Existential Exchanges 1: Comedy

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/18

Sapira Cahana is a New York-based mental health counsellor (MHC-LP) and interfaith chaplain-in-training specializing in existential and relational therapy. In a wide-ranging dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Sapira Cahana explore the nature of humour as both a physiological response and a vehicle for existential insight. Drawing from Jewish tradition, existentialist thought, and cultural history, they examine how humour reflects marginality, trauma, resilience, and spiritual truth. Cahana highlights the roots of laughter in scripture, such as Sarah naming Isaac, and reflects on misinterpretations, including Michelangelo’s depiction of Moses. Jewish humour is shown as a tool for coping, observing, and subverting, with figures like Seinfeld and Moshe Kasher embodying these traditions. Humour, ultimately, becomes a profound lens for navigating suffering, absurdity, and meaning.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, humour means many things. At its core, humour is an involuntary physiological reaction—a laugh, a chuckle, whatever you want to call it.

Sapira Cahana: It feels good. It’s rewarding to laugh. A comedian friend of mine—he used to work with Jimmy Kimmel for about twelve years—is now in his mid-sixties. His daughter recently got married in London. So, he’s entering the next phase of his life. He’s able to reflect on writing tens of thousands of jokes for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and earlier, for The Man Show, where Kimmel co-hosted with Adam Carolla. Humour has been a deep part of his professional identity. From his expert perspective, he argues that laughter—or humour—is a form of “information on the cheap.” In other words, it delivers insight or surprise quickly and accessibly.

Jacobsen: Is there a psychological equivalent to this from an existentialist point of view?

Cahana: Much of humour is about achieving catharsis—whatever form that catharsis takes. Identifying that catharsis is where existential thought enters. Each existentialist—whether Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, or Samuel Beckett—approaches this differently. And each position holds its philosophical legitimacy. For Kierkegaard, for instance, laughter may be tied to spiritual awakening—part of the leap of faith. Laughter, then, is not trivial. It opens a path to the spiritual realm. That’s compelling because it does not seem like “information on the cheap.” It feels more like “information on the lofty.” Humour is often connected to the absurd—the absurdity of life itself. The joke is simply that we are alive in this confusing, sometimes senseless, world.

Jacobsen: Now, what about humour in the Jewish tradition? People who have experienced trauma often develop humour as a coping mechanism—if they’re fortunate enough to find that outlet. Are there traditional Jewish perspectives, whether Orthodox, Conservative or otherwise, that recognize humour as a way of reconciling belief with the realities of the world?

Cahana: Well, Judaism doesn’t divide neatly along denominational lines when it comes to humour. As we’ve noted before, it’s more regional or cultural than theological. Diaspora experiences profoundly shape Jewish humour. Globally, Jews have often lived as peripheral or marginalized figures. However, this marginality has frequently served as a vantage point—a lens through which to examine broader societies. Jews often exist both inside and outside of dominant cultures, and that dual position fosters contrast, irony, and humour. For example, some of the most well-known Jewish humour revolves around the contrast between Jewish and Christian holidays—Christmas and Hanukkah, in particular. These jokes often reflect broader themes of assimilation, minority experience, and religious difference, especially in North America and Europe.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to the West. In India, for example, the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jewish communities were active participants in the arts. Some of the earliest and most famous female Bollywood actresses, such as Sulochana (born Ruby Myers) and Pramila (born Esther Victoria Abraham), were Indian Jews. Because they were not bound by Hindu caste restrictions or certain gender norms, they had more social mobility and freedom in early Indian cinema. These women broke gender barriers and were among the first to gain widespread recognition as film stars.

One of them was named Sulochana. Then, that opened the floodgates for different kinds of play. So, the Jewish positioning—the “wandering Jew,” so to speak—the Jewish role in society often demands play, is part of play, and maybe even is a strategy. It’s hard to pin down whether it’s a result of that position or whether that position emerged because of play. It’s a chicken-or-egg situation. What’s the origin point?

Jacobsen: What about the place of contemporary comedians? Your Phyllis Diller, your Jerry Seinfeld, your Larry Davids—how do they fit into this?

Cahana: Those are more established names from the past, but there are up-and-coming comedians as well who speak to a similar trend—commentary on the banal aspects of life, but slightly tilted. And that’s where the humour is. It’s that slight exaggeration. The point of origin, arguably, is Kafka. Right? Maybe not the first, but it is indeed formative. The dark comedy, the absurd, the angst of being alive, the daily humdrum—that’s what we’re going to talk about later.

