In last month’s column, I told the story of my trip to Israel with six Canadian comics. But I saved the best (or worst) story until now.
The second night of our tour, we scheduled a gig in East Jerusalem, to perform for a Palestinian crowd.
It’s important to stress that this tour had no political agenda. We had a cultural agenda to bring Canadian comedy to the Middle East and perhaps bring some Middle Eastern comedy back to Canada, but that was it. We would show them our comedy routines and hope to be received with open minds. Admittedly, a lot of the comics touch on lifestyle issues that can be controversial to a fundamentalist mindset. But we wanted to take the risk.
We weren’t sure what to expect from the audience, and we almost lost the opportunity to find out after one sentence.
Out of sheer ignorance, with no malice intended, emcee Sam Easton opened up with the line “Thank you for having us here. It’s a pleasure to be here in Israel.”
Except that, to the people in the audience, we weren’t in Israel. We were in East Jerusalem, currently under occupation by Israel.
The catcalls, heckling and booing began immediately. The walkouts followed. Some of the audience waited around to hassle, even threaten, Sam and the next performer, Jean Paul, when they went to the bar at the edge of the courtyard. At this point, the manager, apologetic and embarrassed, told us what was going on. I immediately asked Adi Khalefa, a leading Palestinian comic who was hanging out with us, to take the stage.
He cooled the crowd down, and about a third of them stayed for the rest of the show. I was worried because a lot of the comics deal with sexually explicit themes that are not part of the crowd’s cultural DNA. Strangely, they took this material in stride. It was the one word, “Israel,” that was the obscenity.
If we had been told before the show, or if someone in the audience had diplomatically approached one of us during Sam’s opening routine, we would have gotten the message. But the word, the issue, was so touchy to this audience that we just weren’t given the benefit of the doubt.
You might think the story ends there, but it doesn’t. It’s the Middle East and everyone has an agenda.
Hearing about the debacle, Gil Troy, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, wrote a major piece about it a few days later. His take on the event was that it proved that the Palestinians were totalitarian in spirit, as evidenced by the way we were treated.
For both sides, it seemed clear that we see what we expect to see. Everybody jumped into the debate. There was a big story in Haaretz, the Post’s rival, and I was interviewed on many radio shows. And it was all captured by our documentary film crew.
When North American audiences are offended by a comic, it usually revolves around questions of taste or the lack of it. But on our trip, we realized something as simple as nomenclature can have disastrous and polarizing effects on a crowd.
In the Middle East, words can have the power of life and death, something I will remind myself of when someone walks out of one of my comedy clubs because of a silly joke about sex, body functions or some other supposed “taboo.”
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books, including Control Freaked.