Old Jews Telling Jokes

There are few Passover dinners I remember from my childhood that didn't end in my father telling jokes with the other adults seated around the table. But they'd wait until all the kids went off to watch The Simpsons before launching into the more racy ones. As I learned later on, that's when I should have stuck around.

Now there's a site that allows us hear the old saws in all their politically-incorrect glory. As a video blog, Old Jews Telling Jokes is different than the many websites that simply print the text of jokes. It's all about the delivery, and you can see that these alter kockers have the timing and mannerisms down.

There's a lot hidden beneath the punchlines. As site director Sam Hoffman explains, old jokes "can reveal the concerns of a generation or even the generation before. Anxieties of coming to a new country, of prospering, of assimilating, of having families, of fearing and worrying about, well, everything. Humor was and is the ultimate anti-depressant."

New jokes are posted on Tuesday and Thursday. A note of warning: some of these may not be kosher for the office. But if you're patschkieing around on the web, you could find a worse place to spend your time.