No Joke (25 page)

One of the guys added, “And bears will walk in it.”

The cartoon figure of Srulik, diminutive of Israel, became the most recognizable representation of the sabra, the native-born Palestinian Jew, sporting the
kova tembel
, the Israeli national headgear. Created by Hungarian-born Kariel Gardosh (1921–2000), who signed himself Dosh, Srulik soldiers for the Jewish homeland, but his victories never result in the anticipated peace.

The Hebrew expression
lo dubim v'lo ya'ar
(no bears and no forest) means something like “there's nothing to it,” reversing the ostensible point of Ben-Gurion's forecast. Accorded every honor as head of the country and spearhead of the war, the prime minister is mocked for a suspect species of grandiloquence that smacks of what Oring, who translated these anecdotes, calls Ben-Gurion's “extravagant prophetic vision.”
¹²

Idealists are not inclined to cultivate irony, and the youngsters of the Palmah were out to prove their zealotry, not their wit. Chizbat sometimes discloses familiarity with local poets (Haim Nahman Bialik or Natan Alterman) or aspects of Jewish tradition, but always in ways that discount their importance. Contrived simplicity and prideful ignorance establish a new cultural ideal, which had come to replace the Diaspora quest for hypercivilized perfection. But this phase of humor didn't last and didn't take. Following the rise of the state and establishment of an official military, some Palmahniks became professors, and some became interpreters of Agnon.

Neither Agnon nor chizbat figured in an eleven-part televised history of Israeli humor from before the rise of the state until its jubilee year of 1998. That is because the show covered only the fast-growing
professional
comedy of those five decades.
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The series describes how the trickle of immigrant humorists who dominated comedy in the 1950s—such as Efraim Kishon and Dan Ben Amotz—became a tidal wave once radio spawned television, and then television as the single national channel multiplied sevenfold. Every local complaint—from the austerity and rationing of the early years to the conspicuous consumption a half century later—would eventually draw ridicule in a country whose first prime minister boasted that he governed a country of prime ministers.

The Hebrew language itself was a mainstay of comedy. Relegated for the duration of the exile to the higher regions of Jewish study, liturgy, and rabbinic correspondence, and replaced in everyday use by Jewish vernaculars that were forged
wherever Jews settled for any length of time, Hebrew—the only language that could unite a people so long and so widely dispersed—experienced revival as a spoken tongue once Jews determined to reclaim their national homeland. Jokes circulated about fanatics who would not rescue a drowning person unless and until they shouted for help in the national language—and with the correct pronunciation. (As part of the move back to the East, the new speakers of Hebrew replaced its European-style pronunciation with that of its users in Arab lands.)

In the Land of Israel, German refugee professors learned Hebrew from their native-born students, Yiddish speakers were cowed into switching or silence, and Judeo-Arabic vied with local Arabic as the source of the juiciest invective and slang. On a somber note, Colonel David (Mickey) Marcus, a U.S. volunteer officer at the highest rank in the nascent Israeli army, was killed by a guard when he responded in English because he did not know the Hebrew password. But joking prospered on such misunderstandings and mistakes.

In 1953, the government of Israel established the Academy of the Hebrew Language to serve as the deciding authority on matters of grammar and terminology. If you are not laughing already, you haven't sufficiently appreciated Ben-Gurion's insight into the extravagant individualism of his fellow Israelis, who were bound to resist regimentation by their fellow Jews as vigorously as their ancestors once complied with authority imposed from without. Jews in their wanderings had already created more languages than Catholics once had children, and in Israel today you can find speakers of an estimated forty different
languages. The French Academy in Paris might strive to preserve the French tongue from the inroads of Americanization (and fail even there), but an academic committee trying to influence the development of a Jewish language had as much likelihood of being heeded as an Ashkenazi referee at a soccer match attended by the largely Sephardi fans of Jerusalem Betar, the team originally founded by the Revisionist Zionist youth movement and traditionally associated with its right-wing politics.

This last simile was prompted by a skit, “The Judge and the Referee,” by the most popular comedy team in Israel's history. If I ask an assortment of Israelis, “What comes to mind when I say, Israeli humor?” almost everyone answers “Hagashash ha-hiver,” though a young man adds, “I don't know why I said that, since I think I've only seen one of their sketches.” Improbably named “The Pale Trackers,” or in shorthand, Hagashashim, the Trackers, the group made its mark in the 1960s through live performances and radio, then in the following decades on television and in films. Thanks to DVDs and YouTube, the group is accessible today at the flick of a finger.