You can frame it as a wretched form of life weighed down by meaninglessness. Or you can take an outsider’s lens—which is a strength of the Jewish perspective—and see how hilarious, how absurd, what horror, what humour! Seinfeld, Larry David, Sarah Silverman—so many Jewish comedians feel that humour is part of our tradition. To sit around, talk, and laugh. Yes. These are almost philosophical commentaries, too.

And I’m building on your point about marginality. That aspect of being socially or culturally on the margins becomes a natural breeding ground for observation and commentary. There’s your seed point. From that space, you can either bring out the positive from the vast neutral field of life—or you can lean into the pain.

So much of Jewish humour is gallows humour or dry and deadpan. It balances levity and gravity—treating heavy things lightly and light things with intense seriousness. That’s the genius of Seinfeld or Larry David: the heroism and the harrowing aspects of daily absurdity. You’re frustrated at the ice cream line, Larry David—not at systemic injustice or existential dread. The world induces anxiety, yes, but the comedy focuses on the immediate, the now, and the mundane.

Jacobsen: That’s what you were saying earlier. It’s not about the grand challenge of life. It’s not about the weight of success or injustice—it’s about the now. What about scripture? In the pastures of the Bible or the Torah, are there examples—not necessarily framed as jokes—but that could be seen as existentially humorous?

Cahana: Yes. This is a classic—and it’s how many modern New York or Northeastern Jews develop their sensibility and sense of identity. In the Hebrew Bible, in the Torah, and the Tanakh, Moses leads the Israelites into the desert. And the Israelites are so ungrateful—they say, “Bring us back to Egypt!”

The way many contemporary Jews read that is, “See? We’ve always been like this.” It’s a funny kind of lineage—a genealogical connection to our ancestors that feels very personal. It humanizes them in a way that other wisdom traditions—or even other parts of the Hebrew Bible—don’t always do.

It’s a collective story, which reflects how Jewish culture is structured—pretty collectivist. The Israelites complain, “Take us back to Egypt. We had such good food—melons, leeks, cucumbers.” It’s all listed. They’re nostalgic for zucchinis and melons. The food! Oh, it was so amazing—never mind that it was under Pharaoh, under enslavement.

Jacobsen: That irony is so rich. People come alive at that moment, narratively. And haven’t people done geographic studies of the trip—from where they were to where they were trying to go? It’s a very short journey, geographically. They were wandering for forty years, but the distance wasn’t far. 

Cahana: Mount Sinai is widely believed to be near the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula. Saint Catherine’s Monastery, for instance, is right there. If that’s where Mount Sinai was, then yes—it’s not far. But that’s another whole discussion.

The Garden of Eden, too—that story could be read as tragic, about the loss of innocence and exile from paradise. Andthere are plenty of interpretations that go that route. However, the Garden of Eden is also a source of tremendous humour in Jewish storytelling.

What was the Garden of Eden? What happened with Adam and Eve? It’s so full of symbolic play. And knowing Hebrew makes it even more fun—because translation itself becomes funny. In the Hebrew Bible, Adam isn’t a name; it means “earthling.” And Eve, Chava, means “mother of all living” or “life-giver.” It’s entirely metaphorical in Hebrew.

However, mistranslations have led to numerous cultural developments. Hebrew-speaking Jews are very aware of this. Like, “Yes, I know that’s how it’s interpreted in English, but in the original Hebrew, it might mean something completely different.”

That’s why Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses with horns is so absurd. It comes from a mistranslation. The Hebrew word Keren can mean “horn,” but it also means “ray” or “radiance.” The verse described Moses’s face as emitting rays of light, not sprouting horns. But Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translated it as “horns,” and that’s how it ended up in art history. And youtook it as “horns.” Then there’s this whole stereotype—”Jews have horns.” So we turn that on its head. We already know it’s absurd, so we joke about it. There’s humour in that inversion.

But the misinterpretation itself—its absurdity—and the act of holding your truth despite that—that’s a core source of Jewish humour. And that connects back to the Hebrew language and translations of Torah. The Abrahamic faiths are all grounded in Judaism. Roughly half the world’s population today identifies as Christian or Muslim—or more than half if you include global religious demographics. So, Judaism could be seen as the parent tradition of much of the spiritual world.

Jacobsen: How often do you notice other asynchronies—misalignments—between how people interpret things today, even at the level of seminary or theological study, compared to the historical evolution of those same ideas within Judaism?

