She used the new slice-and-dicer machine that mostly just makes clean-up faster, she said. She's operated with it about ten times, and with the regular fibroid-cutting loop about 200 times. She put a balloon in my uterus so that the walls of it wouldn't collapse upon one another. I get it removed on Monday. I had general anesthesia. I asked the anesthesiologist if I would wake up in the middle of surgery. She says everyone asks that and she blamed TV. I don't think I've seen it on TV. I think it's a universal fear. When I was in the first recovery room I felt a need to talk talk talk to the nurse. She and everyone else at Fancy Hospital were kind and jolly.
I'm supposed to move slowly today. I'm finishing my essay/presentation on Jewish cancer humor for the conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, June 25. I should be moving slowly and writing quickly. All the books about Jewish humor are about what you think of: shtetl humor, Yiddish-inflected men in the old and new country, a few misogynist gibes. We (Woody Allen, Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield)are Ashkenazi (European) Jews, get laughs by being outsiders, powerless. A recent story in New York magazine (to be linked later) talks about how Jewish humor has changed since we are now so much on the inside. (Think Jon Stewart, ne' Stuart Kaminsky.) Larry David can get laughs as an outsider because his show is set in non-Jewish LA. Supposedly.
The Ashkenazim are from Eastern, Central and Western Europe. The Sephardic Jews are from the former Ottoman Empire lands. No one (here) examines their humor. Because we outnumber them vastly, vastly, in the US. There are French-Moroccan comedians, but I don't think they talk much about their Judaism. They are double outsiders--Arab and Jewish. Bulgarian Jews are mostly Sephardic and I will find out from them what their humor is like.
Before the war, there were tons of Jewish Austrian and German comedians. In Germany now there are terrible terrible anti-Semitic jokes about Jews and extermination camps.
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