After the massacre by Hamas on October 7 of last year and the outbreak of a war that has claimed so many more lives, it might have seemed that Israel had entered an era when it would be impossible for Israelis to smile, let alone laugh.
Omri Marcus, an Israeli comedy writer and creative strategist who focuses on the connection between AI and content, said that he heard from an American friend who is a writer for a top US comedy show on October 10.
“He asked, ‘Is it too soon?... Can you laugh at all?’”
Marcus spoke for many here at that time. “I said, ‘Honestly, I have no sense of humor right now at all.’”
The American writer and his wife called Marcus every few days to see how he was doing, and gradually he was able to get back to what he loves to do – creating funny content. But it took time.
Muli Segev, the showrunner for Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s popular sketch comedy series on Keshet, said in an interview with Variety after October 7 that the series had never missed a show and was not about to start now.
But he acknowledged, “Everyone is still in mourning; each and every one of us has lost someone, or knows someone who has. It has been the most horrific event in this nation’s history – and we have been through a lot along the years, as you know. But still, people need some kind of relief. It’s the old Jewish secret: laughing in the face of death.”
According to Yonatan Gat, a lecturer in the communications department at Tel Aviv University, when Israeli comedy began coming back to life a few weeks after the massacre, a shift had taken place: “Israeli comedy returned to the kind of humor that there was at the beginning of the state, when there were so many wars and so much turbulence, and back then, we mostly we didn’t make fun of ourselves, we made fun of our enemies or people who collaborated with them. Now, because we are experiencing such grief, our tendency to take a tragedy and turn it into humor about ourselves is very limited.
“Mark Twain said comedy is tragedy plus time, but we are still dealing with all the bloodshed here... When it comes to comedy now, the arrows are pointing out[ward], not in,” Gat said.
Israelis looked around and found much outside of Israel they could laugh about.
Not surprisingly, two of the most fertile targets were the woke campus protesters around the world, especially in the United States, and foreign coverage of the war.
Finding comedy in the darkness of war
Eretz Nehederet reached some of the funniest moments in its 20-year history by making fun of those topics, as did many other Israeli comedians. Edan Alterman, a comic and musician, began creating English content on social media, making videos like “Antisemitism for Dummies,” with lines like, “With antisemitism, you can ditch the truth and make your own – Jesus was a Palestinian. Sure! Queer people are welcomed in Gaza. Hell, why not?... And if someone calls you a racist, never forget the mantra: I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m just anti-Zionist.”
Gat pointed out: “When did you ever see Israeli comedy about the BBC or Columbia students or antisemitism before?”
He said this was very much in the tradition of the great Israeli comic writer/director Ephraim Kishon, who wrote a book following the Six Day War called, So Sorry We Won!, aimed at international readers.
“A lot of the best comedy this year has been in English,” Gat noted.
Eretz Nehederet featured many English sketches that went viral. Some of their best were about the BBC’s coverage of the war. The first sketch, which aired in late October, featured Eretz Nehederet regulars Liat Harlev as a BBC anchor and Yuval Semo as the reporter, Harry Whiteguilt, breaking the news of the bombing of a hospital that the British media outlet blamed Israel for, immediately taking Hamas’s accusation at face value.
Harlev, mimicking the expression and intonation of a BBC broadcaster, announced casualties from the attack, saying, “More, more” when the number appeared and then rose in a chyron, and, “Good,” when it jumped from 500 to 750.
Whiteguilt played what he said was an audio recording of the terrorists, who admitted in Arab-accented Hebrew that they had fired the rocket. Harlev, purposely ignoring the admission, responded, “Well, I guess we’ll never know what happened,” even as one of the terrorists insisted, “No, no, we did it.”
NOTHING WAS taboo this year, including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (played on the show by Eli Finish), who was interviewed by the BBC anchor (Harlev again) but was interrupted by the cries of a hostage baby. Naturally, the anchor blamed the Zionist baby for torturing Sinwar by causing sleep deprivation. Finish said in an interview later that it was tough, emotionally, to film this scene, knowing that there really were babies being held in Gaza.
About a month after the outbreak of the war, Eretz Nehederet lampooned the campus protests when they were just beginning, in a skit that turned out to be especially prescient. The first sketch featured two students called Kelcy (Harlev) and Wordle (Tamir Bar), dressed in full rainbow regalia, engaged in typical college-kid activities, such as tearing down hostage posters. Wordle boasted that he was majoring in “Post-Colonial Queer Astrology,” and said, “I’m not antisemitic. I’m racist fluid.”
They fawningly interviewed a Hamas terrorist, who deemed them too stupid to kill.
In another clip, taken almost word for word from a real campus press conference in the US, Eretz Nehederet’s student protesters demanded mineral water, organic food, soy and almond milk, and gluten-free sunscreen.
In a musical number, the show poked fun at Hamas leaders living in luxury in Doha as millions of Gazans were stuck in a war zone. Each leader was identified by his name and by his multi-billion dollar net worth, and the performers sang lines such as, “In Gaza the sky is black but in Qatar, it’s always sunny.”