Cahana: It’s not really for me to judge. I’m not in a position to dismiss half the world’s population and say, “They don’tget it.” That wouldn’t be right. I can only speak to my tradition. I hold that tradition as sacred. I come from a lineage grounded in ancestry—that’s my foundational way of being.

And when people choose to become Jewish, they’re joining that ancestral lineage. They’re opting into a worldview that places all of us at Sinai, spiritually speaking. That creates space for imagination because religious cultures and wisdom traditions are all about approaching truth—however elusive. Humour, to return to an earlier point, is one of those imaginative tools. It adds suppleness to the human experience. You shift the kaleidoscope by one dial, and suddenly, the entire picture changes. Humour lets us combine disparate ideas in surprising ways—and that’s what generates new, rich meaning.

Judaism, with its rich history, is also a tradition of profound interpretation. Sometimes, it’s not clear—was this written in the Torah? Or is this an interpretation from eleventh-century France? Or another context entirely? How does that interpretation map to today?

And who was the ancestor offering that interpretation? There are hundreds of thousands of commentaries. Each framing is slightly different. My religious education has helped keep my mind flexible—able to take various vantage points—and that’s precisely the space where humour lives.

Jacobsen: What about Job? In the Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition—there’s Job. And in Hindu culture, there are parallel figures. But back to the Hebrew Bible: what about the story of Job?

Cahana: Job is the comedy of all comedies. It’s a sad story—but it’s a tragicomedy. It’s bargaining with God—bargaining with the distance between the divine and the lowly person going through immense suffering. In Jewish culture, Job is referenced, yes, but it is not a central text in the same way it is in Christianity. It’s not studied as extensively. In Christian theology, Job often becomes a foreshadowing or prefiguration of Jesus, which makes sense within that interpretive framework.

One of my favourite thinkers to invoke about Job is Hélène Cixous, a French feminist philosopher. She talks about comedy as an act of rebellion. And while Job does not laugh, there’s something so deeply absurd about his continuous misfortune that you can imagine laughter emerging—not necessarily in the text, but potentially within him, as a radical, disruptive form of acceptance.

His acceptance of suffering—”I believe in you”—might be read in another light as containing an inner, subversive laugh. I see people in hospice care laugh all the time. I regularly laugh with people in those spaces. That bubbling, almost hysterical laugh—it’s a transcendental moment, a kind of submission or transformation.

Jacobsen: Who do you think is central, in Judaism, when it comes to humour? Can any figures from Torah be read that way—where you find something like oatmeal for comedy? Something nourishing. Something that sustains. Who would be a “sustaining comedian”—a figure you can return to and frame comedically?

Cahana: Well, Job is not central in Judaism, but as you said, he plays a symmetrical or typological role in Christianity about Jesus. In the Torah, though, one of the first stories of Jewish history—our ancestral stories—begins with Abraham and Sarah.

Sarah is old, she’s never had children, and she’s struggled with infertility her whole life. Then an angel tells her she’sgoing to be pregnant—and she laughs. That’s the moment. That’s the nuance. She laughs, and then she names her child Isaac—Yitzhak—which means “he will laugh.”

Jacobsen: Oh. That’s something I wouldn’t have thought of.

Cahana: Yes. Laughter is embedded in the name. Isaac is laughing. That lineage starts with a laugh. And that moment contains layers—it’s joyous, it’s absurd, it’s miraculous. And Sarah’s experience with infertility is deeply human and profoundly resonant. She had even told Abraham to take another wife—Hagar—and Hagar bore Ishmael. The name Ishmael means “God has heard.” The prayer was heard. But when Sarah finally has a child of her own—despite her age—it’s laughter. That’s the emotion.

It’s laughter born out of joy, absurdity, and disbelief. And then—later in the story—when Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac, that moment becomes the emotional peak. Sarah dies soon after. That loss can be read as a kind of gallows humour—the tragedy within a life filled with paradoxes. There’s betrayal, lightness, and darkness interwoven. It’s all there.

Jacobsen: You mentioned “grains of truth” earlier—how faith traditions or wisdom traditions contain those. Yourknowledge and training are now rooted in Judaism and Hebrew philosophy. So, to find a grain of truth in a story is to find a point where myth and reality touch.

You also mentioned women facing fertility struggles. Therapists, of course, talk to people about deeply sensitive subjects—things of emotional weight. And earlier, we were discussing how that weight can be turned around, sometimes, so that humour emerges from it.

