‍🏆 Judith Yaross Lee Publication Grant Winner

Earlier this year, I was awarded the Judith Yaross Lee publication grant, which pairs four or five students with mentors across the country in the field of Humor Studies with the aim of working on and publishing a paper in a journal. Below is the proposal that was accepted:

"As Good as Comedy Gold: The Resistance of Heritage and Humor in the Works of Joseph Heller"

          Catch-22 was both the best and worst thing to happen to Joseph Heller; while it set the stage for a promising career, it also cast a shadow from which Heller’s works struggled to escape.  In terms of both popularity and, mostly, critical reception, Heller’s subsequent novels were failures relative to his debut novel. For the rest of his career, Heller would struggle to resist two elements of his work that were linked to Catch-22 by his critics and audience—humor and Jewishness—while also honoring their impact on his work, a balancing act that Heller never mastered, and truthfully never wished to (Heller cheekily explores this non-desire in his third novel, Good as Gold). Heller’s perception of Jewishness and the war and his fans’ perceptions of them were markedly different and form the foundation of an uphill battle Heller never quite won. He was not working with his audience and critics, but working against them. They wanted comedies about being Jewish, and Heller wanted to break away from the Jewish humorist box that he had been placed within. In this paper, I set out to explore two facets of Heller’s career that led to its (arguable) downfall: his challenges with writing comedy, and his insecurities about expressing Jewishness in his work and characters. Both of these issues that Heller was working through were due mostly to his relationship with critics and his audience, and their adoration of, and problems with, Catch-22. I hope to explore Heller’s resistance of writing about "the Jewish experience" and his attempts to stray from comedy in an effort to not just draw up a roadmap of his career but show how humor and comedy might have been the way that Heller could (and others might) cope with, understand, and push back against the charge that one must or is required to write about one’s identity.