Comedy Showcase: Classic Courtroom Jokes in Translation from Yiddish by Comedian Emil Cohen

Emil Cohen (1911-2000) was an American comedian, humorist and entertainer. He was billed as "America's Foremost American Jewish Humorist". He frequently performed at the Grossinger Hotel in Liberty, New York, in the so-called "Borscht Belt". Cohen's Yiddish humor was well received by the predominantly Jewish audiences in this area.

Cohen developed a unique style of humor in which he delivered jokes and stories with a punch line in Yiddish followed immediately by an English translation. His smooth delivery ensured that audience members who only understood English could still appreciate the joke in its authentic style. Cohen was known for his double-entendre Yiddish-English humor, particularly his translation of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Yiddish. His humor was inspired by the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Cohen worked to preserve the heritage of Yiddish humor. 

In this courtroom scene, Cohen describes the funny results of a Yiddish to English interpreter translating the answers of an elderly Yiddish speaker to a judge's questions in English about the man's age and why he stole a chicken. The inflection  of the Yiddish answers and English translations are hilarious. 

Enjoy!

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