The Lion and the Unicorn

What can be better than for a child to discover another culture through its folk humor? Accurately and artistically, the sense and soul of a people is made explicit through those stories it traditionally finds funny. While some ethnic humor may be limited in appeal, the rhetoric exclusive and the experiences restricted, the most characteristic folk humor, paradoxically enough, is universal in appeal. For any humor to be appreciated, the story that frames it must be good and spicy, soaked in a rich background and seasoned with fragrant words and flavorful characters. Often, folk humor is more distinctly appealing not only for providing novelty through the ethnic qualities it contains, but for impressing us and children with what is earthy, deep, part of some vital community of spirit since lost—the reality of human absurdity with the implicit tragedy that begins and ends our laughter.

Yiddish tales begin and never end. Yiddish humor is terribly repetitive; in fact, it can be terrible in its repetitiveness. One author even suggests that "Cain slew Abel because he kept pestering him with long-winded Jewish jokes."¹ A people confined to a ghetto, prohibited from actively entering into life, achieves its sense of life and assures its own identity through critical examination, speculation, talk, and more talk, especially humorous talk; tries the adversity of "the system" and taunts the absurdity of that self who would remain whole within that system. Yiddish folk humor, for all its irony, is not cruel. (The world is cruel enough, and cruelty is not the means to enlightenment.) While the Talmudic influence gives the humor an intellectual quality, it also gives [End Page 9] it an ethical basis; laughing with an individual rather than at him, will gently persuade him to improve.

In Yiddish humor, Rabbis are those sages who suggest to others their own silliness; in their wisdom, Rabbis can also play jokes. In Could Anything Be Worse? by Marilyn Hirsch, for one man, nothing seems as if it could be worse, until a Rabbi realizes matters differently. The story combines many qualities of Jewish humor—it is repetitive in structure, an "accumulative tale"; it is gently prodding through picture and print; and the laughter has a moral basis.

As the story opens, a splendid two-fold picture demonstrates a stage set for comedy, the interior apparent under a roof which is lifted above it. Upstage right is the frustrated father, helplessly clutching a yowling infant who reaches towards the mother, ineffectually trying to calm him. On the left, a self-absorbed older sister detaches herself from the whole confused scene, concerned only with tying her hair ribbon. The upper foreground is the predominant center of comic motion; it is the loft under the roof. Up the ladder to the loft, a dog pursues a cat; on a pole to this same loft, the little brother climbs towards the top only to be pushed down with a pillow by a larger, surly-faced sister. In the room below, the cluster of furniture, some framed ancestors blankly looking out of circular frames from the wall, a pot abjectly kindling behind the father's rocking chair, all testify that "nothing could be worse."

Hirsch has a marvelous sense for designing confusion in simple, unconfused forms—all coming together in a welter. The first stage set is used as the standard against which "worse" will be judged. The Rabbi's suggestions serve to increase the confusion, the first set reappearing five times, each time "worse" than the last. The accumulative disasters are, thus, visually demonstrated. The moral that derives—Be Grateful for What You Have, for There is A "Worse" in the World You Cannot Know—is resounding in the climactic scene. [End Page 10]

After the man, at the start, complains to the Rabbi about his troublesome family, the Rabbi advises the man to bring into his house his chickens, and on further complaints, his cow, then his poor relatives. Then each removal of what has been an added calamity, now removed in reverse order—relatives, then cows, finally chicks...