Adam Blatner

There’s a song with that title and first line. I’ve been a fan of Jewish humor, especially in the mid-20th Century. I picked up “The Myron Cohen Joke Book” (New York: Gramercy Press) and have been leafing through it. It reminded me that I’ve enjoyed humor and cartoons, joke books of various types, all my life. And  especially Jewish jokes, and a book of jokes by Myron Cohen (that I just purchased for like a dollar or two at the book sale) reminds me of the many Jewish comedians and joke-writers in Hollywood, near where I grew up. So I knew first-hand the tone of Jewish restaurants, for example.

It occurred to me that I was part of several sub-cultures, such as the assimilated Jew, in America! We had a unique experience in the mid-20th century, an island in time, and I was on the outskirts of that. (I was part of several sub-cultures, in fact: There were followers of Whitehead and Hartshorne in process philosophy; medicine in mid-late 20th century (and the history thereof until then); the New Age revolution starting at Esalen in 1960s, etc. And there were the popular songs and comic books and cartoons—still not too decadent in the mid-20th century, etc.

I realize that “this moment in time”—my whole lifetime—was really part of Big History—going on for many centuries, eons, millions, billions of years. My life is like an eye-blink or less. But in my cosmology, somebody has to notice that “It’s all happening at the Zoo” (as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle sang in the 1970s on a record).