Opened at new comedy club in Jerusalem

The Off the Wall Comedy Club only opened several months ago and it’s a blast — in a good way. It seats about 50 people. Little bar in the back and small cubby-hole of a place with a great stage and lighting and seating, too. It draws people from right off Ben Yehuda Street nearby. It’s at the top of the hill at the intersection of Ben Yehuda Street and King George V Street. The owner, David Kilimnick, is a friend of mine. David does a great monologue about being an Israeli American living in Israel and has a great connection with the audience that laughed at his frenetic rants on life.

Sherif Hedayat and I stopped by Off the Wall to say hi and of course, David invited us to do time … on the stage, of course. The audience loved the material. No one got angry about my Palestinian humor and they roared over the Palestinian-Jewish wedding bit that audiences love and is the basis of my show. My opening joke just for his club, “Sherif and I got lost. We were looking all over for the club and we’d stop Israelis and ask, ‘Do you know where the Off the Wall comedy club is.’ The Israelis would look at us and scream indignantly, ‘It’s not a wall. It’s a fence.’ ” And I still go to do my Wall-Fence joke regarding my son, Aaron. (By the way, Sherif wrote a great column on his experience being hassled by Israeli security at the airport. Imagine, they didn’t stop a Palestinian, but they did stop an Egyptian.)

In contrast, very few theaters in Palestine want a comedy troupe that partners with “Israelis.” Not that they don’t want it but they live under fear of the fanatics who are struggling not to destroy Israel but to destroy the secular beauty of Palestinian life. These religious fanatics force the Palestinian community to the lowest common denominator of life. Fundamentalist. Boring. No excitement and all religion. No wonder they’re always upset.

So I couldn’t get one theater in Palestine to agree to do a show. Definitely not with the Israelis, although one location in Bethlehem (where half the disappearing Christians there are related to me) said they wanted the tour but they feared they could not give the two Israeli comedians with the Israeli-Palestinian Comedy Tour, Yisrael Campbell and Charley Warady, proper security. It was the Palestinians who were concerned. Another place said they might be interested, but despite public claims that they want peace with Israel, the truth is many Palestinians are no different than the Israelis they blast and deep down do not like Jews or Israelis at all. They won’t say it because it is not PC.

We do have two shows at the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem in Sheikh Jarrah. This is one of the top hotels in Palestine and they are not afraid to provide great quality shows to their customers. In fact, the first show we ever did there last June was packed, mostly with Palestinians, who not only laughed at my comedy routine but the comedy of the two Israelis, Charley and Yisrael, and my friend Aaron Freeman, who is African American and absolutely hilarious.

I can’t get any support from Palestinians in the states, and from the leftist cadre of professional organizers. These are people who live the suffering as a career in the Occupation and can’t seem to see past the mission to enjoy life. And in enjoying life, you actually make life for everyone better. The Israeli press, again, is covering us. But the Arab media is silent. No problem. Maybe Palestinians and Arabs haven’t reached a point where they can enjoy life the way our people did many generations before we became a “people of tragedy.”

I don’t like it because “people of tragedy” tend to wallow in tragedy and never rise above it. It’s easier to whine and complain than to do something positive. For some, anyway.

So it was a real pleasure for me to perform at Off the Wall Comedy Club and I recommend everyone should go there who has a sense of humor, doesn’t hate, and recognizes that humor and comedy are the fuels that run your inner souls. Without humor, we are not human beings. Humor is important to any society, especially those who are “people of tragedy.” Humor can help them dig themselves out of the struggle.

On a side note, no matter how many times I pass information to the PLO “Ambassador Afif Safieh, he never passes it along. Although he does promote those events who meet his personal political agenda, I guess. But, as a Palestinian, I learned long ago you can not expect any help from your own people. As “People of Tragedy,” we find it so much easier to beat up on each other than to respond to suffering and rise above the challenge. Thats the only way a diaspora people can win and survive. They disappear when they wallow in self-pity and constantly complain about their terrible lives while rejecting any suggestions on how to make them better. They always say “No,” but they never offer solutions. That is true tragedy.

Ray Hanania in East Jerusalem

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