Fairly interesting 3

I found that the author had trouble locating his point between the collection of funny stories and analysis of the mechanisms of cold humor.
It emphasizes the willingness to minimize the stories to keep only the useful parts for analysis, and therefore I find the stories fairly funny (and funniest I knew through books like "kant and a Platypus Walk into a Bar "or" little philosophy jokes ") and the analysis is fairly linear, chapters identifying stories by country (to explain the context which is rather successful) and theme (" the converted Catholicism in the section on Germany, communism in the Soviet Union on ...) but without really untap my point of view the characteristics of Jewish humor (if not the self mockery, not so marked that I find it mocks the rest of the community (the convert, the chnorrer ...) but not necessarily self-evident, and flavor of Yiddish that unfortunately can not taste). L The author also recognizes that Jewish stories numbers found in other folklores that sometimes recognizes as "manifestly Jewish" without knowing why.
Another weakness pointed out by the author, the chapter on Israel, is of Jewish humor? Not entirely it seems to me, it is interesting to know that the jokes about government officials are the same as ours, but suddenly they are known jokes.
One of the points discussed among the most interesting, the difference between Jewish humor and anti-Semitic stories that the author does not resume unless it is so outrageous that it becomes a form of complicity humor laugh Semitic.
So many of the stories mocking avarice are absent from this book what seems a shame because there are strong funny and just tell them replacing a Jew with "Scrooge" or "very stingy Jew" or a "loan shark" so that they are more anti-Semitic, as a Belgian joke can be told with an idiot prototype instead of the Belgian service.
The final chapter summarizes the portion Freud's book on the decoding of humor dedicated to Jewish stories.

Overall interesting but on the same subject, I advise to read the book of Gérard Rabinovitch, much funnier.