1This essay is concerned with humour in The Apprenticeship of Buddy Kravitz, and in particular with a special kind of ’self irony that is said to mark Jewish humour – i. e. an irony ’directed against oneself and against one’s community1.

2In the light of this, this paper concentrates on the major themes of Richler’s humour by following them m their different manifestations, by examining the methods the author uses to achieve this humour, and by assessing its role within the structure of the novel as a whole.

3Humour exists within the context of a cultural inheritance and depends on a direct and permanent contact between the work of art and daily life. Life, indeed, has always been the reservoir that supplies the humorous work with a great deal of its material, in the sense that humour derives its subject matter from situations and from characters’ traits. Because of this, humour is much at home in the realistic and naturalistic novel. Not that a humorous work is inevitably a realistic or a naturalistic creation, but they all happen to draw their materials from the same source. Richler finds an inexhaustible field in Jewish Montreal. And this he undertakes to debunk, in The Apprenticeship of Buddy Kravitz with startling honesty and a fascinating objectivity that not many before mm have been willing to attempt.

4The Apprenticeship of Buddy Kravitz is both a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel, even if these two might exhibit differences almost as strongly evident as their resemblances. The action of Richler’s novel is relatively simple. It is a ludicrous story of a ’pusherke’ trying to build a name through material success. The whole novel rests on an ironical situation: that in which the sympathetic old Simcha Kravitz, Duddys grandfather, ’one of a dying species of the human race, embodying good and strong values’ hands on to Duddy a dream which Buddy misinterprets and then strives to realize through machiavellian means. The novel is divided into four parts2. The first of them describes Duddys boyhood and provides the story with the most important events that are going to mark Buddy’s life. To situate Duddys background Richler tells us that ’where Duddy Kravitz sprung from the boys grew up dirty and sad, spiky also, like grass beside the raiload track3’. The stress in this section, however, is laid on Buddy’s adventure with McPherson, a teacher of history at Fletcher’s Field High School. McPherson is ’a personification of the decay of the liberal consciousness4’. During twenty years of teaching he has had time to see ideal beliefs fleeting away to be reduced into one ridicule principle: a total refusal to strap the students. One particular incident, in this section, is related with enough details to show Buddy’s cruelty and ruthlessness. It is his phone call to McPherson which unintentionally kills McPherson’s diseased wife.

5Buddy is motherless, and he early understands that his father Max, as well as his rich uncle Benjy, dotes upon Lennie his brother, a medical student at McGill. To fill this sentimental emptiness Buddy creates an imaginary rich brother who loves him. And the only one of the Kravitz family to love him, for what he is, is his grandfather Simcha Kravitz whose dictun, ’a man without land is nobody’, is going to mark Buddy for life. Acquiring land, in fact, becomes in Buddy’s eyes the goal of his life so as to prove to the world, and certainly to himself, that he is a ’somebody⁵. The means to realize his dream is inspired by his father Max, the fervent narrator of the Boy Wonder’s unreal tales that glorifies Jerry Dingleman’s unbelievable progress from ’nothingness’ to building a gigantic gambling network. For a long time Buddy identifies himself with Jerry Dingleman, even if he manages his own way of earning money: he works on weekends and each summer. The first part ends with a comic sexual intercourse with Yvette, his French Canadian girl friend, along with a splendid scene of his discovery of the lake.

6The second section covers Buddy’s relentless pursuit of his dream. Nothing obstructs him in his frantic lust and eagerness for money. He gives up all hope of gaining help from Jerry Bingleman, and founds Budley Kane Entreprise, a Film production company. For this he hires, as his cameraman, John Peter Friar, who is also the first of the societal failures whom Buddy gathers around him5. Many comic scenes arise from this enterprise. The most grotesque scene is undoubtedly Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah which will be discussed later in this paper. In this section, however, another side of Buddy is revealed: this is his great concern and loyalty to his family. When Lennie performs an illegal abortion it is Buddy who brings him home and saves his career by averting his expulsion from McGill. And later on when his uncle Benjy is dying, it is he who goes to New York to fetch aunt Ida.

