The trouble with repeating jokes out of context — and here I'm doubling the contextlessness — is that you always have a bit of explaining to do. Anat is at Auschwitz, as Sara would immediately have understood, because visiting the camps is a routine component of an Israeli education. So that's part of what the joke comprehends — Israel's conscientious, some would say (though they would be wrong) obsessive, remembering of the Holocaust. "Anat's at Auschwitz" sounds a bit like "Anat's at Weight Watchers." Again! But no matter how often or perfunctorily it's visited, Auschwitz remains Auschwitz. And it's an acrid joke indeed that figures Jews as safer there than in a café in Tel Aviv. "The joke crosses the wires of anxiety over Jew-killing past and present," Wisse writes, "and revels in the forced recognition — surprise of surprises — that today's danger may be greater than yesterday's." In this way it offends alike "liberals who deny the ferocity of Arab aggression, and patriots who cannot acknowledge that Zionism does not fully safeguard the Jews".

Unlike the Roubitschek joke, then, this one promises no happy release. Crossed wires of anxiety is a good description of its edginess. Wisse reports that it had Israelis splitting their sides with laughter and I am not surprised. The bleaker the funnier is the rule where Jewish jokes are concerned. For bleakness pressed into the service of laughter enables the worst eventualities to be confronted in advance: this time, at least for the duration of the joke, we will be philosophically prepared. "Never again" is the injunction against forgetting. But Jews have long memories. It's not forgetting the past that's the Jewish weakness, it's anticipating even worse from the future. If another Auschwitz is a possibility that only a fool would discount, there is temporary relief in everyone acknowledging the terror of it together. And some satisfaction in not being naive. The Jewish joke is a strategy for survival, part of that strategy being an open-eyed acceptance that it might only be mental survival. You take what victories you can, and an intellectual victory must suffice when that's all that's on offer.

I should declare an interest in Wisse's book: my novel The Finkler Question gets a favourable mention in it. And having written a book about comedy myself, I feel a kinship with anyone else who tries. It is treacherous territory. Take on tears and tragedy and you meet no resistance; take on laughter and comedy and you walk into a steepling wall of hostility. The very enterprise sets up false expectations, the silliest being that if you write about comedy you must play the comedian yourself. Which is closely followed by the philistine objection that comedy, alone of everything else we do and think, must not be subjected to critical thought. Intellection kills the joke, it's argued, as though, like some arcane ritual, comedy loses its divine mystery in the presence of philosophy or criticism. And this is before we get on to disagreeing about what is or isn't funny. Certainly, what you find hilarious your neighbour won't. And not only won't he find it funny, he will be angered by it, for offence attaches to the very ambition to amuse. We are indifferent to tears that don't flow. Maybe next time. But for laughter that lies stillborn in our belly we cannot ever forgive the father. Whoever goes out on a limb, therefore, declaring for this comedian or comic writer or another, risks a double-wrath — for being too much the intellectual in support of comedy that isn't comic and for spoiling that which has no value anyway. Good luck with that.

So I applaud the intellectual courage of this book, the breadth of Wisse's learning, the comprehensiveness of her ambitions, her unembarrassed declarations of pleasure in what she finds funny (and if we don't, that's tough on us), her unapologetic references to such serious students of comedy as Freud, whose writing on jokes it is easy to deride, and the confidence with which she moves from rabbis to writers to jesters, from literature to music hall and back. Comedy is comedy is comedy.