No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  In a society whose high culture had been shaped and dominated, if not monopolized, by Ashkenazim, the trio forged a Sephardi or Mizrahi image, maintaining distinctions in pronunciation that marked the speech of Jews from Arab lands. In the aforementioned skit, pitted against each other before a judge are a supporter of Jerusalem Betar, obviously of Middle Eastern origin, and the referee Pendelovitch, obviously of European background. The latter’s offside call against Betar, which the fan had leaped on to the field to protest, was the cause of the altercation that landed the two in the courtroom. The excitable groupie is defiant and cocky; the referee is offended and petulant. Since the judge also hails from the “Eastern tribes,” the advantage of common status (referee and judge are both shofet in Hebrew), on the one hand, is offset, on the other hand, by the advantage of common ethnicity. We wait to see which two will team up against the third, but each member of the trio is aggrieved: the intensity of the enthusiast’s support for Betar has its source in the socioeconomic disadvantages of his group; the referee suffers the slings and arrows of insult along with occasional injury for trying to uphold order among savages; and the judge demands respect from each of the two antagonists. The three-way dispute is peppered with ethnic slurs so politically incorrect and vile that they finally reduce the referee to tears. “Don’t cry,” says the judge, as he approaches resolution. “I’m not the Kotel [the Western Wall]. Soon you’ll be stuffing a petition in my ear.”

  The entertainment branch of the educational corps was charged with strengthening the citizenry’s identification with Israel, and the Gashashim were mindful of their mission. They identified with the lowly against the mighty not in order to foment class conflict but rather in expectation of an eventual integration. Instead of the oppositional tension at the heart of many comic duos (Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, and Dzigan and Schumacher), the trio’s teamwork represented a segmented society struggling to come together, and the three actors traded places often enough to prevent any one of them from becoming the habitual butt of the others. Their ensemble approach represented the amalgamation of disparate groups under unprecedented pressures. Sociologists noted that the trio avoided divisive political issues, and used traditional and liturgical terms as well as allusions in ways that melded religion with evolving modernity so as to create an Israeli folklore that seemed drawn from the past while legitimating everything current.14

  The Israeli comedy trio Hagashash Hahiver (The Pale Trackers) when they gained fame in the 1960s. From left to right, Shaike Levi, Poli Poliakov, Gavri Banai. Digital image of a photograph by Israel Haramati. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. From the Judaica Collection of the Harvard Library, Harvard University.

  An example of how divisiveness becomes comic fodder for harmony is the trio’s postelection skit of 1981, when the Likud Party of Menahem Begin narrowly defeated the Alignment Party of Shimon Peres. In their “morning-after” routine at a newsstand festooned with election posters, one man is reading his paper, and others come by to ask, “What are the results?” and “Can you pass me a section?” But their presumed concern with the electoral outcome turns out to be mistaken: the first man wants the score of yesterday’s soccer match, and the second chews up the paper. “Hungry?” asks the owner, offering him a tastier section. The three then launch into a musical number that interprets avodah, the national ethic of labor, as ovdim aleynu, “They’re Working Us Over,” in which each stanza spoofs the promises made by politicians when running for office. Begin’s rhetorical style is subjected to some mockery, but since the elected prime minister was heavily supported by the very underclass that the Gashashim purported to represent, the comedic trio could not indulge the kind of dismissive satire of the Israeli Right that would characterize later comedians appealing to the country’s left-of-center elites. The song’s refrain, “They’re working us over … and we never learn,” was inherently democratic.

  In its shows, the trio indulged in some slapstick and masquerading, but in typical Jewish fashion specialized in language and wit: a fitting area for humor in a new land where philosophers and flower sellers, mechanics and kibbutzniks, were caught up alike in the insecurities of an emerging language. Indeed, the committee awarding the Israel Prize to the Gashashim in 2000 singled out these comedians’ contribution to the language while several times invoking the term “loving” to describe the nature of their impact on Israeli culture, society, and state. The commendation read: “Anyone who wants to know who we were and what we did in the first half-century of the State of Israel may turn to the work of the Gashashim.”15 (In regard to the trio’s YouTube rendition of “ovdim aleynu,” viewers remark on how little has changed in the intervening years.)

  Yet if we were to trace Israel’s history through its humor, we would perceive a downward trajectory in precisely those qualities of courtesy, affection, and national cohesion that the Israel Prize committee remarked on in its praise of the Gashashim. Their own later humor, indeed, would become coarsened with features that seemed to be coarsening the culture at large, in part thanks to the ambiguous consequences of rising standards of living. In a skit titled “Kreker vs. Kreker”—a takeoff on the 1979 U.S. film Kramer vs. Kramer—a family argument erupts among a wealthy husband, wife, and only child in which the escalating exchanges of invective resemble those that once raged between the fan and referee in the earlier skit, except that the impersonated female buffing her nails in contempt of her husband is far less charming than the Betar enthusiast who cannot restrain his love for his team. The cooling attachment of wife for husband reflects the cooling affection of her social class for the family of Israel, and a society once comical for its difficulties in coming together is now mocked for its ease in coming apart. The drugs and depression that eventually took their toll on some of those who wrote for the Gashashim left their mark on the country’s humor as well.