7In the third section Buddy goes through a bankruptcy. And in his attempt to get through it he faces two representatives of English and Jewish Montreal represented respectively by Hugh Thomas Calder and Mr. Cohen. Calder’s perversion, (one of his amusements is putting hundred-dollar bills in urinals to see which of his friends will retrieve them), and Cohen’s opportunism gives an idea of Buddy’s immediate environment. Richler suggests that Buddy should be assessed within the scope of this large circle, which saves his central character from total rejection as a wicked man and sustains the reader’s concern and indulgence in spite of his mischievous deeds. For soon after Buddy’s quarrel with Mr. Cohen, Virgil, an epileptic poet and Buddy’s friend, gets crippled while working as a driver for Buddy. Richler makes it clear, too, that this blended retinue Buddy gathers around him – i. e., Yvette, Virgil, and Friar is mere convenience Buddy uses without scruples to realize the dream he has set himself. This is confirmed in the fourth part when Buddy forges a cheque on Virgil’s account and gets the last part or his land. The ultimate moment arrives when Buddy takes his family to see the land, but Yvette has already told Simcha about the means he has acquired it. And the land becomes in Buddy’s hands a symbol of shame and dishonesty as Simcha tells him at the end of the novel:

’I can see what you have planned for me, Buddel. You’ll give me everything I wanted. And that would settle your conscience when you went out to swindle others.’6

8In short, as Davidson observes, Duddy fulfills Simcha and Yvette’s fantasies by betraying their ideals7 because of these wicked means he has used to get his land. These very means offer a doubly ironical end8. Firstly as Duddy drives Dingleman away from his land to crown himself as the new powerful figure of evil. And then when the waiter, offering to make his bill, gives Duddy a false impression of being a somebody. His very ecstasy reveals his true identity.

9Notwithstanding Duddy’s failed experience, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz resounds with themes evoked in a humourous way. Most of them contribute to a total effect of valuable richness. This work will deal with the most recurrent ones in Jewish literature: Family, religion, and illness especially when death is at hand. Yet Richler is a satirist and a moralist. This suggests that in his writing it is impossible to differentiate between ethics and aesthetics and that art for art’s sake does not find adequate meaning in his work. It is in this light and from this straightforward perspective then, that Richler’s themes should be understood. Concerning the first theme, few societies have preserved the spirit of family life as the Jews have done. And this is certainly one of the reasons that has enabled them to survive in the face of the Holocaust and other pogroms throughout history. Family for a Jew is part of a tradition and conduct he has always valued and tried to protect from possible dangers. It might happen that members of a given Jewish family do not live on intimate terms together, do not share the same dreams as their fathers have been accustomed to, but they never abandon the spirit of family life which supersedes all possible conflicts. Yet, out of concern for the integrity of the family they adopt a suspicious attitude towards all that is foreign to the group and thus, they make it their duty to protect the family so as to maintain the continuity of the group and the race.

10The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a satire upon Jewish confinement and ethnocentnsm. This is ironically delineated by the very absence of communication and estrangement between the five members of the Kravitz family choked by these family bonds too strong to be maintained. Ironically too, Duddy is compelled to rely on Virgil and Yvette without whom he could never have obtained the land. This confinement, however, is of far-reaching effect as it favours all sorts of groundless prejudices and intolerance against ’the other’. Richler the humanist understands man’s frailties and narrow-mindedness. He also beheves that the most severe way to eradicate them is to ridicule them and to expose their baseless foudations. This is what he does in the course of the statement on Dingleman made by Max:

’... Somewhere, in the Jewish General Hospital let’s say, a baby is born, and in the Catholic hospital – no offence, McDonald – some poor, misguided nun has just died of an abortion...’9.

11The other ethnic groups are not without prejudices of their own. Yet, to hold that a Jew makes an ’s’ by drawing two strokes through it ’$’, or that his national anthem is ’to the bank’ appear by contrast to be childish anecdotes rather than antisemite barbs. The point to be made is that any statement based on race is absurd. And Richler, the moralist, wants his reader to think of Duddy as a Canadian product rather than a mere Jewish disciple. And even if many incidents in the course of the novel bear witness to his strong loyalty to his family, his actions proceed from a great lust for material success. And to achieve this, he treats the Christians and the Jews alike: he exploits Virgil and Friar, but does not hesitate to cheat Mr. Cohen and to drive Dingleman away from his land. He enslaves Yvette and with an exasperating innocence he explains to her after she has showed him the land:

The farmers would be wary of a young Jew, they might jack up prices or even refuse to sell, but another French-Canadian would not be suspect. He was too young to marry, he explains calmly, and in any event he might have to marry a rich woman if he could get one, but if she helped him he would always look after her and she would get a share in the profits10.

