No Joke (27 page)

Of course, in Israel as elsewhere, the nature and quality of humor are governed as much by professional opportunities and technological innovation as by the historical and cultural conditions I have been describing. A 1983 law permitting commercial television channels to break the state's monopoly brought on the kind of comedy glut that suffuses television in the United States.

Israel's most popular humor revue,
Eretz Nehederet
(A wonderful country), often compared with
Saturday Night Live
, resembles its prototype in producing weekly shows on a regular schedule—unlike the Gashashim who perfected and refined their routines as if for the theater. The result is an artistically uneven record, with sometimes-loutish comedy receiving the heartiest laughs from the live audience—probably no different from the norm in Shakespeare's day. By loutish I mean a bar mitzvah boy playing with his penis as the MC announces that the lad has his speech in hand, or a flamboyant U.S. blond, played by a cross-dressed male actor, outcursing the Israeli cowboy trying to pick her up. On the political scale the show tips leftward, and instinctively favors Mizrahim when they come up against Ashkenazim in the same way that
Saturday Night Live
stays politically correct when it treats the racial divide between blacks and whites. But an Israeli niche market has also developed for right-wing comedy that mocks the very talk show hosts and broadcasters who try to take down the Likud prime minister. For instance, on the Latma Web site, the “reporter”—typecast as a candidate for Conservatives Anonymous—conducts interviews on the Yom Kippur War with actors playing an Egyptian Islamist and Israeli
leftist, neither of who can bring themselves to admit that Israel fought the war to victory.

“Sometimes things here are so surreal we have to laugh at them,” says one of the writers of
Eretz Nehederet
. Yet in confronting the elements that make life “surreal,” many of those in the business of
Israeli
comedy are reluctant to see the connection between earlier
Jewish
humor and theirs. Much as Bellow and Roth flaunted their Jewish origin yet balked at being labeled as Jewish writers, creators of comedy in Israel freely admit their indebtedness to the United States but are skittish about their Jewish affinities. When I tell a couple of fans of
Eretz Nehederet
that I am studying the Jewish humor of Israel, they are taken aback, protesting that there is no Jewish humor in Israel. This reminds me of the banker Otto Kahn, who had converted to Christianity. Walking along the street one day with a hunchbacked friend, he passed a synagogue and confided, “You know, I used to be a Jew.” The friend replies, “And I used to be a hunchback.”

And Molière's Monsieur Jourdain did not know he was speaking prose.

In 1988, a year before the sitcom
Seinfeld
was launched on U.S. television, the Israeli actor Shmuel Vilozhny produced a modest documentary film that used the same dramatic device of alternating between a comedy-club routine and the real-life situation on which the routine is based.
Abaleh, kah oti l'luna park
, translated as “Daddy, take me to the fair,” a line echoing a Hebrew popular song of the 1930s, is based on a trip that Vilozhny took to Poland in the company of his father and
younger sister. In an opening monologue in the comedy club, Vilozhny describes his family of Holocaust survivors. It seems that there is a constant feud between his father, who refuses to buy any German-made products, and his uncle, who buys nothing but German-made products on the grounds that German goods are the best. How does he know they are the best? The uncle rolls up his sleeve to boast that the camp number engraved on his arm “never comes off.”

This wins a laugh from the audience. Vilozhny evokes the strained relations between sabra-son and survivor-father in a tone that assumes his listeners share his impatience with the genocide that darkened their parents' lives—and consequently, theirs. The comedian seems almost surly as he accompanies his father back “home”: “My only concern is that you'll start speaking Polish.” The footage of the trio at the start of their voyage captures the discomfort of all involved.

There are by now dozens of accounts of young people tracing their familial roots in eastern Europe, with or without their parents; Vilozhny's footage of his own family's visit to Auschwitz includes a tour group of young Jews on a similar pilgrimage. But in the way that comedy punctures factuality, what goes on between son and father breaks through the standard features of this journey with its obligatory visit to native town, family home, and intended final destination. At the heart of
this
film is a scene where Vilozhny senior describes how, as a boy, he would use fallen tree branches to play at dueling. Shmuel goes looking, and soon enough father and son have begun to fence, with the father teaching his son the rudiments of parry and thrust until they go at it for real, and the
viewer starts to worry lest the game end in symbolic patricide or filicide. As the daughter observes, though, the sparring actually achieves the opposite effect, bringing each a momentary taste of the carefree childhood that only the father had ever truly experienced. The pressure of trying to spare his children the knowledge of what he had endured before becoming their Israeli parent had raised a wall of silence between the generations. Now they are convulsed in laughter, released by swordplay instead of wordplay.

The town record book, which the family later consults, serendipitously reveals that the father is several years younger than he had thought—as if confirming what he had gained by introducing his children to his past. Conversely, Shmuel's reaction to being at Auschwitz is to “want to stay silent for eternity.” The catharsis that releases spontaneous familial laughter allows this voluble comedian to be still.

