The Humor Code (27 page)

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.
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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!”

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.”
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