by Peter McGraw
Rami is happy to oblige. He takes us to an open-air club in the hills over the city where student revolutionaries practice their pickup lines rather than debate rebel tactics. He introduces us to the pleasures of Arak, the traditional anise-flavored liquor, and Taybeh, the celebrated local beer. And he invites us to a bar to watch the big soccer match between Barcelona and Real Madrid, a rivalry Palestinians follow religiously. “The young generation needs something to believe in,” says Rami between handfuls of bar pretzels. “The new generation loves Barca and Real Madrid more than any leader, more than any nationality.”
After the game, Rami insists on checking out the late-night scene in the center of the city. Soon, we’re swept up in a maelstrom of honking cars and flag-waving young men. Everywhere, people are yelling and chanting, while Palestinian Authority soldiers fidget with assault rifles and attempt to maintain order. Is this noise the rumblings of a new uprising, the dawning of a new intifada?
Nope. Just jubilee over Barca’s game-winning goal.
Awad calls with good news: Watan ala Watar will be taping a show while we’re in town after all.
She offers to pick us up at the Mövenpick and take us to the shoot, but when the day comes, she stands us up. Half an hour passes, then an hour. Pete calls her cell.
Something terrible has happened, she tells us. The Palestinian attorney general has shut down the show, citing recent grievances filed over it. It’s reminiscent of the Watan ala Watar sketch we’d watched several days earlier—maybe too reminiscent. It seems the attorney general can’t take a joke.
We jump into action. We reach out to a contact we’ve landed in the Palestinian Authority, and soon we’ve finagled the personal number of the attorney general. Pete, in full investigative-reporter mode, wastes no time making use of it. “Hello, this is Peter McGraw,” he declares into his phone when he gets through. “Hello? Hello? Hello?” He goes on like this for a while, then puts his phone away. “I got in eight hellos, then he hung up,” he says. So much for that Pulitzer.
Disheartened, we take a taxi to the security checkpoint back into Israel. We’re scheduled to meet with a Holocaust survivor named Gizelle Cycowycz in Jerusalem. But as Pete predicted, getting out from the Palestinian side, where the graffiti-covered barrier walls are blackened from Molotov cocktails, is more complicated than getting in. At the checkpoint, we join a line of Palestinians lucky enough to have the right permits in a dirty, corral-like hallway, waiting for an electric turnstile to let us through. The gateway seems to start and stop arbitrarily, severing husbands from wives, mothers from children. In the corridor beyond, Palestinians run belongings through a metal detector and flash their identification to young Israeli soldiers peering through thick glass panels. It’s a tense experience—not just for those of us moving through, but also for those on the other side of the glass. All in all, the process takes us twenty minutes, but we consider ourselves lucky. We’ve heard the waiting times at checkpoints can sometimes be hours long.
We take a crowded bus into the city, riding through East Jerusalem, the largely Arab, holy site–rich neighborhood that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their own. After our time in Ramallah, it’s striking to notice what we’d been missing. Clean streets. Traffic lights. Trees.
Cycowycz lives on a quiet, tree-lined street not far from Jerusalem’s old city. She welcomes us into her spacious apartment, brimming with artwork and book-laden shelves. Like all good Jewish grandmothers, she offers us massive amounts of food. Once we’ve had our fill of tea and cookies and chocolate, we want to hear her story.
For the next several hours, Cycowycz tells us her tale: the Nazis taking over her native Czech Republic when she was a young girl, forcing her out of school and her father out of his job. Getting sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp as a teenager, where she was shorn of all hair and crammed into a barrack with a thousand other women. Watching as those deemed too elderly, too infirm, or too young were shuffled off to the gas chamber. Eventually making it home with her mother and sisters after the war to find their house ransacked and desecrated—and learning that her father had been sent to Auschwitz’s crematorium on the last possible day.
It’s a horrible story, one all too common among survivors of the Holocaust. The sheer enormity of the “Shoah,” as Jews refer to it, is such that it’s hardly ever referred to in anything other than solemn or sacred tones. But while Holocaust humor is still off limits (aside from a few successful outliers like Mel Brooks’s The Producers), that doesn’t mean there wasn’t humor during the Holocaust. “We laughed under the worst circumstances,” says Cycowycz, a psychologist who now runs support groups for other Holocaust survivors. At night in her barracks, Cycowycz says the dirty jokes traded by former prostitutes who slept nearby fascinated her. When sent to a work camp, she and other girls on the production line giggled over funny songs and stories. And at times she laughed to herself over the hardships of those around her, something she’s not proud of today. “We were hungry like hell, but we laughed,” she says. “It had to be a release.”
A release, a salve, a moment of respite—that’s the explanation most people ascribe to the humor found during horrific ordeals such as the Holocaust. “Holocaust humor was about affirming life, not giving life,” says Steve Lipman, author of Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust. “It was a coping tool, an escape, a way to step back and take control of the situation in some small way.” The same goes for gallows humor, the idea of laughing at your fate when all hope seems lost. As Sigmund Freud put it, “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”7
Such humor was survival humor. And that may be why the sort of Holocaust jokes Gizelle describes to us—dark, witty, self-deprecating—sound familiar. We found the same brand of funny in Palestine. The beleaguered quips tracked by Sharif Kanaana after the intifadas, the put-upon snark of Watan ala Watar—this is humor as self-defense, a way for the tellers to inoculate themselves from further despair. It is, in other words, what many people consider “Jewish humor.”
