Today's NY Times has an obituary for Mel Tolkin who led the famous team of writers who produced the stories and jokes for the classic "Show of Shows" and later "Caesar's Hour." Tolkin lived through pogroms in the Ukraine, of which he said: "The pressures made heroes of some, and poets and violinists of some. But it made for a lot of broken human beings too. I'm not happy to have to say this: it created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke." It surely is not coincidental that in a century so horrific for Jews almost all the great comics were of Jewish descent.

There must be some association between absurdity and humor. Someone must have written about this.

To offer an example utterly trivial by comparison: the two years in the seminary that were most difficult, and difficult in part because of absurd conditions and rules, are the years that I remember laughing the most. And I think what an important role common laughter continues to have in my best and longest friendships, some of them dating back to those days.