TWO GUESTS from abroad also contributed to the show this year. Brett Gelman of Stranger Things played an arrogant Berkeley professor who teamed up with Kelcy and Wordle and took them back in time to visit Joseph and Mary, hoping to prove that there were no Jews in the Holy Land when Jesus was born.
Actor/comedian Michael Rapaport appeared on the show twice, once as Dumbledore in a Harry Potter-themed sketch, where the heads of the Hogwarts houses were asked whether a call to kill all muggles (in Harry Potter lingo, muggles are ordinary humans), would be all right. The sketch very effectively parodied the US congressional hearings with college presidents. After Rapaport learned how much the “country that shall not be named” – Qatar – had paid for the representatives of the houses to say that it all “depends on context,” he was ready to sign up.
In late February, Rapaport returned and pretended to host the Oscars in a realistic-looking skit in which he slammed Hollywood stars for their indifference to the plight of the hostages.
Eventually, there were sketches that made fun of Israeli politicians, Eretz Nehederet’s specialty, and a handful that poked fun at ordinary Israelis. In one, a married couple sat and watched Idan Amedi – the actor/singer who was wounded in battle in Gaza – at a press conference upon his release from the hospital; he spoke modestly of his bravery and the wife was clearly infatuated, while the husband, eating cake out of a box with his fingers, felt totally inadequate in the face of Amedi’s nobility.
THIS PAST year has also been a golden age of pranks. Israel’s queen of comic prank calls, Racheli Rottner, made several this year, illustrated with her trademark cartoons. The most memorable was to the Harvard admissions office in November. She pretended to be the mother of a Hamas terrorist who had taken part in the October 7 massacre and asked whether his participation would be an asset in his quest for admission.
“Everything that a student does helps them in the process,” the admissions officer answered, sounding just a trifle disconcerted.
Rottner emphasized that her son did not rape anyone, “He only killed them, he’s very feminist, so it’s OK, right? He’s very respectful for gender self-definition.”
The Harvard staffer said, “All I can say to you is that he can apply.”
Rottner managed to keep the officer on the line for two minutes and forty seconds, and it was she who ended the call.
Standup Orel Tsabari made several live prank calls on the talk show hosted by Erez Tal and Israel Katorza on Keshet 12. Tsabari, who is fluent in Arabic, called a luxury Qatari hotel and reserved a suite for Hamas head Yaya Sinwar (he used Sinwar’s name and the clerk enthusiastically said she had heard of the terror leader and that it would be an honor to host him). He discussed the arrangements for several minutes with the clerk, who finally hung up when he said he was with the Mossad and was going to come there to kill another Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, about two weeks ahead of Haniyeh’s actual assassination.
In another prank call, Tsabari, pretending to be a woman, asked an employee of the Beirut airport’s duty-free shop if there were rockets available there, and was transferred to someone said to be with the “security services.” This man, sounding flirtatious, gave her his phone number and told her to stay in touch. The call ended when Tsabari started singing a Hebrew song.
But it wasn’t only professional comics who got laughs this year. Many Israelis made jokes on social media about what was going on, posting memes and quips. Black humor all across the Middle East was even the subject of an article in The Wall Street Journal in August, as Israel waited for Iran and terror groups such as Hezbollah to respond to Haniyeh’s killing.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on X that the retaliation would come, “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week.” An X user replied, “Sounds like my wife when I ask for sex.” Others responded, “Me starting a diet”; “The cable guy’s text message”; and “When you ship your missiles by Israel Post.”
THE PAGER attack on Hezbollah operatives by Israel in September also created quite a few opportunities for wisecracks. Some criticized this humor as “sick,” but it didn’t do much to deter many social media users. “From the liver to the knee,” was a popular refrain in these responses, a play on the slogan, “From the river to the sea,” used by those who want Jews out of Israel. Other responses were cartoons showing 72 disappointed virgins in heaven now that the pager owners were no longer, well, operational, as well as sketches of Hassan Nasrallah eying household appliances such as electric kettles apprehensively.
The Israeli government briefly joined the comics, hiring witty Eylon Levy as a government spokesperson, and he frequently needled antisemitic commentators and interviewers abroad and even created a funny holiday video based on a famous scene from the romantic comedy, Love Actually, where he holds up signs about Hamas surrendering and releasing the hostages. But he was soon fired from his government position and now mixes jokes with serious content at the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office.
Marcus said he was able to get his sense of humor back in time to create a creative guide for Americans on how to get through the winter holidays, which asks the question, “What would Christmas look like if Hamas takes over the world?”
Said Marcus, “I was trying to reach people in America, young Americans, and I think that humor is a more effective way to reach out to them about the situation than showing pictures of something horrible… You can use comedy to make people understand things and laugh at the same time. But it’s not easy.”
Gat said, “The comics strengthen us. Even if comedy doesn’t get to us to our destination, it makes us feel better along the way.”