The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  Leore drops us off at the checkpoint, an imposing conglomeration of barracks and fences and 26-foot-high concrete walls. Beyond lies Palestine. Gesturing with his assault rifle, a gruff-looking Israeli soldier directs us toward a cheerless one-story building. Inside, we pass through a series of floor-to-ceiling turnstiles. I glance around to figure out what’s next in the security process, steeling myself for a gauntlet of questions and paperwork. But then I notice through a sunlit doorway a line of dingy Palestinian cabs idling at a curbside, eager to take us on our way.

  “That’s it?” I ask. We had just entered one of the most turbulent places on earth, and it was easier than navigating a New York City subway station.

  “Yeah,” says Pete. “But just remember: it’s a lot easier getting in than getting out.”

  The incident began on an overcast January day in 1968, just off the coast of North Korea. Patrolling the area, North Korean naval vessels spotted a suspicious cargo ship and moved in to investigate. The crew on the ship raised an American flag, and the North Koreans ordered it to stand down. Upon boarding their prize, North Korean officers found a trove of classified documents in various stages of hurried destruction.

  North Korea had captured a U.S. spy boat, the USS Pueblo.

  As news of the capture spread to the States, the USS Pueblo’s 82 crew members were locked away in a POW camp in Pyongyang. North Korean guards tortured the American officers, holding loaded guns to their heads and demanding confessions. At first, most of the prisoners assumed the situation wouldn’t last long. But with the Vietnam War escalating, the administration decided one international quagmire was enough. There would be no ultimatum, no rescue mission. The 82 crew members were being left behind.

  But then something strange happened. Things got funny.

  The North Koreans demanded the prisoners write letters back to the States renouncing their evil capitalist ways. Instead, the crew members scribbled out comedy routines. “Say hi to Howdy Doody for me,” one prisoner wrote to his mother. Lloyd Bucher, the USS Pueblo’s commander, admitted to having been given spying orders “in the TOP SECRET Japanese lair of the CIA’s evil genius, Sol Loxfinger,” a name he borrowed from a James Bond lampoon in Playboy magazine.1 In his final confession, Bucher wrote it was his “fervent desire to paean the Korean People’s Army Navy, and their government.” Apparently nobody noticed that he’d stated he wanted to pee on his captors.

  Then there was “the digit affair.” In staged photos taken of the prisoners, crew members began flipping off the camera. Soon nearly all the propaganda photos of the captives showed the crewmen giving North Koreans the bird. Eventually, North Korean brass demanded to know what the middle finger meant. Bucher, on behalf of his crew, explained, “Why, that’s the Hawaiian good luck sign.”

  “The whole ordeal was one big humorous thing,” said Alvin Plucker of the eleven months he and his crew members spent in captivity, which ended on December 23, 1968, when the North Koreans released them. Plucker, a friendly fellow with thin gray hair and piercing blue eyes, is the vice president of the USS Pueblo Veterans Association and the group’s unofficial historian. He lives just an hour from me in Colorado, and so I visited the makeshift USS Pueblo museum he’s fashioned in his basement. The small, windowless room is crammed with memorabilia—a copy of The Pyongyang Times announcing the capture of an “Armed Spy Ship,” the gray rice-straw prisoner’s uniform he wore in captivity. On one wall there’s a photo of Commander Bucher, taken a month before he died in 2004, beaming and flashing the Hawaiian good luck sign.

  Stories like the Pueblo incident and the digit affair suggest humor is far more durable than most people realize. Pete connects it to the benign violation theory: you need to start with a bunch of violations, he explains, if you want to come up with great benign violations. He’s not the first person to suggest that laughter and pain go hand in hand. As Mark Twain wrote, “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in Heaven.”2

  But here’s what’s puzzling about suffering and humor: people in desperate situations seem compelled to be humorous, even when it might get them in trouble. Flipping off their captors wasn’t in USS Pueblo crew members’ best interest. Just like telling taboo anekdoty, or jokes, in the USSR was a big no-no. But that didn’t discourage the Soviet citizenry from developing one of the richest joke collections the world over. There were even Soviet jokes about jokers busted for their jokes:

  Who dug the White Sea Canal?

