LAUGHING WHEN YOU SHOULDN’T (AND WHY THAT’S SO JEWISH…)

Jews laugh in cemeteries. I know because my mother and I did just that last week—standing among the graves of generations of our family on Staten Island. It wasn’t disrespect. It was survival.

These were immigrants who left old worlds to build fragile new ones here, losing family and lives along the way. Among their weathered stones, we prayed, history settling across our shoulders like a tallit. And still, we laughed -- at getting lost between sections, at silly memories surfacing mid-prayer, at humor sneaking into sacred spaces. That’s deeply Jewish: grief and laughter, braided like challah.

Jewish life always circles back to that braid—heaviness and humor. Especially when the calendar turns to the High Holidays. Rabbis urge reflection, families brace for meals so heavy cardiologists could bill them in advance, and congregants angle for seats like it’s a middle school lunchroom. But beneath those rituals runs something older, darker and sharper: the dangers Jews have always faced. Rituals anchor us. They restore us. But are they enough?

What steadies just as much is humor. It’s a lasting heirloom—more durable than recipes, more portable than candlesticks, and more faithfully passed down than guilt. In shtetls and tenements, in synagogue pews and cramped kitchens, Jews laughed not because life was easy, but because it wasn’t. A joke can shrink the unbearable, puncture the silence, make the air a little easier to breathe.

That instinct is why I write my humor blog, itsallmaterial.net. Most days I’m not writing about cemeteries or synagogues—I’m writing about parenting, chaos, and the weird satire hiding in ordinary life. But it comes from the same place: turning heaviness into connection, turning isolating moments into shared ones.

And you can find that instinct in Jewish comedy everywhere. Jeff Ross is on Broadway turning dread into matzah-ball singalongs. Jerry Seinfeld riffs on “nothing” and somehow nails every anxious thought you’ve ever had. Alex Edelman’s Just For Us makes identity feel like a communal joke everyone’s invited to. Liz Glazer’s Very Jewish transforms mourning into something connective instead of crushing.

And then there’s comedian Ariel Elias. When a beer can came flying at her mid-set, she didn’t duck. She cracked it open, took a sip, and delivered her punchline. And went viral. That’s Jewish comedy in one gesture: when the world hurls something at you, you turn it into strength. Maybe even into a drink.

Leaving that cemetery, I realized survival has never rested on prayer and prayer alone. It also rests on our ability to laugh through hardship, loss and confusion. My ancestors leaned on it, my mother and I leaned on it, and I hope my kids will too. In a time of rising antisemitism and uncertainty, that instinct feels more essential than ever—humor as connection, binding us and carrying us forward together.

L’chaim. May your holidays be heavy where they must, light where they can, and funny exactly when you need it most. And if you find yourself laughing in a cemetery—trust me—you’re not alone. You’re in good company.