Humour has a long tradition in Judaism dating back to the Torah, but Jewish humour generally refers to the more recent stream of verbal, self-deprecating and often anecdotal humour originating in Eastern Europe and which took root in the United States over the last hundred years.
Jewish humour is rooted in several traditions. The first is the intellectual and legal methods of the Talmud, which uses elaborate legal arguments and situations often seen as so absurd as to be humorous in order to tease out the meaning of religious law.
Hillel Halkin in his essay about Jewish humour traces some roots of the Jewish self-deprecating humour to the medieval influence of Arabic traditions on the Hebrew literature by quoting a witticism from Yehuda Alharizi's Tahkemoni.
A more recent one is an egalitarian tradition among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly, rather than attacked overtly-as Saul Bellow once put it, "oppressed people tend to be witty." Jesters known as badchens used to poke fun at prominent members of the community during weddings, creating a good-natured tradition of humour as a levelling device.
Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, a scholar of Jewish humour, argued: "You have a lot of shtoch, or jab, humour, which is usually meant to deflate pomposity or ego, and to deflate people who consider themselves high and mighty. But Jewish humour was also a device for self-criticism within the community, and I think that's where it really was the most powerful. The humourist, like the prophet, would basically take people to task for their failings. The humour of Eastern Europe especially was cantered on defending the poor against the exploitation of the upper classes or other authority figures, so rabbis were made fun of, authority figures were made fun of and rich people were made fun of. It really served as a social catharsis."