Arts & Culture

Bagels make people smile. I can’t think of another bread that has so many jokes made about it – some of them, according to the bagel bakers I talked with, unrepeatable in print or polite company.

In the 1950s Milton Berle and Molly Goldberg used bagels as props. Even a young Woody Allen in 1963 got in on the act with a routine that taboo subjects are vital to society, so much so that in a place (like the Faroe Islands alledgedly) where sex is casual, sleazy natives peddle food porn instead. When a Faroe woman is asked whether she’d like cream cheese on her bagel she replies: "I don’t do that kind of thing."

The New Jersey artist who in the 1990s figured out a way to preserve genuine bagels and genuine locks (as versus lochs) on canvas had to be counting on the sense of humour of his potential buyers in an upscale Miami gallery – otherwise why hang these arrangements on your wall?

So what is it about the bagel that’s so funny?

Some say it’s the word itself - ‘beigel’ or ‘bagel,’ it’s chunky and chewy just like the experience of eating it.

For others it’s the ring shape with no beginning and no end that has a special hold on our human imagination with its intimations of eternity.   And then there’s the bagel hole – inpsiring or terrifying, depending on how you deal with the concept of infinity (for one London poet of the 1930s, the ring of dough represented life – when you finished off your bagel the hole you were left with symbolised death). The hole is the subject of many tales, the best of which has to be the one about the Fools of Chelm – a staple group of simpletons in Jewish folklore. Finding Chelm’s bagels lacking, a delegation of the town’s sages decided they must act and find out why the neighbouring town’s bagels are tastier, crunchier and chewier. 

"It’s simple," says the neighbouring town’s bagel baker when they ask him, "it’s the hole that makes the bagel."

"Please," say the delegation from Chelm, "can we have some of your holes so as to improve our bagels?"

"Of course," answers the baker and hands over a dozen or so holes which the sages place very carefully in their pockets.

Wending their way home in high spirits, they stop paying attention to the path. Suddenly all of them – to a sage – fall over the crest of a hill and roll down, the bagel holes falling out of their pockets as they gathered speed. Desperately they search the fields for these special holes but to no avail. Crestfallen they return to Chelm empty handed, unable to change the sorry state of the town’s bagels.

What I find endearing about the shape of bagels is that while they may aspire to be the perfect halo, they are by their plump, lumpy nature imperfect and a bit cheeky.   

In the 1960s El Al introduced a booklet – El Al Looks into the Bagel – to explain bagel history and etiquette to those passengers (there were quite a few it turned out) who had never eaten one before. The booklet was a hit and was reprinted at least four times. In fact, such was the scale of interest generated that El Al created a Bagel Research Center in its New York office – or did it? No one I spoke with in the course of my research (including the airline’s unofficial historian) knew anything about it. Was this a further bagel joke? Or is there a great archive of bagel jokes out there? Anyone with more information?

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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