  But the most obvious cause for the darkening colors of Israeli humor was, and remains, the regional hostility that overturned the nation’s expectations of political normalcy. Of all the predictions of Zionism, none was as severely thwarted as the prospect of peaceful relations between the Jewish state and its neighbors. Liberal democracies are by nature reluctant combatants, and Jews, who had long since developed a politics of accommodation to power, realized only slowly and reluctantly that in Israel, winning wars might remain the necessary price of Jewish survival.

  Israel’s first feature film, Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), remains—despite its English and polyglot dialogue—the most iconic representation of Israel’s War of Independence. Its conventional story line shows four soldiers of varied backgrounds and languages trying to secure a strategic outpost against superior Arab forces that also include a former unrepentant Nazi. The sacrifice of the few secures the land for the many. In a 1975 parody of this film starring the Gashashim, Hill Halfon Doesn’t Answer, a sergeant in love with the younger daughter of a certain Victor Hasson has been ordered to bring back to his outpost in the Sinai an Italianate Israeli gambler named Sergio Konstanza, who is hoping to elude his Egyptian Israeli creditor, the said Hasson. Although the post’s soldiers and commanding officer are presumably concerned about an impending Egyptian attack, slapstick routines with exploding grenades and bulldozed outdoor privies make ostentatious fun of the enterprise. Funniest is the dialogue, here between a visiting commander and Hasson, who has come to the post in pursuit of his prey and must pretend that he, too, is doing military service.

  “What do you do if the Egyptians approach the post?”

  “What we did in ’56!”

  “What did you do in ’56?”

  “What we did in ’48. It doesn’t get better than that!”

  “What did you do in ’48?”

  “Thirty years ago, you expect me to remember?”16

  Lampooning the disparity between a determinedly informal citizenry and the demands of military exigency, the parody also acknowledges that the War of Independence is still being fought. And in fa
ct, by the time of this film, in addition to the wars of 1956 and 1948, Israel had been made to fight the war of 1967, the 1969–70 “war of attrition” along the Suez Canal, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Yet when Hasson accidentally crosses a UN boundary, is picked up by the Egyptians, and interrogated as a spy, the episode is played not only for laughs but also for laughs at the very idea that there is any real enmity involved. Hasson teaches his Arab interrogator, a fellow “Mizrahi,” how to make proper coffee, and prisoner and interrogator even sing a line or two together from Fiddler on the Roof in a salute to the international culture that embraces all.17

  Some of Israel’s war-weary humor can be likened to that of the U.S. movie and long-running sitcom MASH (1970, 1972–83), which transformed the Korean battlefront, at a distance of twenty years, into a theater of comedy. The antiwar sting of MASH reflected the political outlook of Americans opposed to their country’s military role in Vietnam, suggesting the absurdities of the current involvement through the supposed absurdities of the earlier one. Halfon, the Gashashim version of this antiwar comedy, was existentially (though perhaps not artistically) more complex, since the enemy was within arm’s reach, and no Jew in the country was exempt from the fight.

  This paradoxically may help to explain why Halfon has become a staple of Israel Independence Day entertainment, whereas replaying a film like Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer would merely reopen the wound of unrealized hopes—hopes that had been an integral element of the Jewish struggle for historical vindication. Rehearsing an ironic response to those unrealized hopes is a way of reaffirming Israel’s resolution to carry on precisely in the face of disappointed expectations. In the way that Yiddish comedy seldom portrayed the main cause of its anxiety, but instead sought comic relief in intramural ridicule that obscured the greater enemy threat, Halfon obscures the real and present Arab danger through spoofs of incompetent Jews. The Israeli army post has replaced Sholem Aleichem’s railroad car as the place where threatened Jews come comically together.

  The heyday of the Gashashim and Hill Halfon Doesn’t Answer coincided with a period of relative optimism in Israel, but the diplomatic assault on the country’s legitimacy and expanding menace of terrorism gradually hardened the national sense of siege. Even Anwar Sadat’s welcome visit in 1977 took away with one hand what it brought with the other, requiring Israel’s traumatic withdrawal from the Sinai and a treaty that never yielded the reciprocal relations it promised. That the formal peace concluded between the two countries caused Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League and triggered Sadat’s assassination two years later reinforced not Egypt’s but Israel’s isolation, since it showed the depth of pan-Arab commitment to the war against the Jewish state. Moreover, once Egypt made it clear that it had no intention of honoring the terms of the agreement it had undertaken, it was allowed back into the League.

