You heard the one about the journalist and the academic, co-authors of a book called The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, who wrote an article in the Washington Post last Sunday about Palestinian stand-up comics and jokesters? No punchline here, really, just a seeming puzzle. How could the Palestinians, you ask, crushed to a fragment of their humanity, find it in themselves to compose gags about themselves?
Ay, there’s the rub. For as Joel Warner and Peter McGraw tell us in their Washington Post piece, the sobering truth about humour is that it originates in internalised suffering and speaks to and about alienation, otherness, despair, helplessness and the rest of it.
As any therapist would attest, from Sigmund Freud down, jokes are a necessary function of human survival and they play a vital role as a buffer between the sufferer and the source of the suffering. As such, they are an outward expression of human resistance.
And humorists are the heroes of the realm here, for they are the ones, sad souls one and all, who were there first to internalise their people’s pain, process it inwardly, and give it back as a twisted dialectic in the form of a joke. Surely a happy comic is an oxymoron.
Consider the routine of one Palestinian stand-up comic, Adli Khalifa, cited by Warner and McGraw in their piece, where he talks about getting on a plane in Israel and noticing a sign on the bathroom door reading “Occupied”.
He bemoans the fact that “not just Palestine is occupied, but the bathroom on the plane is occupied as well”, before breaking into a subverted version of a patriotic chant: “From the River to the Sea, our bathrooms will be free”. Heaven knows that Palestinians have suffered long enough to form their own body of self-deprecating national humour, anchored in their objective reality.
Happily, political satire appears not only to be tolerated in the West Bank, but the powers that be have sanctioned a weekly programme, aired on state-run television, devoted to it, where no holy cow is too holy to be satirised, including the once untouchable legacy of Yasser Arafat.
It is about time, you will agree, that Palestinian leaders have come to recognise the vital healing role that jokesters play in society and the wisdom of allowing these folks to let off steam rather than dumping them in a holding cell.
No culture, especially where it is victimised, is without its brand of humour — which humorists resort to and people gravitate to as an alternative means of expressing criticism about injustice.
The dour Germans may have coined the term “schadenfreud”, defining someone who rejoices in the misery of others, but they also coined “galgenhumour”, translated into English as gallows humour — a cynical type of satire that derives from stressful or traumatic situations.
Consider this Israeli joke as a case in point: During the October War, an elderly Israeli refuses to go to the air raid shelter until he could retrace his dentures. His wife yells at him: “What, you think the Arabs are dropping sandwiches?” Or this Soviet-era joke in which two Russians debate who is greater, Joseph Stalin or Herbert Hoover. “Hoover taught Americans not to drink”, says one. “Yes, but Stalin taught the Russians not to eat”, replies the other. No Palestinian is a stranger to gallows humour when you recall that old joke — so old by now you could smell the mothballs on it — about how, when Yasser Arafat addressed the deity in his prayers, asking him when a Palestinian state would be established, the deity responded: “Not in my lifetime”.
Ah, the healing power of the comic voice, which is an index of strength, is historically associated with the persecuted and the condemned. For consider the fact that jokesters abounded in the concentration camps, where funnymen placed a comical spin on the unspeakable, life was outside one’s control and jokes served as an effective coping mechanism.
Totalitarian, autocratic and repressive political systems dread stand-up comics and professional satirists, who poke fun at their country’s social ills, ridicule its political leaders and mock its petrified values.
Nazi Germany, for example, paid these folks the supreme tribute of fear, acknowledging the mesmerising power of their craft. Joseph Goebels, as a case in point, interpreted the political joke as a “remnant of liberalism” that threatened the Nazi state, where anti-Nazi humour was taboo.
Thus Germans at the time were denied access to political satire as a psychological salve and thus were transformed into mere observers of their history. For who was there to level the playing field for them? And in many places in our part of the world today, sadly, you can equally get into a lot of serious grief if you are a professional funnyman.
Conversely, in the US, irreverent humorists, satirists, stand-up comedians, cartoonists and even gagsters with one-liners reign supreme, defining the cultural zeitgeist. And in their jokes — whether told on a television screen or on the printed page — anybody who is a somebody is a potential target for a roast.
Even editors are up for grabs. Recall, in that regard, the New Yorker cartoon, set in the Victorian era, where an editor, holding on to a manuscript in his hand, is meeting in his office with one of his writers, with both men dressed in Victorian garb.
“Mr Dickens, Mr Dickens”, the editor says impatiently, reprimanding the writer for the first sentence in his novel. “It can be the best of times or the worst of times, but surely it can’t be both.” And look, I can tell you from experience, editors can be finicky. No joke.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
