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And then there was the opera about the Jewish mother who boasted how much her son loved her — so much that he paid an analyst $100 a week just to talk about her.

That scene, "Therapy," is one of many vignettes in "Jewish Humor from Oy to Vey," a comic chamber opera by veteran composer Seymour Barab. A total of 19 Jewish jokes make up the one-act work, to be performed Saturday, March 28 at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center by Berkeley Opera's chamber company, Opera da Camera.

Designed to be performed in a small room rather than a full-scale opera hall, chamber opera requires small casts and a relatively small number of musicians.

Barab, who is 77, says writing "funny little operas" is his favorite occupation.

"They're easy and economical to produce, and I don't have to wait for the Metropolitan Opera to come calling," he says in a telephone interview from his home in New York.

Barab is a professional cellist who has played with such disparate celebrities as Charles Mingus, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson. Though he had been writing songs and chamber music since his career began in 1945, he did not attempt chamber opera until the 1960s.

"I was commissioned to write an opera for a New York group called Young Audiences, which took chamber music into high schools," he recalls. "The trouble was that I could only use four people: three singers and a pianist."

The opera he wrote, a musical adaptation of "Little Red Riding Hood," was a huge hit.

"It turned out that the opera world had been waiting for this kind of small-scale work," Barab says. "Little Red Riding Hood" has since been performed all over the country and as far afield as China.

Since then, he has written more than 30 chamber operas. They continue to be staged far and wide, making Barab one of the most frequently performed living composers.

To his surprise, Barab also found that he had a talent for writing librettos.

"My talent for creating musical styles might be negligible," he says modestly. "But the moment I got hold of some words, I knew what to do with them musically."

Over the years, Barab, whose parents immigrated to this country from Warsaw as teenagers, has turned to Jewish themes several times. His opera "The Predators," written nine years ago, pits a vampire against a Jewish mother who is determined to marry off her daughter to the first decent man she can find — fangs or no.

Adapted from a play called "Beast of Another Burden" by Faith Whitehill, "The Predators" ends with the mother dancing around the vampire's coffin. As she dances, she sings triumphantly, "Well, he's a little peculiar, but my daughter and I will change him."

When composing "Jewish Humor from Oy to Vey" around five years ago, Barab scoured the Jewish literature section of the New York Public Library. "I found about 25 books that consisted of nothing but jokes and stories about Jewish life," he says.

He narrowed his selection to "any kind of Jewish joke that I thought was especially good and lent itself to dramatization."

Richard Goodman, Opera da Camera's artistic director, says that "Jewish Humor from Oy to Vey" appealed to him because of its mixture of operatic and folk music.

"It has the structure of an opera, and some truly operatic moments, but a lot of it sounds like `Fiddler on the Roof.' And of course, Barab is a wonderful humorist, both with words and music."

He gives an example from a scene called "Prospects," in which a Jewish father berates his daughter for falling in love with an actor.

"To have no money," sings the father. "For this you're ready? You want a husband who's never working steady? To be an actor's wife, to be an actor's bride; I don't call this a life — this is suicide!"

Along with "Jewish Humor," Opera da Camera will perform a Barab operetta called "The Ruined Maid." A satire on Victorian class distinctions, "The Ruined Maid" is less folksy than "Jewish Humor" but equally clever and amusing, Goodman says.

"It's a 20-minute gem."

"Jewish Humor" runs for around an hour, though Goodman says the exact running time is hard to predict.

"Every single number has a punchline."

With 19 Jewish jokes, he says, "Who knows? The audience might laugh for half an hour — then it would take an hour and a half."