What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza?

The pizza doesn’t scream when you throw it in the oven.


This joke is good not because of any inherent humor, but rather because of its failure to amuse. It serves, therefore, as a valuable cautionary tale.

The first flaw in the anecdote’s construction is in its gratuitous use of ethnicity as a crutch. To be sure, Jews serve as an invaluable comedy resource. Any joke involving miserliness of any kind can be improved by the addition of a Hebraic surname (or, in the alternative, by the addition of the prefix “Mac.”) But here, “Jewishness” does not improve the comedy one wit. Any ethnicity will scream when placed in an oven. You throw an Irishman into an oven, and see if he doesn’t cry out “Begosh and begorrah, I’ve been thrown into an oven!” So too the Mexican, whose refrain of “Ai yi yi, es mui caliente!” is equally plausible. Indeed, the only person who should ever be thrown into an oven in comedy is Sylvia Plath.

Many of you may object, “But what of the Holocaust? Surely that validates the choice of ‘Jew’ in the set-up?”

Far from it. One must be very careful when relying on history as validation. The Nazis threw very few screaming Jews into the oven. This is not Holocaust revisionism, it’s simply fact. The Germans are a very efficient people, and they killed almost all their victims before disposing of their bodies in factory-like furnaces. To do otherwise would slow their production lines of death down, and that would be intolerable to the German psyche. No, no. The corpses that were thrown into the ovens went in not unlike the aforementioned pizza – silently.

Thus, the fundamental logic of the joke is ruined. The difference does not hold up under historical scrutiny.

So when you are asked to contemplate the difference between a Jew and a pizza, plausible answer is: “One is a human being with a human soul and a human mind and inherent human dignity, and the other is a molded dough product.” Or “You take the pizza out of the oven in one piece.”