12Family and religion are very closely related in Jewish literature. With Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah, Richler offers a very sharp satire on religious rites. Ironically, these are reduced to ceremonial celebrations void of any spiritual meaning, and for Buddy it is merely a way to earn money. This is a very true image of alienation. For having resigned much of their cultural integrity to suit modern life in Canada, hence the word ’reform Jews’, men like Mr. Cohen are trying to develop a nostalgic attachment to religion. Many different behaviours appear in the services. The synagogue is ’so modern that it is called a temple’. Men and women sit together, prayers are said in English, and the rabbi who is also a ’public speaker’ conducts his sermons in a very ’up-to-date’ fashion.

13People who value ’family life’ develop a stong feeling of complicity and concern towards each other’s sorrows and misfortunes. In circumstances such as death and illness, we observe that people forget their rancours and conflicts and manifest a very profound feeling of solidarity. This somewhat over-sentimentalized atmosphere, regardless of its indeniable advantages, generates an odd behaviour. This behaviour can be the source of a specific kind of humour. Illness in such cases becomes a protective shelter, synonymous with escape and defeat in front of a hostile world. Stora Sender finds many reasons to justify this behaviour. She calls it psychological motivations:

II s’agirait d’attirer 1’attention et la pitié d’autrui pour pouvoir se montrer suffisamment brave. L’humour déployd à cette occasion a toujours le même but: il sert & gagner la sympathie qui devrait se doubler de l’admiration pour le courage de la personne en question11.

14Benjy makes everybody believe he is impotent so as not to lose his father’s love: he was unwilling to share this love even with a child of his own. Ironically, what starts off as a protective measure in order to keep a ’child status’ turns out to be the cause of straitened circumstances between Benjy and his father. Ironically, too, Benjy is sickening of a real, yet more dangerous illness which eventually kills him, and yet allows Richler to reflect one of the most important characteristics of Jewish humour. This is their familiarity with misfortunes, in this case illness and death. A familiarity that merges with masochism to such a point that one wonders if the patient is not happy in his own calamity. But the truth is that in cases of great despair, the Jews have learned to laugh, perhaps out of bitterness as the only way left to resist an inevitable defeat, a false impression of an illusive victory over one’s own destiny:

Then one day Buddy ran into Uncle Benjy on the street. ’Jeez’, he said, ’I hardly recognised you. Have you ever lost weight.’
’An operation. Luckily it was only an ulcer. Well, Buddel, how are you?’12.

15In such situations, one calls one’s whole existence into question again and becomes one’s own subject of irony; perhaps a means of substituting serenity for despair, yet why don’t we call it a form of victory in which one comes to see life as it deserves to be seen?! Before Benjy dies, we read in his letter to Buddy:

Wear rubbers in winter and don’t go bareheaded in the sun. It’s a good idea to brush your teeth twice a day. That, Buddel, is the sum of my knowledge...13.

16In a humorous work, there are always victims. Richler’s victims vary from an individual with stupid nervous twinklings to the profound spiritual beliefs of a social group. This sets the tone for the whole book and, consequently, the narrative structure adapts itself to this constant change.

17The narrator provides the novel with several of its best humorous scenes. One of these is the march of the Fletcher’s Cadets. It is a fascinating representation, in a four page account of the society at stake in the novel. It is both a historical and sociological account on the Jewish society of Montreal: from the pogrom generation to that of the Fletcher’s Cadets, the reader is reminded of the difficult Jewish past, their everlasting, though symbolic, attachment to religion, as well as their actual state in the ghetto. And though Richler is known as an outspoken and censorious writer14, this recital does not, nor is it meant to, evoke any feeling of censure. The first aim is certainly mere amusement. For this he uses common devices. He puts together elements which are utterly inappropriate to the actual situation and joins in the same meal two or more incompatible courses.

18Along with the smart Fletcher’s Cadets’ parade, one becomes acquainted with a medley of all kinds of people: ’younger brothers in sleighs’, ’sisters with running noses’, ’women with little beards’, ’fussy nurses with thick legs’ etc, and to the imperturbable musical note is mingled a mass of absurd invectives and gratuitous insults, snowballs, provoking chants and funny advertisement panels. By all these one gets the impression that all Jewish Montreal participates in the parade: as in a play, the F. F. H. S. being its actors, the inhabitants its chorus, while the set is offered by Jewish Montreal. Everyone participates in his own way with his own share, like a puzzle that needs all its fragments to make a coherent and complete form.