  The right bank was dug by those who related anecdotes.

  And the left bank?

  Those who listened.3

  It’s almost as if making people laugh during dark and troubling times is so vital, so crucial, that it overrides common sense, and maybe even self-preservation.

  Maybe we’ll find this same against-all-odds humor in Palestine. But for our own self-preservation, we won’t be flashing the Hawaiian good luck sign at anybody.

  In the Palestinian city of Ramallah, we are off the map.

  Ramallah is the administrative capital of the territory, the seat of power for the Palestinian Authority, the political apparatus that controls the West Bank. The city is also experiencing something of a building boom, thanks to the loosening military restrictions in the area and increased foreign aid and investment.

  But still, there is no map of Ramallah. That’s according to the concierge at our accommodations at the Mövenpick Ramallah—a brand-new, $40 million operation that’s the city’s first five-star hotel. He tells us, “We are still growing. We don’t need maps yet.”

  He’s confused about why we’d want to walk around Ramallah. “The old city?” he responds when we ask about historical parts of town. “There is an old city, but you can’t use it.”

  We discover the concierge is wrong: we do need a map of Ramallah. The city is modern and Mediterranean, filled with mid-level high-rises topped with terracotta roofs and mosque minarets piercing the hazy turquoise sky. But it’s also confusing. A perplexing tangle of streets roll up and down Ramallah’s rocky hills, and spending too much time wandering them would be a surefire detriment to our health. The narrow, undulating sidewalks are pockmarked by gaping holes and cracks, with streetlights few and far between.

  “One thing you can say about Palestine is there are lot of rocks,” says Pete as we wilt beneath the noonday sun. “For a population that isn’t armed, that’s useful.”

  Everywhere we look, there are cafés and restaurants where we could seek shade and directions. But because it’s Ramadan, most are shuttered. Two upscale coffee shops are open, we are told: Zamen, a café on one side of town, and Zaman, a different operation on the other side. When we ask a taxi driver to take us to one, he typically will deposit us at the other.

  After failing to find anything of interest in the city on our own, we flag down one of Ramallah’s ubiquitous yellow cabs. The drivers seem to operate with one hand affixed to their horn. “Can you take us to the old city?” we ask, to a look of incomprehension. “The old town?” we try. “The place where there are old buildings?” Stumped, the driver calls his taxi dispatch—who apparently hasn’t heard of the old city, either. We give up and decide to head back to our hotel. “How about the Mövenpick?”

  “Ah, the Mövenpick!” replies the driver triumphantly, and deposits us back where we started.

  But we’re not going to give up that easily. After all, we know comedy is no stranger to the Middle East. Islam has long embraced humanity’s funny bone, just like every other successful faith.

  “Humor is part of the human experience. If a religion does not fully embrace the scope of the human experience, it is not going to make sense to a lot of people,” says Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest who’s been named the “Colbert Report Chaplain,” as well as author of the book Between Heaven and Mirth. “From a practical point of view, if you were starting a religion on your own, who would want to come to your services if it were just a gloomy group of people?” Maybe that’s why the
origin story for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam begins with a chuckle. In the book of Genesis, when the 100-year-old Abraham, the forefather of all three religions, learns from God that he will bear a child with his 90-year-old wife Sarah, he falls on his face laughing. No wonder they name this child Isaac, Hebrew for “he laughs.”

  The Koran, too, insists humor is divinely inspired. As the Islamic holy book notes, God is the one “Who makes (men) laugh and makes (them) weep.”4 And while Europe was bumbling through the Dark Ages, the Arabs kept the high art of hilarity alive. In the eleventh century, Iranian scholar Al-Abi took up that mantle with “Scattered Pearls,” an unparalleled seven-volume encyclopedia of jokes and anecdotes that begins by cracking wise about Muslim traditions, then digresses into chapters on lunatics, transvestites, noisy (and silent) farting, and a treatise on those considered the worst of the worst: canal sweepers.5

  Have Palestine’s tribulations wiped away that comedic tradition or fostered its growth? Since all of our official plans have fallen through, we go about our research the old-fashioned way: we approach random strangers around Ramallah and ask if they are funny.

