Description from TIFF 2013 catalog by Steve Gravestock:

A thoughtful exploration of Jewish identity couched in a charmingly casual history of Jewish stand-up comedy, Alan Zweig’s When Jews Were Funny begins with the veteran filmmaker speculating on how Jewish his infant daughter will be, given his own apostate status. Asking himself what he most cherishes and wants to pass on from his heritage, Zweig is led back to the Jewish comics he grew up watching on television in the 1950s and 1960s. Following the thread through to the present — and along the way interviewing such influential comedians as Shelly Berman, Jack Carter and Shecky Greene, while throwing in some amazing archival footage to boot (including a phenomenal bit by the legendary Jackie Mason) — Zweig shuttles from the universal to the particular and back again as he gets ever closer to his real subject: the unanswerable, but essential, question of what it means to be Jewish.