There\u2019s a song with that title and first line. I\u2019ve been a fan of Jewish humor, especially in the mid-20th Century. I picked up \u201cThe Myron Cohen Joke Book\u201d (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.<\/p>\n
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<\/strong><\/em> 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.<\/p>\n I realize that \u201cthis moment in time\u201d—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 \u201cIt\u2019s all happening at the Zoo\u201d (as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle sang in the 1970s on a record). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a song with that title and first line. I\u2019ve been a fan of Jewish humor, especially in the mid-20th Century. I picked up \u201cThe Myron Cohen Joke Book\u201d (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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-papers","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2830,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions\/2830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}