The Humor Code (26 page)

The Israelis have clearly moved on from the whole “suffering through millennia-long exodus” thing with determination and style. In 1948, they carved out a piece of Palestine roughly the size of New Jersey, and then, once they'd fended off the resulting incursion of Egyptian, Syrian, Transjordan, and Iraqi forces, moved forward with establishing an independent state. Since then, they've fended off attacks from one Arab neighbor after another and taken the land they'd claimed—a rugged backwater region that Mark Twain described as “desolate and unlovely”—and built one of the most developed countries in the world. As a side project, they took the ancient literary language of Hebrew, at the time not spoken by anybody, and turned it into the mother tongue of Israel's 5.8 million Jews.

There was just one problem in the Zionist plan to reclaim their ancient homeland: there were a lot of Arabs living there who weren't keen on the arrangement. Hence the violent fracturing of the region into the Jewish-controlled state of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Although Israel has thrived, Palestine has not. Palestine's per capita GDP is just $2,900, about the same as Ghana's. Life expectancy is only 66 years, compared to 80 in Israel. In most financial and social benchmarks, Palestine falls far down the list of country-by-country rankings—that is, if Palestine were a country and not an amalgamation of occupied territories without a unified government, a standing army, or even an agreed-upon border.

And right now it's in the middle of summer, and Palestine and the rest of the Muslim world is in the midst of Ramadan, the holy month in which many Muslims refrain from eating or drinking all day. It's the sort of arrangement that would make anybody less than chipper,
let alone someone living in a struggling, war-torn region in the midst of the sweltering Middle Eastern summer.

Outside the taxi, an increasingly parched and hilly landscape rolls by. As we move farther inland, away from the Mediterranean, grass and trees give way to dusty knolls and valleys of scrub brush. Watchtowers top hilltops, and along one stretch of the highway, a shorn-off Israeli fighter jet wing is propped up like a macabre roadside attraction. I ask Leore how often he drives foreigners to the Qalandia checkpoint, which connects Jerusalem to the West Bank. It used to be fairly common, he says, but not so much since an Israeli tank gunned down an Italian journalist a few months back. I change the subject.

Most cabbies refused to take us to the main checkpoint into the West Bank because of the rocks that sometimes come hurtling over the wall and do a number on their paint jobs. But Leore didn't hesitate. He understands the Palestinian situation, he says, noting, “It's like Bruce Springsteen, when he's singing about the lowest of the low.”

Encouraged, we broach the subject of Israeli settlements, the Jewish communities encroaching onto the West Bank to claim more land for Israel. The settlements have triggered protests and violence and have been condemned by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations. “What do you think of those settlers?” Pete asks Leore, his tone suggesting we should all be able to agree they're a tad bit excessive.

“Why does everyone call them settlers?” Leore snaps back. “It is our land!” We scrap our plan to usher in a peace plan to the strains of “Born to Run.” Leore elaborates: “I don't hate Palestinians, but I don't like them.”

So there you have it: we're about to enter a region scarred by decades of violence and suffering, a place controlled by cocksure and annoyed Israelis holding big guns and Palestinians going about in the sweltering heat with hunger headaches.

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.