On Marriage

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And I feel this is the case with all feelings – that they need to be admitted, even if only to yourself.

AH: It’s so funny, because what you just said, I was thinking about my generation, and it seems to be quite the opposite, they see all these stand-up comedians – Bill Burr, Louis C.Because marriage doesn't always bring out the best in us, it makes us wonder what the best in us might be. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. EV: We wondered if this idea of the joke in your book The Jewish Joke (2018) could be linked to theatre.

The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage?From Freud to Ferrante, and One Thousand and One Nights to Fleabag, she looks at marriage in all of its forms – from act of love to leap of faith, and asks: what are we really doing when we say ‘I do’? So, everyone thought he was such a loser… you know, the one good thing that ever happened to the family…. In these movies, both partners offer what you suspect is an exaggerated version of themselves: Baum the straight woman, Appignanesi the butt of the joke. He got a job offer to work for a local timber merchant, got very excited, showed the letter offering the job to everyone in the village, lost the letter, and then the timber merchant – who was also Hasidic and a cabbalist – said, ‘Well, this was a sign, you mustn’t have this job, if you lost the letter’.