"Make It Small"

"Although Dauber's greatest focus is on stand-up and television, there is a consideration of literature as well–I particularly like his calling Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus 'the Revolver of Jewish American Literature'. Like the comedy it is trying to parse, the book never gets above itself. Even when correctly describing Kafka as, at heart, a comic Jewish writer (what is more human and small than, having woken up as a beetle, to worry first and foremost about missing the train to work?), the parallel it draws with his Metamorphosis is the comic film There's Something about Mary, because they both deal in moments of 'excruciating, emasculating embarrassment and discomfort'."

David Baddiel at The Times Literary Supplement reviews Jeremy Dauber's Jewish Comedy: A Serious History.