Funny 83: Jewish Mother Jokes
My 2 favourites (even though I suspect the genre is deeply misogynistic and possibly):
The one where a woman's son rings her and asks how she is, she says, "Not good, I haven't been to the toilet for 5 days." The son says, "Oh my god why?" and the mother says, "Because I didn't want to be on the toilet when you called."
Reasons why it's funny:
It's kind of an epic heigh of passive aggression. As a passive aggressive person myself, I enjoy the lengths to which she has gone (not going to the toilet for 5 days) in order to emphasise the fact that her son ought to be calling more than every 5 days.
5 days is kind of funny, because it's kind of not really that long.
It kind of takes you a second to get that he hasn't called her for 5 days and that's the problem. Before you get it, you're like, "Wait, what?" and then you get it and you're all like, "Oh." I guess there's something funny satisfying about that.
The one where the woman stands up in a plane and shouts, "Is there a doctor on board?" and a guy comes over and says, "I'm a doctor, what's wrong?" and she says, "Are you married? I have a daughter, she's very pretty, long dark hair, nice smile. Do you want to meet her on Tuesday?"
Reasons why it's funny:
Posing matchmaking as an emergency scenario is funny. It's a lot funnier than a Jewish mother just telling her daughter, "Please marry a doctor." Obviously everyone on the plane will think it's a medical crisis. It's a funny way of emphasising the fact that this mother does consider her daughter's not being married to a doctor currently an emergency.
The way she doesn't explain herself at all, she just moves straight onto selling her daughter, "She's very pretty," as if the doctor is just going to be like, "Okay, this is a normal way to date people, responding to their mother's fake medical emergency on a plane."
The idea that she's so anxious to have her daughter marry a doctor that she doesn't care that this one might live thousands of miles away - it kind of implies that she does this everywhere she goes in order to increase the chances of getting that doctor son in law.
This one is especially funny for me because I have a friend whose mother converted to Judaism and seemed to take aspects of cultural Judaism she had picked up from films and comedy shows particularly seriously. She instructed my friend to spend her lunch breaks outside the medical building on her university campus, in the hopes that she would pick up a Jewish boyfriend. The two jokes are not overly related, but when I hear the aeroplane one, I remember my friend's mother and do a little mini laugh.