Ever notice that young people in English-speaking North America talk black and joke Jewish? As stereotypes go, being considered funny, verbal, and good at music or sports are relatively benign societal ghettos to get shoved into. But you don’t have to be Jewish (or any other ethnic group) to know that people develop skills wherever they are allowed to flourish.

This subject comes under scrutiny, at least indirectly, in the almost two dozen movies offered during this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, screening November 7 to 14 at the Fifth Avenue Cinema. What’s a good example? I’m glad you asked. Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy, showing Tuesday (November 12), mines the almost embarrassingly rich vein of Jewish American composers—from George Gershwin and Harold Arlen to Leonard Bernstein and beyond.

The influence of Yiddish humour, which travelled inexorably from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the sitcoms of New York and Hollywood, is the subject of When Jews Were Funny, which screens on Sunday (November 10). But the latest doc from Toronto’s Alan Zweig (I, Curmudgeon) doesn’t attempt to convey the whole story.

“I didn’t want to make a comprehensive study of Jewish comedy,” Zweig explains, calling from his cellphone somewhere in the Toronto area. “I didn’t start with a thesis; I had an opinion, a feeling about the Jewishness of comedy, and wanted to look at it from the inside, you could say.”

Consequently, the director—recently here for VIFF with 15 Reasons to Live, his other new doc—aimed his camera at a multigenerational cohort of comics, ranging from a surprisingly emotional Shelley Berman to David Steinberg, Howie Mandel, Judy Gold, and current fave Marc Maron, all of whom contemplate what makes their jokes so Jewy. It was harder than he expected, although the job was made easier with a bunch of classic TV clips.

“The older people, as you see, are much more reluctant to address this kind of question. They don’t deny that they are Jewish, but they all changed their names; back then you had to to make it. The younger they get, the more articulate they are about this—perhaps because some of them, like me, want to grab onto this world before it disappears completely.”

One of the middle-generation spokesmen is Curb Your Enthusiasm’s gravel-voiced Bob Einstein (Super Dave Osborne), who has amusingly caustic chemistry with the off-camera director. Among the missing are Einstein’s brother, Albert Brooks—you can see why he changed his name—and, most notably, Jerry Seinfeld.

“We tried to get everybody,” Zweig explains, “from Woody Allen to Sarah Silverman. But if we had shot every name we went for, we’d have to include them all! I didn’t know how analytical and self-reflective the old-timers would be, of course; at first, all they wanted to do was tell showbiz stories about Frank Sinatra at the Sands. But with every syllable of denial came confirmation as well. In the end, you can hear all their mothers talking through them!”

A joke that didn’t make the film’s final cut has two strangers sitting on a Manhattan park bench, circa 1937. One fellow is reading the New York Times and the other has Der Stürmer, an infamous Nazi paper. Finally, the Times reader can’t stand it anymore and asks the second man how he can read such an awful rag. “In your paper,” he answers, “Jews are sick and dying and afraid. In this one, we own all the banks and run everything! Which do you prefer?”

This harsh jest, which turns a seemingly positive stereotype on its head, is central to another key film, aptly called Jews and Money. It’s here on Wednesday (November 13), with Canadian director Lewis Cohen in tow. The filmmaker, who has a deep background in Quebec TV, shot the intense documentary mostly in France, alternating between interviews with historians and the tale of a hideous 2006 case in which a young, nonobservantly Jewish salesman was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by African immigrants motivated by crazed notions about you know what.

Reached at his home in Montreal, Cohen says that, like Zweig, he and his small crew started the ambitious project without too many set goals in mind.

“We tried to walk through the case, which resulted in two trials, to find what would come up organically. We shot over several years, watching how French opinion shifted, and mixed that with this historical background in which Jews started as nomadic merchants and gradually became moneylenders, since that was useful to Christian rulers who had admonitions against handling money. It was basically a complicated tax racket, with some protection schemes on the side, and the ruling class got to demonize whatever minorities were designated to handle money.”

As the movie makes clear, when things went south in Christendom, European gentry would hold Jewish community leaders for ransom, double their taxes, enact more restrictive laws, or just expel the whole lot, blaming Jews for anything that riled the locals.

“I spent a lot of time in the Paris suburbs,” Cohen recalls, “and found that world really interesting. My job was to take an ancient prejudice, see where it came from, and try to figure out where it’s going.

“There’s still so much to learn about this twisted history,” the filmmaker asserts, “it’s not even funny.”