In the 1980s, there was a library that had some non-library books in a lounge (they were not in “the system,” they were just there for browsing while relaxing or taking away if you wanted). One of them was a humor book by an American Jewish author (rather like Sam Levenson. I judge the period it was written as the mid-60s through the mid-70s because the humor talked about “kids these days in college” - meaning hippies. The only bit I remember specifically was chapter about “The Tsuris* Factor” (or “Tsuris Coefficient” - something like that) - the way that kids could establish their countercultural bonafides - with the winning play being “My parents were smeared by McCarthy” (or “smeared by the House Committee” - something like that). Anyone have a clue as to what the book was?
Thank you. I’ll give it a look, but this book seems a little too focused on actual information about Yiddish than the more freeform humor I half remember
I looked through the Leo Rosten book on Internet Archive and it looks like a dictionary. If you do a search for tsuris on Internet Archive, hundreds of hits come up. You don’t need an account to search, but it’s very easy to create one.
All the books of humorous essays (we need a better word for them) in that era had a piece on college students and half of them were written by Jews. Only slight hyperbole there.
Something about the phrasing makes me think of Calvin Trillin, but his kids weren’t old enough to go to college back then. He could have been writing about others, I suppose. Nothing else is ringing any bell.
I’ve read it, and probably still have it somewhere. There are lots of jokes in it, but I don’t remember him complaining about college students. There were tons of humor books that did - but none that I remember reading.
There was a Jewish newspaper publisher and writer I recall my father liking particularly named Harry Golden. He was quite prolific from the 1940s up until his death in 1981. Many of his books were satirical, sometimes nostalgic and oftentimes political. Could he be the author of the book you found?
From Wikipedia: Calvin Trillin devised the Harry Golden Rule, which states that “in present-day America it’s very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses.”
My first thought was How to be a Jewish Mother or something else by the same author, but a search of the text at the Internet Archive doesn’t have any results for “smeared”, “McCarthy”/“committee”, or “tsuris”.
I checked my books by Harry Golden and didn’t see anything similar in a scan. However, I don’t have some of his later books and I found a source that said he really didn’t like student radicals. Nevertheless, no search on Golden and tsuris comes up with anything.
Same with Dan Greenburg, though none of his books seem like good candidates.
He raises a question. Was this book a collection by a single author or an anthology of humor? Greenburg, e.g., was included in many Playboy humor anthologies, which weren’t exclusively about sex. I have 300+ humor anthologies, so that could be a slog.
