Unfunny foundation

As a gentile who found the Hitler joke funny enough to repeat it to my wife (I rarely tell jokes nowadays), I disagree with Professor Kintrea’s assertion that “the key to the art of telling a good one is careful establishment of context” while agreeing with his final sentence, to the effect that he “still do[es]n’t “understand Jewish humour”. Perhaps he might consider the spirit of another Jewish joke, as a test of his self-evaluation: Abie and Issy are being shunted towards a pit in Minsk, in late 1941, into which they were to jump, and lie face down before being shot. Issy is shaking and turns to a nearby SS soldier: “I’m frightened; I want to go home…” at which Abie hisses: “Oi, don’t make trouble!” Here, I’ve placed a well-known Jewish joke in the historical context of Himmler’s visit to an Einsatzgruppen (Special Action) execution near Minsk in late 1941, as related by SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff: “An open grave had been dug and they had to jump into this and lie face downwards. And sometimes when one or two rows had already been shot, they had to lie on top of the people who had already been shot and then they were shot from the edge of the grave. And Himmler had never seen dead people before and in his curiosity he stood right up at the edge of this open grave – a sort of triangular hole – and was looking in. While he was looking in, Himmler had the deserved bad luck that from one or other of the people who had been shot in the head he got a splash of brains on his coat, and I think it also splashed into his face and he went very green and pale – he wasn’t actually sick, but he was heaving and turned round and swayed and then I had to jump forward and hold him steady and then I led him away from the grave.” ( http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/himmlerinminsk.html ) A more common version of this joke is along the following lines: Samuel and Bennie are brought before a firing squad. They are put up against a wall. “Any last requests?” the captain asks. Samuel says, “I would like please a blindfold.” Bennie says to him, “Sam, please... don’t make trouble!” I think this version gets rapidly to the point: obviously the two characters are already facing imminent death and (almost) nothing can make that worse, so the joke highlights the utter futility of Schwartz’s final plea to Sam. (Perhaps it also taps into black humour as a way of coping with the often tragic history of Jewish populations.) The whole point of a joke is the effect of the punchline, which to recall Koestler’s “The Act of Creation”, (1964) relies on “bisociation”: “bisociation” – a blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated matrices of thought into a new matrix of meaning by way of a process involving comparison, abstraction and categorisation, analogies and metaphors. [Koestler] regards many different mental phenomena based on comparison (such as analogies, metaphors, parables, allegories, jokes, identification, role-playing, acting, personification, anthropomorphism etc.), as special cases of "bisociation". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation ) * To blur this by adding context distracts, I suggest, from the “bisociation” that triggers the “Aha!” moment, when the joke is experienced. * It's also worth recalling that Koestler himself spent a night under threat of execution, during the Spanish civil war.