  Pete waylays a stylish young woman smoking a cigarette at one of the Zamen cafés. “I don’t think we’re funny,” she says. But her equally chic female companion scoffs. “Tell them what your name is,” she says.

  “Hurriyah Ziada.”

  “In Arabic, that means ‘Extra Freedom,’ ” says her friend. “Her name is ‘Extra Freedom’ and she lives in Palestine. Now, that’s funny.”

  The French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that comedy arose from “something mechanical encrusted on the living,” awkward attempts to restrict the manner folks go about their lives. It may be why the Soviet Union was such a gold mine of punch lines, since Communist leaders tried to mechanize every aspect of daily existence. The results were awkward, to put it mildly.

  In Palestine, too, life is defined by restriction. Arbitrary checkpoints hamper commutes. Where you can travel is limited by what color identification card you have in your wallet. And since 2007, when Palestine fractured into warring factions, with the hard-line Hamas party taking power in the Gaza Strip and the more moderate Fatah party controlling the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, there’s not even much harmony between the two isolated territories.

  In other words, there are plenty of violations around here to make benign.

  Later, after evening prayers echo from the minarets to mark the end of the day’s fasting, Ramallah comes alive. The shops and eateries throw open their doors, and the streets throng with people hungry for food and social interaction. Overlooking a taxi-clogged traffic circle that doubles as the city’s central square, young people drink espresso at the “Stars and Bucks Cafe,” which flaunts its copyright-violating name and logo. Down the street, techno music pulses out of the provocatively named “911 Cafe,” where waiters deliver drinks in faux bulletproof vests.

  On an open-air patio, we join in with a group of middle-aged men sharing a bubbling hookah pipe. They ask if we’ve heard about the unofficial Arab comedy ladder. On one end, the funniest of the funny, there is Egypt, a place so chock-full of jokesters that during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a special intelligence unit monitored wisecracks about the government.6 On the other end of the comedy scale is Jordan. One of our companions cracks: “Have you heard the one about the Jordanian businessman? Every morning before work he puts on his shirt, tie, and angry face.”

  So where does Palestine fall on the Arab comedy ladder?

  The best person to ask is Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology and folklore at Berzeit University in Ramallah, since he’s spent his career collecting Palestinian jokes. But to go along with our bad luck, he’s not in the West Bank. He’s in the States, visiting his son in California. “Despite all of the pain and agony, there is a lot of humor in Palestine,” says Kanaana over the phone. Much more, in fact, than he ever expected. Israeli-Palestinian relations over the last few decades have been marked by a cycle of intifadas, periods of intensified conflict. In 1989, the midst of the First Intifada, Kanaana was struck by all of the wisecracks and laughter he witnessed among the revolutionary youths, even as they returned bruised and bloodied from confrontations with Israeli soldiers.

  To explain all that laughing, Kanaana began collecting the jokes he heard—and he never stopped. Now he has an archive of thousands of Palestinian jokes, all written down on index cards and arranged chronologically in his office.

  And according to Kanaana, among all those boxes and binders of jokes, he found a pattern. During the First Intifada, when unity and energy swept the occupied territories, the jokes depicted the Palestinians as champions. Many involved canny street kids getting the better of Israeli soldiers. But then, in the disillusioned low in between the First Intifada and the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, the jokes turned dark and pessimistic. One post-intifada joke describes several heads of state meeting with God and making requests for their people. To each, God says, “Not in your lifetime.” Then Yasser Arafat, the former Palestinian leader, asks for his people’s freedom and God says, “Not in my lifetime.”

  “The humor follows a curve,” says Kanaana. “In retrospect, you can see the uprising coming from the humor you find. The morale gets very low, the jokes turn very dark, and people start to demand something be done. Then the uprising comes.”

  So, I ask him, what do the jokes he’s found lately say about Palestine’s future?