19Richler could not obtain such a mirthful atmosphere without the combination of visual flashes belonging to a great cinematographic tradition and a musical tone peculiar of the popular theatre. Thanks to his great concern for authenticity, his characters speak the very commonplace language found in the ghetto.

20With Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah, critical irony reaches its climax, as whenever taboo subjects are its targets15. Here the whole effect is a kind of cynical humour with great ironic tenseness, obtained by the juxtaposition of the narrator’s hyperbolic account and the absurdity of certain visual images and off-colour jokes:

Narrator: older than the banks of the Nile, not so cruel as the circumcision rite of the zulus, and even more intricate than a snowflake is the bar-mitzvah...
’Hey, what’s that he said about niggers being clipped? I thought-–’ ’–-Comparative religion. I take it at McGill.’
’Comparative what? I’ll give you such a Schoss.’16.

21With Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah, however, Richler’s ironic stance aims at both Jewish and Christian cultures. This is achieved by the fact that it is Friar, a ’super goy’ who produces the film. Other conspicuous allusions are implicit in Friar’s Hyperbolic recital which satirizes artistic delirium and intellectual gaucheries as well17.

Narrator: but that afternoon, in the good Rabbi’s study, the young Hebrew learns that there are more exalted things in this world besides material possessions, he is told something of the tragic history of his race, how they were exploited by the ancient Egyptian imperialists, how reactionary dictators from Nehru to Hitler persecuted them in order to divert the working classes from the true cause of their sorrows, he learns – like candide – that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds18.

22No doubt this is parody or burlesque literature. The ridicule in this case owes much to language. Escarpit speaks of the stylistic transposition as a frequent procedure in irony which affects different levels of narration19. Irony here arises from the serious and solemn tone of Friar’s religious account recited through a communist terminology. The image is that of a Rabbi holding a discourse at a communist meeting. And when he says that ’there are more exalted things besides material possessions’, the reader knows that in Duddy’s eyes nothing is more exalting than money. Note that the solemnity of Friar’s language collapses with the final sentence: ’that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. Furthermore, words Eke ’imperialists’, ’reactionary’, and ’working classes’, apart from their hollowness in this context, serve like a ’wink of an eye’ that sets the dramatic irony developed and sustained throughout Richler’s work.

The following scene is one of the best scenes Richler has ever produced: Duddy made love quickly to Yvette by the shore.
’I feel so good’, she said. ’Do you feel good?’
He could watch the lake over her shoulder and in his mind’s eyes it was not already his but the children’s camp and the hotel were already going up. On the far side there was a farm reserved for his grandfather. ’I’ve never felt better.’
’Do you like me? A little, even.’
’Sure. Sure thing.’20.

23Humour in this scene is the result of what Elie Aubouin properly calls ’la conciHation & propos d’un meme objet de sentiments contradictoires21, intensified by the opposition between Duddy and Yvette’s actual position, and the narrator’s eloquent style which creates a kind of Time lag’ or ’frequency slippage’ between the tone and the situation. A subtle example of dramatic irony, indeed, that reinforces complicity between Richler and his reader.

24Humour in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is defined by V. Ramraj as ’an important aspect of Richler’s style’, ’it has’, also ’an organic function’ and ’it is not only used to set passages’22. Yet, humour in Richler’s work is much more than mere style. It is an ontological choice, the technique of an ’equilibrist’ that whispers to the reader his very reactions by putting them right in the middle between complete detachment and nihilist condemnation23- This, however, is much more evident in characterization. For if Richler is known as a satirist and a moraEst, he is also a great character monger. And his success with characterization, as noted by Arnold. E. Davidson, derives from his remarkably skilful use of shifting points of view24. Two important cards in Richler’s hand then are a versatile narrative structure, and to use D. Lenoski’s expression, a plethora of personalities25. The versatility of the narrative structure partidpates in the richness and the diversity of humour. It allows us to see a character from different perspectives, and simultaneously subjects him to the different kinds of Richler’s humour.

