Billy Wilder, the cinematic genius who died last week at 95, was an example of someone who had a cynical joie de vivre, or joy of life.

This is something that one encounters often in Jewish material of the sort that criticizes life, recognizing all its shortcomings and corruptions while upholding its wonders, many of which arrive through the glory of laughter.

It is there that the Jewish sensibility aligns itself with the tragicomic sense of life that heroic novelist Ralph Ellison saw as central to the American Negro vision.

That is far more important than shared troubles with bigoted majorities, which is how most explain the ways Jewish immigrants and Americans with African-derived skin tones have been able to experience many things in similar ways at almost the same time.

Billy Wilder’s career his masterworks were “The Lost Weekend,” “Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Ace in the Hole,” “The Apartment,” “The Fortune Cookie” and “Some Like It Hot” of course was very different from that of a black American. So was his life.

As an Austrian Jew, he was sent to us by Adolf Hitler, a few hot feet ahead of a gas chamber.

A certain shift took place in our society when so many European Jews came into this nation during that period, bringing the feeling of a civilization having been sucker-punched by fascism and a bigotry dressed up as national pride.

As a Jew in the Jewish world of Hollywood, Wilder had the freedom to write as if his Jewishness and his European background were no obstacles to understanding American life.

As a genius, he brought together all he knew and all he learned for masterpieces that showed how well an exceptional talent can transpose experience.

The European Jew’s loss of confidence in society’s better judgment might have influenced the screenwriting and the directing that Wilder did because he was so often taken by the difference between what people seemed to be and what they really were, what they pretended to want and what destructive things they might be willing to do.

Wilder didn’t completely trust cops or insurance men or reporters or lawyers or politicians or even the Hollywood that had allowed him to make a fine living and that had celebrated him for his brilliance.

He knew that women, beautiful or not, could be monstrous, just like the guys. He was equal in his disdain for fraud and pomposity, for exploitation and greed. He could write great hard-boiled scripts and great drama and great satire and great comedy. He could thrill, he could chill, he could tickle.

His was the sort of talent that we are lucky to have gotten even though Europe and civilization had to pay a mighty price for the events that sent him to us.

That, of course, is another way tragedy has brought black American and Jewish immigrant experience together. No one can condone or celebrate slavery or Nazism, nor can anyone deny that those who arrived here in chains or on the run from death camps did bring with them men and women of genius who seem to have enriched almost everything they touched.

Billy Wilder was surely one of those.