Abaleh, kah oti l'luna park
broke through prohibitions about using the Shoah for comedy even as it deepened connections with the Jewish past. The child's reference to his father in the diminutive—Daddy, rather than Dad—expresses this intimacy, with the Yiddish suffix yoking the Hebrew/Israeli noun to its Jewishness. To appreciate this accord, we need only think of the bitter letter written by Kafka to
his
father, and his even more haunting reflection that “I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no ‘
Mutter
,' to call her ‘
Mutter
' makes her a little comic.”
²¹
The term
Vater
, too, is far from meaning the Jewish father, which leaves Kafka fatally and essentially alienated from his parents.

For Kafka, the tragic component of life was less the threat from the Germans as enemy—though he takes full account of that as well—than the degree to which a foreign language had prevented what, in opposition, the Vilozhnys of the world have been able to forge. It is possible that Israeli immigrant parents were inhibited from speaking “freely” with their children as much by having to do so in an adopted language as by the trauma they hoped to suppress; this would give Jewish-style comedy and a Yiddishized Hebrew special importance in binding the generations—as happens in this film. The fact is that Shmuel's father could not have taken his children on a trip with a happier outcome, or so his children have chosen to interpret it.

Vilozhny's embrace of the Shoah coincided with an upsurge of interest in the subject on the part of his generation that did not always result in the wry brand of Jewish humor he practices. By way of contrast, the writer David Grossman's influential novel
See Under: Love
, published almost simultaneously with the release of Vilozhny's film, elevated the trauma of an Israeli child doomed merely to imagine the Nazi beast above the trauma of those actually devoured by the beast in Europe. Despite concerted attempts by Israel's leaders and cultural figure heads to reduce the traumatic aftereffects of the European genocide—among other ways, by emphasizing the dynamic potential of newly won political autonomy—survivors who reached Israel could not help but wish to record what they had witnessed, to memorialize the dead, and call for collective as well as individual mourning. The establishment in 1953 of Yad Vashem as a “living memorial to the Holocaust”
and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 gave national expression to the attempts of citizens to cope with the losses as well as shocks that they had sustained. The Shoah cast a long, dark shadow over the country that had defied probability in its buoyant birth and development; many children of Israel's pioneers and Europe's refugees alike resented the burdens of history they were expected to bear.

Yet Vilozhny was not alone in using humor to come to terms with an unwelcome past. Something even livelier occurs in Amir Gutfreund's novel
Shoah shelanu
(Our Holocaust, 2001), an alternately heavy and lighthearted representation of Israelis who voluntarily assume the role of “grandchildren” of those who left no biological issue. Also a child of Polish refugees, the author creates a narrator who is removed enough from the unspeakable horrors experienced by survivors to investigate the ironies inherent in that term.

Grandpa used to say, “People have to die of something,” and refused to donate to the war against cancer, the war against traffic accidents, or any other war. To avoid being considered stingy, he would occasionally burst into exemplary displays of tremendous generosity. He put on these shows with such proficiency that if not for us, his relatives, no one would have known the simple truth: he was a miser.
²²

The children of those who came out of Europe had to piece together events that their elders were loath to describe, and determine what was theirs to avenge, redeem, or ignore. So, too, the narrator has to figure out the relative influences of inborn
character and historical impact—nature and nurture—in the formation of those who surround him. Gutfreund's narrator explains that his family's Law of Compression was a wonderful invention of those who, “lacking brothers, uncles, fathers, and mothers, had done away with the requirement for precision,” and adopted as family anyone with a corresponding wish for adoption.
²³
Because “Grandpa” is not his actual progenitor, the narrator can expose his foibles without an offspring's rancor and figure out at his own pace where he stands in relation to his intriguingly quirky, murky inheritance. Gutfreund, himself a lieutenant colonel in the Israeli air force, saw no contradiction between his twin careers as officer and master of ironic fiction.

Jewish humor remains, as it always has been, merely one of many possible responses to the anomalous experience of the Jews. But as long as it does remain one of those responses, suppliers will arise to meet the demand. Some of Israel's most talented and popular writers—Meir Shalev, Haim Beer, and Etgar Keret—have developed individual styles of humor that stand at a philosophical remove from the exigencies of everyday life in the Jewish state. On my table are stacked books on Israeli humor, articles about Israeli humor, articles and books by Israelis on the humor of other nations, videos and DVDs of Israeli comedians and Israeli comedies, and assorted cartoons and clippings attesting to this comedy surge. One of Israel's premier publishers recently issued a selection of anecdotes and jokes from a three-volume treasury collected by Alter Druyanov, who after his arrival in Palestine in 1922, anthologized Hebrew translations of Jewish humor, mostly from Yiddish.
The editor and illustrator of the new volume of selections, the artist Danny Kerman, writes that Druyanov's collections, the only books that his generation of Israelis needed no encouragement to read, informed his contemporaries' idea of humor, period.