It's a survivor's sense of humor, maybe even a Jewish sense...

It's a survivor's sense of humor, maybe even a Jewish sense of humor. Because of the difficulty of life for many Eastern Europeans - the pogroms, the Revolution, the Holocaust - their humor is broad and aggressively and ridiculously comic. It also triggers an emotional response. It's that kind of chaos and absurdity that results in an opening-up to a discovery of deeper emotion.