THE VINDICTIVE NATURE OF JEWISH WRY HUMOR IN PHILIP ROTH’S EARLY WORKS GOODBYE, COLUMBUS AND PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT

Sigmund Freud once said that he never knew any other instances of people mocking themselves as do Jewish people. Humor related to Jewish communities throughout history and among diverse peoples is characterized by a certain feature, which facilitated the breaking of social barriers or erecting them in order to catapult others. In most cases, mocking the self and its flaws in dealing with non-Jews is one of the most distinguishing features of Jewish humor. Studying this kind of humor more closely, one realizes a sly vindictive nature lurking behind a façade of self-laceration mockery while the other is always the intended target. The mechanism of Jewish wry humor depends on counter attacking the aggressor by mocking the self as a measure of defense and retaliation. Philip Roth’s early works, commonly semi-autobiographical recreations of his experiences as an adolescent, deal with the dilemma of central Jewish male protagonists who are repeatedly caught in a tragic-comic limbo between the demands of their social and religious affiliations and their unquenched desires for self-fulfillment and gratification. The bitter sweet blend of mirth and agony is the main feature of Jewish wry humor as the agony is of a masochist nature and the mirth is of a scandalizing purpose. The aim of these commonly wry self-mocking narrative discourses is the vindication of the self against religious, familial, or social oppressive powers. This papers aims at studying the mechanism of Jewish wry humor in the wryly humorous narrative discourses of Philip Roth’s early works.