It could be one more bit of ammunition in humor scholar Elliot Oring’s ongoing scholarly battle to dismantle the misnomer that is “Jewish humor,” the idea that Jews have long held a monopoly on self-deprecating underdog jokes. “People presume that Jewish humor is in some ways special, but no one has been able to say with evidence whether that is really the case,” Oring says. As he points out, there’s no proof, no Talmudic comedic passages or ancient Israelite joke books that suggest the Jews’ reputation as jokers is anything but a modern creation. For another, to suggest that Jews alone employ underdog humor ignores a rich variety of Jewish comedy, including the cutting satire and sometimes militaristic jokes of Israel. And lots of different people use humor as a psychological buffer zone, a way to put themselves down before their enemies have a chance to do so—and that includes the folks we’ve met in Ramallah. While most people on either side of the security barrier aren’t likely to admit it, Israelis and Palestinians share a comedic sense of self-preservation.
But while self-preservation may account for some of the jokes we find in Palestine, it can’t explain all of them. The assertive anti-Israeli jokes Sharif found during the height of the intifadas weren’t about surviving. And if the satirical humor of Watan ala Watar was just about helping people get by, government officials wouldn’t have been so eager to censor it. Instead, Awad and her colleagues had the same aim as all satirists who came before them, from Aristophanes to Jonathan Swift to Jon Stewart: mocking folly and vices to expose them.
Humor like this is a tool of subversion, proof that wit can be wielded like a weapon. But in Palestine, a place of flying projectiles, assault rifles, and explosives, does funny firepower stand a chance? We figure the best place to find out is at the Freedom Theatre.
It seemed only a matter of time until somebody somewhere lashed out. It happened one night a few months before we arrived in Palestine.
That evening, a masked assailant opened fire on Mer-Khamis as he was leaving the theater, killing him. The murder rocked both Israel and Palestine. We’d heard that in the wake of the tragedy, Mer-Khamis’s colleagues were attempting to carry on his mission at the theater. So we take a taxi to Jenin.
The hour-and-a-half cab ride, corkscrewing up and down rolling, arid hills, leaves Pete wracked by carsickness. I consider asking our driver to ease off on the breakneck speed, but then remember he hasn’t had a smoke, a drink, or a bite to eat all day.
When we get to the Freedom Theatre, a colorful building wedged into a dingy street on the outskirts of Jenin’s refugee camp, we find a world awash in chaos. Young children from the camp scream and run about the theater’s cramped offices, here to watch Dora the Explorer and Teletubbies with Arabic subtitles. Outside the 200-seat theater, signs still hang for Alice in Wonderland, the last play Mer-Khamis put on before he was killed.
In a side office, Jacob Gough, the theater’s acting general manager, hunches over a MacBook as he answers a stream of urgent phone calls. Gough, a wry, scraggly haired Welsh production manager who’s spent years living in Palestine, offered to help hold the Freedom Theatre together after Mer-Khamis’s death. He had no idea the level of bureaucratic absurdity he’d be up against.
The absurdity extends to Mer-Khamis’s murder investigation, he says. The Palestinian Authority tried to look into the matter, but since Israelis confiscated Mer-Khamis’s body, car, and personal belongings, there was little for local detectives to go on. And while the Israeli army has been conducting its own investigation, its strategy seems to involve little more than harassing members of Freedom Theatre in hopes that one of them would confess. The man arrested for Mer-Khamis’s murder has been released because of a lack of evidence. “The situation is absurd,” says Gough, shaking his head.
Since Gough is behind in his work, Pete and I venture off into the refugee camp. We expect it to resemble a scene from the nightly news, a sea of tents and thrown-together structures. Instead, the camp is a full-blown village—a town, even—crisscrossed with power lines and packed with concrete and cinderblock multistory buildings. Nearly 60 years old, it’s a camp in name only. The people here refuse to give up hope that they will one day return to their family land in Israel, even though most of them were born here.
Everywhere, there are signs of a community wracked by poverty and violence: empty lots piled high with dusty skeletons of desiccated cars. Cement walls pockmarked by bullet holes and covered in graffiti. A grim martyr’s cemetery housing many of those killed when the Israeli army occupied the camp in 2002. There’s little hope of a better life for these people anytime soon. What to do about the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced from Israel is one of the most intractable subjects in peace negotiations.
Pete, per usual, is eager to make everybody feel better. He borrowed a Barcelona soccer flag he found in our taxi driver’s glove compartment, and he waves it at any young children who pass our way. “BARCELONA!” he shouts at them like a deranged hooligan. The kids scream and try to snatch the flag, to Pete’s delight. “Let’s find more kids,” he says. Considering that Americans aren’t popular here, much less Americans who taunt small children, I suggest a little more discretion.
