No Joke (26 page)

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 fact, 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.