So the laughter—Isaac—that comes from the absurdity and joy of an older woman finally having a child after a long struggle… does the inverse of that, the seriousness of it, show up in therapeutic settings? Is that reflective of the reality you see, especially with women coming to you and struggling with fertility?

Cahana: Yes. People approach these experiences in so many different ways. There’s no single, objective emotional reaction. Some things are so immersive that they’re traumatic—hard to move through or move past.

But we all react differently. We do. And that multiplicity of truth is what produces humour. It’s the cacophony of voices—one person holds a particular kind of gravity, and another has a different one. That dissonance, that variation, is maybe subversive in its way. Each person is subverting different access points of truth.

And that’s very much aligned with Jewish wisdom. In Kabbalistic thought, the world itself is in shards—broken vessels. There’s fragmentation. I read a beautiful piece on this week’s parsha—the Torah portion. It was a kind of class analysis written by someone named Ilya—I’ll have to find the last name for you later.

The piece reflected on the broken tablets from Sinai. And the author imagined: what if the wealthy people received commandments like “don’t commit adultery,” “don’t steal,” while the poor people got “no,” “no,” “no,” “no,” “no.” It was a striking metaphor—a way to explore how class dynamics shape even the moral and legal frameworks within which we live.

That’s something we’ve spoken about before, right? It provides a unique vantage point on the world. And that’s what existentialism is—this ontological view, the fundamental question of being. But there’s also phenomenology—the lived experience, the intersubjective reality. The fusion of those two—that’s where existentialism lives. And it’s where satire, absurdity, tragicomedy, and irony all arise. 

That’s the production of the existential stance. And it’s almost always accompanied by a sense of humour. There’s a point where the absurd is impossible to disentangle from the existential. Laughter becomes central—because it’s extraordinary when you’re able to reach that macroscopic perspective. When you can take a step back, examine your situation, and view it from a completely different angle.

Jacobsen: What stands out most to you in Jewish philosophy—or Torah or scripture—that is strangely tragic and, therefore, humorous? 

Cahana: I mean, is Spinoza being excommunicated? Kidding. 

Jacobsen: Well, he has half my sympathy—as a half-Dutch person.

Cahana: It may be, yes, that some of our great thinkers were unaccepted and then reaccepted into the community. Maimonides, for instance—he’s a huge thinker. We love his 13 Principles of Faith. However, he also has books that are banned in rigorous religious communities.

Cahana: And when Judaism gets translated into the broader culture—well, we get things like Madonna doing Kabbalah yoga. We love that. 

Jacobsen: That’s hilarious.

Cahana: Kabbalah is meant to be this esoteric, deeply mystical discipline—a closed-off, tapped-in community where only a select few are traditionally allowed to study it. And then Madonna is… doing Hebrew letters in yoga class or something. I don’t even know exactly what she was doing, but that’s what I gathered. There’s a kind of play that becomes ubiquitous in these moments.

Jacobsen: And maybe excommunication, too. What’s the Jewish word for that again?

Cahana: Herem.

Jacobsen: Right, herem. I told you—I had a friend who was OTD, “off the derech.” She’s been OTD for several years now.

Cahana: And it’s a real thing. But it also depends—it’s not always the same. Sometimes, people self-select out. Sometimes, the community pushes them out. Sometimes it’s the family. It’s different for everyone. That’s not funny, however. There’s nothing funny about that. That’s terrible.

But I will say, a lot of OTD folks do become comedians—and they often have a lot to say. Take Moshe Kasher, for example. He’s a fascinating comedian. He grew up on the margins of several subcultures. He wrote a book—I think it was called Subculture Vulture or something like that.

Jacobsen: Sounds good.

Cahana: He lived in different worlds and came to understand the absurdity in each one. He was able to see the gravity that each subculture takes seriously—and then also recognize the inherent absurdity in that seriousness. That’s fantastic material for a comic. Also—his father was Hasidic. Both of his parents were deaf. So, he has a very unique perspective.

Jacobsen: A good take. He can tell if you’re actually listening or just pretending.

Cahana: Yes! He can tell if you’re listening—or not—for reasons beyond sound. 

Jacobsen: I’m going to grab breakfast pretty soon.

Cahana: Green eggs and ham?

Jacobsen: Leftover chicken and asparagus. Close.

Cahana: True.

Jacobsen: You take care.

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