An old Jew eventually dies of old age and goes to heaven. He meets God and tells him a holocaust joke. And God says “That’s not funny”. And he says: “I guess you had to be there.”
(I like how philosophical the joke is, heard it from Ricky Gervais.)
An old Jew eventually dies of old age and goes to heaven. He meets God and tells him a holocaust joke. And God says “That’s not funny”. And he says: “I guess you had to be there.”
(I like how philosophical the joke is, heard it from Ricky Gervais.)
You got me stumped. Can you explain it?
Sometimes, jokes are only funny if you experienced the original context they are derived from, I.e. “You had to be there”.
In this case, the Jew is stating that God (who is typically omnipresent) was explicitly not present during the Holocaust.
Not OP, but there are at least 2 things going on here:
The first part is that the Jewish person is effectively treating this like an inside joke, where someone might not find it funny unless they were present in the situation that the joke references.
The second part to the ‘God not being there’ bit (which is what actually makes it funny imho) is basically saying that the holocaust was so horrible that God was clearly someplace else/asleep/absent to allow something like that to happen under his watch.