The first book on Jewish humor in which individual jokes are singled out for comprehensive study, Life is Like a Glass of Tea devotes a chapter to each of eight major jokes, tracing its history and variants-and looking closely at the ways in which the comic behavior enacted in the punchline can be interpreted. One of the unique properties of classic Jewish jokes is their openness to radically different interpretive options (having nothing to do with wordplay or double entendre). This openness to alternate interpretations-never before discussed in the literature on Jewish humor-gives classic...