  Why drag the war against Israel into a book on Jewish humor? Because Jewish humor is affected by anti-Jewish politics. Like salt poured into water, unwelcome hostility turns Jewish humor more flavorful yet progressively heavier. Seeking acceptance from their opponents, some Jews have always expressed the frustrations of their unrequited goodwill through humor. Greater enmity from without increases the wish for comic relief from the indignity of having to suffer the consequences of another people’s madness. One might call it a psychochemical reaction with by now predictable results, which is why students of Israeli humor single out January 16–18, 1991, at the height of the first Gulf War, as its most significant turning point to date.18 The rain of Scud missiles that brought the conflict to noncombatant Israel gave new meaning to the depiction of Tel Aviv as “the city that never sleeps.”

  The missile raids of the first Gulf War were distinguished from previous Arab attacks not by the toll in casualties, which were comparatively light, but instead by the imposed proscription of acts of self-defense. Arab member states included in the coalition that the United States led against Saddam Hussein to prevent his annexation of Kuwait refused to allow Israel’s “participation” even when the country came under direct attack. This caused the absurd spectacle of Israelis huddling in sealed rooms with gas masks because their allies, the Americans, did not allow them to strike back against the common Iraqi foe—a foe whose Arab connections permitted it to bombard the Jews without fear of retaliation by them. No less convoluted was the U.S. effort to intercept and shoot down Hussein’s Scuds lest Israelis be killed as a consequence of the United States having prevented their self-defense. The absurdist twists of Heller’s Catch-22 (an antiwar novel originally written with a Jewish rather than Armenian protagonist) seem puny by comparison.

  No Israeli parent, having donned and helped his or her children into gas masks, could fail to recognize a resemblance to the situation of the gassed Jews of Europe—a situation that the Israeli’s own parents may have escaped, or that their grandparents had come to Israel to avoid. The army spokesperson who reported the news during this war was dubbed Tilim Zoger: tilim is Hebrew for “missiles,” and tehilim zoger is Yiddish for the psalm-reciting functionary whom traditional Jews relied on to secure divine protection. Psychologists concluded that “when Jews in Israel were confronted with conditions similar to those in the Diaspora, the characteristics of old Jewish humor appeared again.”19 Israelis themselves made the connection: “What’s the difference between Saddam and Haman [the archetypal villain of the Book of Esther and the Jewish masquerading holiday of Purim]? Haman was hanged, and then we donned masks. With Saddam, the masks came first.”

  The humiliations of enforced passivity were augmented by the televised display of Palestinians dancing on their rooftops at the sight of missiles falling on Israeli Jews—and on fellow Arabs. Israeli identity, forged in opposition to the political impotence of the Diaspora, was confronted with a political experience almost designed to prove a historical connection between the two conditions.

  But that is only one part, and the grimmer part, of Israeli humor in those days. If some joking flowed back into more familiar Jewish channels—including the preference for internalized humor versus humor directed at the enemy—this was less true of the humor under active development by the Mizrahi Jews of Israel, whose presence had by then affected all aspects of the country’s formal and popular culture. Just as the specifically European forms of anti-Semitism were alien to Jews deriving from Arab lands, so it was commonly observed, these Jews had also been bypassed by the European “Enlightenment” with its consequent separation of church from state. In part as a result, they tended to feel more at ease with religious observance than did many of their Ashkenazi counterparts, and less threatened by a politicized rabbinate.

  All this may help to account for the popularity of one of Israel’s comic creations that came into its element during the first Gulf War: the Baba Buba, fashioned after the renowned Baba Sali (Yisrael Abuhatzeira, 1890–1984, rabbi and kabbalist who had spearheaded the emigration of Moroccan Jewry to Israel) and his son Baba Borukh, who still played a key role among Israel’s Mizrahi Jews. The honorific baba is Arabic for “father,” and buba (rhymes with tuba) is Hebrew for “doll,” telegraphing Baba Buba’s parodic function as a cartoonlike authority dispensing interpretations of current events with all the acumen of Gilda Radner’s news commentator Roseanne Roseannadanna on Saturday Night Live.

  Baba Buba’s tool of interpretation was gematria, which makes use of the numerical value of Hebrew letters to ascribe hidden meaning to words and expressions. The custom had a respectable rabbinic history, but its apparent irrationality had made it a target of Jewish satire from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Enacted by the comic Moni Moshonov, Baba Buba interprets events in the news by subjecting them to the methods of gematria embellished with absurd exegeses of people’s names—for instance, by reversing the elements that make up the name Schwartzkopf (“Blackhead,” after Norman Schwartzkopf, commander of the coalition forces in the war), because “only after things happen do we know what should have happened to begin with.”20
In a study of the psychological contributions of humor to Israel during this crisis, Ofra Nevo suggests that such reversals and paradoxes were an ideal vehicle for the irrational process people were experiencing. The logic of gematria was less kooky than that of requiring Israel to play sitting target in order to accommodate Arab nations that could not fight their own battles.

  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.