I understand that last year you were attacked by a group of Muslim men in a comedy club in East London.Kamal al-Marayati also reports a run-in with co-religionists "mired in minutae" (as he puts it).
It was a few Muslim fundamentalists who said I shouldn't be doing it because I was a woman. They say that, in Islam, women are meant to be really subdued and reserved, which is why they are meant to cover themselves up.
In honor of a spanking clean brand new year, I was deleting some old drafts and revising others, and came upon a few links from August about Ray Hanania (remember him?) as well as a story about Israeli topical humor. What a great juxtaposition!
Now if Jews didn't invent irreverent humor, we certainly spend a lot of time perfecting it. So if you wonder just how Israelis continue to cope with bombing after bombing, not to mention being reviled and isolated by most of the world:
. . . . Israeli humorists have used every subject as raw material, with the sole exception of the Holocaust. Before statehood in 1948, the poet Natan Alterman satirized Zionist leaders in cabarets at the Broom Theater. On the eve of the 1967 war, when ordinary Israelis were digging trenches and parks were being prepared to serve as cemeteries, a running joke here went, "The last one to leave Israel should turn out the lights." The playwright Hanoch Levine famously skewered Prime Minister Golda Meir in "The Queen of the Bathroom." A popular mid-1970's television show — "Nikui Rosh" or "Brainwashing" — lampooned the government investigation into Israel's nearly fatal military and intelligence failures in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.I'd love to see Letterman place a crank call to Saddam Hussein . . . .
Amid the current turmoil, the television personalities Shay Goldstein and Dror Rafael placed crank calls to Hezbollah and the Iranian parliament. Eli Yatzpan, the star of a nightly show on cable television, has specialized in withering impersonations of political leaders; his send-up of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, led Egypt to lodge a formal diplomatic complaint.
UPDATE: Comedian Eli Yatzpan is still annoying the powerful.
A Catholic religious figure stands alongside the famous Fountain of Trevi in Rome, promising to grant a special blessing to passing tourists if they indulge his strange requests. The blessing consists of a string of derogatory comments in Hebrew and Arabic. The skit, one of comedian Eli Yatzpan's "candid camera" antics for an Israeli television show, was strongly condemned by Italian officials and the Vatican.
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