Of all the figures in Bereisheet, the least likely to be thought of as funny is Yitzchok. The pillar of Avoda, the son who stared at his father’s knife, the husband in a couple coping with infertility. This is not what one would associate with stand-up.
Yet everything about him announces “laughter.” His name means laughter. Both his father and mother laughed at the announcement that he was coming -- for different reasons, but they both laughed. His birth also inspired the local scoffers to mock it. He can’t be from Avraham, they said, but rather from Avimelech. Of course, that in turn makes no sense. Avraham had had a child 13 years before. Nobody needed Avimelech. But there’s no point in arguing with mockery. “It’s just a joke,” they’ll say. “Can’t you take a joke?”
What is laughter? It’s not a good sign if you have to analyze a joke, but most of us realize that laughter arises from the breaking of a pattern. When the high and haughty fall, it’s funny. When the low and helpless rise, it also brings inordinate joy.
In fact, it is this very quality that Chazal encourage when they tell us to begin a lesson with a joke. Research shows that puzzles are solved more easily by those who begin the exercise with a joke. The key to solving a puzzle is to break out of fixed ideas or patterns of thought. If one experiences laughter first, it opens up the possibilities for new thinking beyond old patterns.
That is the basic pattern of humor, but there are very different types of humor. There is laughter that springs from a noble moment, that breaks upward. This is laughter comes from a situation where a negative fact pattern is broken with sudden good news. This lifts everyone up. And then there is laughter that is aimed at bringing people down, that debases the noble or that ridicules the vulnerable or the helpless. The announcement that Avraham and Sara will conceive a child is the first type. The idea that Avraham and Sara conceived only with an intruder is the second type.
The present controversies about what kinds of jokes one can make, and what kinds of groups can be laughed at, does not produce a lot of insight. When such analysis gets supercharged on social media and then gets tethered to the unforgiving cancel culture, any hope at insight is extinguished. The cancel button is especially ill-advised when it comes to humor. I feel sorry for people who try to picket comedians. A good comic, with an eye for the truth, is far more powerful than a picket line.
But the controversies do highlight these very crucial questions about laughter that ennobles versus laughter that debases. Everyone knows that the power of humor is a serious matter. Chazal pointed out that no amount of serious exhortation stands up to one line of mockery. Those who make cutting humor are often acutely aware of their power, which is why they have to be careful. They should use it without fear or favor. When Rashi presents the scoffing of those around Avraham and Sara, he calls them Leitzanei HaDor, the scoffers of the generation. They are not the “scoffers of the world” but of the generation. Every generation has its own cadre of scoffers. One of the qualities of their scorn is that it is limited in time and place. This is one of the reasons why one knows that it is demeaning humor.
The laughter of Yitzchok’s name, on the other hand, is about the future. It is a promise; it's targeted for a time beyond the present. It foretells a triumph over -- a break with -- this world’s tawdry patterns. His birth came after hope was lost, and his living on after the Akeida is a life lived permanently after death. That is the ultimate uplifting story. And it gives hope in the face of all of the scoffing we have to endure.
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