kitty Flanagan joking about coffee), while others deal with more edgy subjects (say, Chelsea Handler and her set on masturbation).

And then there is Ari Shaffir with his jokes about school shootings, genocide and the Jews.

All the jokes that make people laugh are, by definition, funny. And one could argue that making people laugh at seriously awful topics is more difficult and clever than making people laugh at watermelon seeds.

But I disagree. Surprise and shock is a key element of humour, and surprise and shock is found in greater abundance in jokes about ‘dark’ topics than in watermelons and coffee. Half the laughter in the Holocaust joke came from the audience’s discomfort. You don’t get that discomfort in food humour.

Laughing at religion can be terribly funny, but it can have profound consequences

Still, even if you find Holocaust humour clever, as well as funny, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s justified. Humour can come at an unacceptable cost. Practical jokes, for example, can be hilarious for the onlookers, but deeply humiliating for the unwitting participants. Personal anecdotes can be fantastically amusing (I have one about an ex-lover’s thigh that will have you in stitches) but they can profoundly wound the subjects, and so we leave them alone.

Laughing at religion can be terribly funny, but it can have profound consequences.

It is easy to laugh at religion. All religions involve invisible gods and peculiar rituals. Religion only makes sense to its adherents. It makes sense to Jews to eat unleavened bread on Passover. It makes sense to Muslims to face Mecca. It makes sense to Catholics to eat wafers representing flesh. To those not of the faiths, the practices seem bizarre.

But to laugh at those practices is fraught with peril. Laughing at a practice renders the practice ridiculous. Once a practice is made ridiculous, the proponents of that practice are made ridiculous. When people are rendered ridiculous, they are left vulnerable to persecution and contempt.

And we all know what happens next.

Shaffir is Jewish, and that gives him the right to poke fun of his own religion. But his audience, largely, are not Jewish, and do not have that right, and yet he is transferring the right to them with his jokes. Shaffir makes his audience laugh, and, in that respect, he is a rousing success. But there are many ways to make people laugh that do not mine the horrors of genocide, or minimise school shootings, or normalise the mockery of minorities.

And whilst I think Shaffir is hilarious, and I thoroughly enjoyed his show, I can’t help wishing he would find another way.