The Humor Code (28 page)

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.

Israeli-born artist and activist Juliano Mer-Khamis founded the Freedom Theatre in 2006 in the West Bank city of Jenin. The idea was to serve the city's large population of refugees who'd fled Israel during the 1948 Palestine War. Mer-Khamis's decision to launch the theater with the help of Zakaria Zubeidi, the former leader of Jenin's martyr brigades, did little to endear his fellow Israeli countrymen to his endeavor; neither did his tendency to slam the occupation. But he had detractors in Palestine, too. The first play staged at the Freedom Theatre was a Palestinian version of
Animal Farm
, George Orwell's satire of revolutionaries. On stage, boys and girls acted together while wearing pig masks. It didn't go over too well with conservative Muslim nationalists.

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.”
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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 MiloÅ¡ević responded, he
looked stupid. One example involved Otpor! painting Milošević's face 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?

Alvin Plucker, survivor of the USS
Pueblo
incident, reached that point—though it wasn't while he was locked away in North Korea. It was after he returned home, in the subsequent decades as he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he'd been through. “It changed you,” he told me. “There was no more laugh in you.”

Gizelle experienced that moment during the Holocaust. For her, the laughter came when there were flashes of relief—the time she spent at a work camp, the moments she spent with her sisters. But often, she says, the oppressive doom of Auschwitz killed all potential for humor. The thousands of gaunt faces, the omnipresent aura of dread, the terrible cold and hunger—it was too much for humor to survive.

Pete has found this comedic point of no return in his research. When Hurricane Sandy first developed in the western Caribbean in late October 2012, he and his collaborators, Lawrence Williams and Caleb Warren, collected potentially humorous tweets from the Twitter account @AHurricaneSandy, such as “It's RAINING men. Literally. I just picked up a bunch of dudes and threw them” and “OH SHIT JUST DESTROYED A STARBUCKS. NOW I'M A PUMPKIN SPICE HURRICANE.” Then, at various points as the hurricane approached the East Coast of the United States, came ashore, and subsided, online study participants rated the funniness of these tweets. The resulting humor ratings followed a curvilinear pattern. The day before the storm hit, participants scored the tweets the funniest. Humor ratings peaked again 36 days later, then dwindled as the catastrophe faded from memory. But in between these two comedic high points, as the hurricane made landfall and left millions without power, the nation reeling from billions of dollars in damages, and communities in mourning for the hundreds killed? Far fewer people found @AHurricaneSandy funny.
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