I had some links about Muslim comics in my email archives, but lgf's link about one more Hebrew University bombing victim got me thinking about a wonderful eulogy I had just read for Ben Blutstein, one of the Pardes students who was killed, and prompted some comments at lgf on the peculiar humorlessness of Islam.
Please read the eulogy (which is also for Marla Bennett), and think about Ben's loving yet irreverent attitude towards his religion. Although Ben was part of an unusually inventive Jewish movement, intellectual debate is a venerable and divinely sanctioned (according to Talmud) way to engage with sacred texts. Although observant Jews believe that Torah is given literally by God, God very clearly says it's the job of human beings to interpret it. Consequently, when Jews dive under the hood of Torah and halacha and tinker (albeit always with respect for the Word itself and our sages' previous interpretations) we are fulfilling God's will. Thomas Cahill, author of The Gifts of the Jews, describes this attitude well from an outsider's POV :
"I had been reading the Bible all my life--in English, Latin, and Greek--but always with Christians, either Catholics or Protestants. When Christians read the Bible, they tend to look for an authority, a priest or minister or biblical expert, who will tell them how to interpret the passage under consideration. Then, the interpretation delivered, they are anxious to move on to the next passage. Jews treat the Bible like a comfortable old couch (it is, after all, their family history). They don't care about moving on and they are willing to discuss and debate a given passage endlessly. Out of this elaborate give-and-take a different kind of authority arises: a shared authority, a genuinely communal authority."
Cahill was a visiting scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but he's describing every Torah study I have ever participated in. Irreverence and tinkering (which go hand in hand) are not threatening when you have that comfort level.
Now. Where do you see this kind of playfulness in Islam? Sufism, and that's about it. And mainstream Muslims have usually wanted to run Sufis out of town on a rail.
So while "Jewish comic" is practically a redundancy, "Muslim comic" is an oxymoron. Well, not quite. There are Muslim comics (all American or Canadian, of course), and in the months following 9-11 they got together with Jewish comics and did some shows. Not only that, according to this article in the Forward, they seem to have adopted "the same vein of nebbishy, underdog humor that became the trademark of Woody Allen and his imitators."
I don't know about you, but I find the idea of Jewish humor infiltrating Islam pretty subversive.
UPDATE: CNN has a report on Jewish-Muslim comedy. This seems to be turning into a trend.
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