When the Palmah was disbanded, the Israel Defense Forces that replaced it developed entertainment units as part of the military's educational program. From these dedicated amateur troupes came most of the professional entertainers in the country, including the three Gashashim: Yeshayahu “Shaike” Levi, Yisrael “Poli” Poliakov, and Gavriel “Gavri” Banai, who were tapped and trained by a talented impresario, and supplied with material by some of Israel's leading writers and lyricists.

In a society whose high culture had been shaped and dominated, if not monopolized, by Ashkenazim, the trio forged a Sephardi or Mizrahi image, maintaining distinctions in pronunciation that marked the speech of Jews from Arab lands. In the aforementioned skit, pitted against each other before a judge are a supporter of Jerusalem Betar, obviously of Middle Eastern origin, and the referee Pendelovitch, obviously of European background. The latter's offside call against Betar, which the fan had leaped on to the field to protest, was the cause of the altercation that landed the two in the courtroom. The excitable groupie is defiant and cocky; the referee is offended and petulant. Since the judge also hails from the “Eastern tribes,” the advantage of common status (referee and judge are both
shofet
in Hebrew), on the one hand, is offset, on the other hand, by the advantage of common ethnicity. We wait to see which two will team up against the third, but each member of the trio is aggrieved: the intensity of the enthusiast's support for Betar has its source in the socioeconomic disadvantages of his group; the referee suffers the slings and arrows of insult along with occasional injury for trying to uphold order among savages; and the judge demands
respect
from each of the two antagonists. The three-way dispute is peppered with ethnic slurs so politically incorrect and vile that they finally reduce the referee to tears. “Don't cry,” says the judge, as he approaches resolution. “I'm not the
Kotel
[the Western Wall]. Soon you'll be stuffing a petition in my ear.”

The entertainment branch of the educational corps was charged with strengthening the citizenry's identification with Israel, and the Gashashim were mindful of their mission. They identified with the lowly against the mighty not in order to foment class conflict but rather in expectation of an eventual integration. Instead of the oppositional tension at the heart of many comic duos (Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, and Dzigan and Schumacher), the trio's teamwork represented a segmented society struggling to come together, and the three actors traded places often enough to prevent any one of them from becoming the habitual butt of the others. Their ensemble approach represented the amalgamation of disparate groups under unprecedented pressures. Sociologists noted that the trio avoided divisive political issues, and used
traditional and liturgical terms as well as allusions in ways that melded religion with evolving modernity so as to create an Israeli folklore that seemed drawn from the past while legitimating everything current.
¹⁴

The Israeli comedy trio Hagashash Hahiver (The Pale Trackers) when they gained fame in the 1960s. From left to right, Shaike Levi, Poli Poliakov, Gavri Banai. Digital image of a photograph by Israel Haramati. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. From the Judaica Collection of the Harvard Library, Harvard University.

An example of how divisiveness becomes comic fodder for harmony is the trio's postelection skit of 1981, when the Likud Party of Menahem Begin narrowly defeated the Alignment Party of Shimon Peres. In their “morning-after” routine at a newsstand festooned with election posters, one man is reading his paper, and others come by to ask, “What are the results?” and “Can you pass me a section?” But their presumed concern with the electoral outcome turns out to be mistaken: the first man wants the score of yesterday's soccer match, and the second chews up the paper. “Hungry?” asks the owner, offering him a tastier section. The three then launch into a musical number that interprets
avodah
, the national ethic of labor, as
ovdim aleynu
, “They're Working Us Over,” in which each stanza spoofs the promises made by politicians when running for office. Begin's rhetorical style is subjected to some mockery, but since the elected prime minister was heavily supported by the very underclass that the Gashashim purported to represent, the comedic trio could not indulge the kind of dismissive satire of the Israeli Right that would characterize later comedians appealing to the country's left-of-center elites. The song's refrain, “They're working us over … and we never learn,” was inherently democratic.

In its shows, the trio indulged in some slapstick and masquerading, but in typical Jewish fashion specialized in language and wit: a fitting area for humor in a new land where
philosophers and flower sellers, mechanics and kibbutzniks, were caught up alike in the insecurities of an emerging language. Indeed, the committee awarding the Israel Prize to the Gashashim in 2000 singled out these comedians' contribution to the language while several times invoking the term “loving” to describe the nature of their impact on Israeli culture, society, and state. The commendation read: “Anyone who wants to know who we were and what we did in the first half-century of the State of Israel may turn to the work of the Gashashim.”
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(In regard to the trio's YouTube rendition of “
ovdim aleynu,
” viewers remark on how little has changed in the intervening years.)