  Kanaana’s voice darkens. “For the last year and a half or so, there hasn’t been anything new,” he says. “What it means to me is that the Palestinian people cannot see where things are going. They cannot see a way out of the present situation. Therefore, they have no humor.”

  The sketch comedy program with no plans to tape while we’re in town haunts us wherever we go. Every evening after the breaking of the Ramadan fast, televisions are switched on in restaurants, cafés, and homes all over the city in time to catch the intro music for Watan ala Watar, Arabic for “Homeland on a String.” Usually the fifteen-minute show airs once a week, but during Ramadan, it airs nightly. The holy month is apparently akin to the U.S. “sweeps” period, since after the big post-sundown meal, everybody crashes in front of the TV.

  On one of our first nights in Ramallah, we convince the hotel staff in the Mövenpick’s lounge to switch on the show and ask a local businessman we’ve been chatting with to translate. The first sketch opens with angry locals besieging the Palestinian attorney general. They all want to file lawsuits over Watan ala Watar making fun of them, says the businessman, translating from Arabic. One woman in the sketch says the TV show hasn’t parodied her yet, but she wants to file suit preemptively. During the commotion, the frazzled attorney general gets a call. It turns out the show just made fun of him, too.

  A couple days later, we meet with the woman from the sketch, Manal Awad, at one of the two Zamen cafés. Even here, among the city’s elite, her Western appearance—trendy jeans, a stylish shirt—is striking. “Before we started, there had never been stand-up comedy in Palestine,” she says with a British accent, courtesy of her time in London pursuing a master’s degree in theater directing. Every time she puffs on her cigarette, a tiny tattoo flashes below her right wrist. It’s hard to imagine the thirtysomething’s dark curly hair ever hidden under a hijab, unless it’s for the purpose of a comedy skit.

  While Israel has a long history of popular satirical television shows like Eretz Nehederet, Yiddish for “It’s a Wonderful Country,” Palestine’s airwaves were satire-free. That changed thanks to Awad and her two colleagues, Imad Farajin and Khalid Massou, a trio that first began developing a comedy act in 2008. Their resulting theatrical show was a huge hit, drawing the likes of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Then came the offer of a show on state-run television, which Manal says they accepted on one condition: “No censorship.”

  Palestinian officialdom agreed, even allowing them to air a sketch in which
President Mahmoud Abbas announces a peace deal—that is, Mahmoud Abbas the thirteenth, at a time 500 years in the future. Hamas, too, has received its fair share of knocks. One skit featured an Islamist judge in Gaza making eyes at a male courtroom reporter. No one is off limits: Israeli negotiators, Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama. While the shenanigans have angered Hamas—its Ministry of Information in Gaza called the show “an example of black propaganda”—it has long enjoyed the blessing of the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of President Abbas’s closest advisers, even played himself on the show.

  In 2010, a polling organization found that 60 percent of those in the West Bank and Gaza who’d seen Watan ala Watar liked it, far higher approval ratings than either of Palestine’s two major political parties. With a mandate like that, Awad and her colleagues have diversified, turning their satirical gaze upon Palestinian society: outdated medical practices, shabby police operations, backward cultural traditions. They also have plans to start a comedy training program, maybe someday open Palestine’s first-ever stand-up club.

  While the everyday jokes Professor Sharif Kanaana has long collected may be stagnant, in Ramallah the comedy business seems to be booming.

  That’s because folks around here are desperate for something—anything—fun to do, says Rami Mehdawi, a local journalist and social activist we meet one afternoon in Ramallah. “There has long been no space for any kind of entertainment here,” says Mehdawi, who sports a tightly cropped beard and a rakish smile. “I am 32 years old, and all I can do is go to the gym if I want to do something.” He points out that Ramallah is essentially park-free. There are no leafy promenades, no stretches of grass. With so little in the way of diversion, Palestinians are eager to embrace comedy or anything else to pass the time.

  To prove his point, Rami offers to become our unofficial guide to what little nightlife Ramallah offers. Pete’s all in, declaring, “Let’s go break some cultural norms!”