Moving through these labyrinthine streets, seeing the destitution and ruin, it’s easy to wonder if any of Mer-Khamis’s and his colleagues’ work makes a difference. That’s especially true of the satire Freedom Theatre uses to critique both Israel and Palestine. After all, some humor experts claim subversive humor doesn’t have any practical use whatsoever.
Show me an insurrection launched by joking, these skeptics say. Show me a despot overthrown, oppression overcome, because of the right punch line. Some people go further, arguing that not only is comedy incapable of launching revolutions, but it might have stopped a few from happening. Just as Pete’s PSA study suggested that funny sex-ed ads led people to take birth control less seriously, it’s possible that joking among the discontented masses might act as a safety valve, allowing folks to let off steam and view their plight in a less threatening manner instead of rising up in rebellion.
Even the great Soviet Union comedy boom, the upwell of political jokes just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, is suspect. International joke expert Christie Davies spent decades tracking USSR humor, and he concluded that among all the things that led to the Soviet Union’s spectacular collapse, joking didn’t even crack the top twenty.8 At best, the explosion of Soviet jokes was an indication of a rising fervor already under way among the populace, not the spark that turned up the heat. Or as Davies put it, “Jokes are a thermometer, not a thermostat.”9
Revolutionary humor, conclude Davies and other cynics, is a misnomer. There’s never been a case of jokes changing the world.
For Pete, this is a “black swan” argument, and it’s his favorite kind of reasoning to dismantle. All you have to do to disprove a statement like “There are no black swans,” he says, is find a single swan with black feathers.
In this case, we think we found a whole country of black swans.
Flash back to Serbia in 1999. The small Balkan state was in its tenth year in the autocratic grip of President Slobodan Milošević. Four recent wars with neighboring republics of the former Yugoslavia had left Serbia isolated, financially ravaged, and aggressively nationalistic. No one expected the situation to change any time soon.
A year later, everything was different. A half-million people had taken to the streets in protest, and Milošević resigned in disgrace. What happened in between? A whole lot of jokes.
It came at the hands of Otpor!, a Serbian youth movement. On Milošević’s birthday, Otpor! baked the president a giant cake, only to carve it up just as he’d disastrously carved up Yugoslavia. Another time, Otpor! leaked word to police that their main office in Belgrade was receiving a big delivery of important materials. The authorities showed up at the appropriate time to confiscate the heavy-looking crates, with the media standing by. Only the crates were empty, so when the police went to hoist them up and carry them away, they accidentally tossed them all in the air, looking like a Looney Tunes cartoon as the cameras rolled.
It was all about “laughtivism,” injecting humor into protest movements. That’s what I learn from former Otpor! leader Srđa Popović, a man who calls himself a disciple of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Monty Python. According to Popović, who met with me while he was staying in Colorado, teaching a class in nonviolent action, humor added three key elements to the movement. First, it allowed the protestors to break through the “fear barrier” that kept much of the population immobilized. It’s harder to be afraid of someone once you’ve laughed at him. Second, the young, laughing activists wearing hip Otpor! T-shirts and engaging in goofy street theater made protests seem cool and fun. Or as Popović put it to me with a wink, “If you weren’t arrested in Serbia in 2000, you couldn’t get laid.”
Finally, humor was integral to Otpor!’s signature “dilemma actions”—protests designed so that however Milošević responded, he looked stupid. One example involved Otpor! painting Milošević’s f
ace on a barrel and letting folks on the street take a whack at it. Since Milošević wasn’t about to let citizens smack him in the face, police confiscated the prop, allowing Otpor! to report that the authorities had arrested a barrel. In Denmark and Sweden, we’d learned how derogatory jokes and pranks often put the powerless in a lose-lose situation. Otpor! figured out a way to turn that phenomenon around and use it against the most powerful people of all.
“The age of laughtivism is coming,” promised Popović. As part of their new organization, the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, he and former Otpor! colleagues are now teaching laughtivism techniques to activists all over the world.
Maybe next can be a stint in Jenin. Despite its recent setbacks, Gough remains convinced that the operation Mer-Khamis built at the Freedom Theatre remains a potent weapon against intolerance and oppression. But the Freedom Theater performers need to polish their comedy routines. According to Gough, the jokes around here are rough stuff. Theater members once decided to play a prank on a new volunteer. Before the new guy left the theater one night, his colleagues warned that Israeli soldiers might be out and about. As he walked home, the former freedom fighter Zakaria Zubeidi snuck up behind him and put an assault rifle to his head. “Take me to Zakaria!” he shouted to the volunteer, impersonating an Israeli commando. “I want to kill him!”
The ruse continued, with Zakaria threatening to shoot the volunteer all the way back to his house. Only when the guy seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown did Zakaria reveal that—surprise!—it had all been a joke.
“Everyone thought it was funny,” says Gough, chuckling at the memory. Then he notices our stricken looks. On second thought, he says, “maybe the joke went a little too far.”
We’ve found humor in Palestine—a lot of it. But is it everywhere? Is there a point where circumstances become so difficult, so trying, that it’s hard to keep laughing? Is there a point where joking dies away?