25Max, for instance, is a flat character or a caricature. He is also a tragicomic character. Himself an abandoned child, he strives to make a living as a taxi driver and as a pimp. Max’s performance can be summed up in one single sentence, yet there is human mystery and opacity around him. His achievement does not actually modify the story, but offers a means to understand the central character. We know Max with his favourite utterances ’when I lose my temper I lose my temper’, ’the world is full of shits’, with certain repeated habits, especially when these are of a loutish taste like scratching his back. We know him above all as the fervent narrator of the Boy Wonder stories. No doubt, we are very delighted by these tales about Jerry Dingleman. Their mythical and fantastic aspect that links up with the absurd and the grotesque, tells us more about Max’s life than about Dingleman’s achievements. For, deprived of a decent life, Max banishes himself unconsciously from the hollowness of his actual life into worlds furnished to a great extent by his own imagination. Eddy’s ’Soda and cigar’ provides him with a faithful audience, which like him, lives on intimate terms with hardships. This gives Max’s performance the aspect of popular theatre on the town square, and it flashes like a moment of liberation in an oppressive existence, leading towards a world of a false reality, cloyed by an irrelevant imaginative construction that merges into the absurd.

26Around the central character, a more entertaining, yet fundamental humour is created. Probably among the most pungent episodes are those with McPherson and Virgil, varying from calling the first ’my dear Mac’, ’Mac of all people’, and making killing phone calls to his wife, to exploiting the second’s naivety and ultimately destroying him. These grotesque episodes and the ludicrous humour they express, create laughter and at the same time breed a feeling of horror and disgust towards Duddy. Fortunately, we see him under other microscopes. And we are mostly amused by his innocence that borders on imbecility and his naivety that merges into idiocy. Such effects are created by some favourite phrases he repeats like maxims and takes for his own precepts: ’A man without land is nobody’; ’Anatomy’s the big killer’. Other utterances are much more occasional but have the same effect: ’there’s not a businessman in town who hasn’t at least one bankruptcy in his pocket’. We are no less amused when Buddy puts on his intellectual air and recommends to those he meets his first and unique reference: ’God’s little Acre’, or when he betrays his fantastic talents in the fabric of lies.

27Language creates humour whenever it is misused or extravagantly manipulated. Bergson, however, distinguishes between the comic language creates, and the comic it simply expresses26 An example of the first kind is Linda’s introducing Peter to Buddy:

’Peter’s a painter, ’ Linda said to Buddy.
’Inside or outside?’
That’s good, ’ Peter said. That’s very good.’ He slapped his knees again
and again.
Buddy looked puzzled.27

28Humour, here, comes from the clash between two ideas by playing on words without any didactic consideration28.

29More frequent and very illustrative of the second type is the ’comedy of insults’, which is a ’characteristic of exiled Jews’29. N. J. Ramraj argues that ’unable to defend themselves physically, they resort to verbal invectives and absurd insults to ease their frustration30. The idea is that of the popular proverb: ’his bark is worse than his bite’. By making the greatest possible noise, they quench a burning thirst for revenge. The result, however, is not the mere illusive impression of triumph, but a very profound feeling of failure and defeat. Here is Buddy’s response when Cohen refuses to lend him money:

Boil in acid, Buddy thought. I hope all your teeth fall out. All except one.
And the one that’s left should give you a toothache for life.31

30Very surprising, indeed, is this character, sometimes arousing our disgust, at others moving closer to us, constantly making us laugh, but never enlisting our pity. In fact, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, as noted by J. Metcalf depends upon an oscillating pattern of sympathetic and judicial response to its central character32. We despise him because of his machiavellian deeds, but many extenuating reasons bring him closer to us. This is why even at the very end of the novel, it is hard to tell whether Duddy is a victim or a crook. This situation is consciously cultivated by Richler. And humour is a very skilfull way to maintain this equilibrium which is of prime importance to the structure of the novel. It guarantees a somewhat essential distance to the protagonist that allows Richler to achieve objectivity without total indifference. It serves, as well, to breed suspense and sustain the reader’s interest up to the end of the novel without falling into nihilist reproofs nor naive connivance with the central character: he is then, a crook from a moral standard of judgement, and a genius from a North American point of view.

31On a similar way, Richler manipulates the reader’s consideration of Duddy when he appears again, in St. Urbain’s Horseman, but that will be, along with black humour, the subject of another study.