On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Is that a joke? There are no send-ups of Israel or Zionism, are there?
> Nothing as innocuous even as a guy in a yarmulke sneaking a bacon
> cheeseburger.
No, that innocuous we get. When Sharon was PM, Jon Stewart used to beat the fat jokes to death. And on the neurotic side, last week they had "Mr. Bagelman's Hour of Hate." But they're the exceptions that prove the rule: they're trivial, they're not anti-zionist and they're pretty lame as jokes -- kind of as if they were forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel after avoiding everything that might give offense. Stewart used to routinely apologize to his audience that he was the only one laughing at the Sharon fat jokes.
But FWIW (just in case it's relevant to Dennis's topic, and he seems to be in an encyclopedic mood), the Daily Show does do good anti-semite jokes. They had a hilarious segment years ago when Eric Rudolph, the Olympic bomber was finally captured after five years on the run and news articles noted that he used to scream at the TV calling it "the electric Jew." They got like three pieces out of that, and they were all funny. One was a one liner and a graphic about how that was Stewart's break-dance name in the 1970s; the second was a long and very risky piece where Colbert reported from the field fulminating about how Stewart ("as if anyone's fooled by that name") was sitting in a nice cool office in Jew York while ordering white southern men like him to work their asses off in the heat; and lastly a turn-away to face the camera where Stewart waved a bagel on a string in a classic hypnotist's pose and intoned "Obey the Electric Jew. Obey the Electric Jew..."
Also come to think of it, Stewart did have a joke last week that was almost what you're looking for. An interviewee gave an extremely complex opening summary sentence about cosmology or law and Stewart took a baffled beat, gave him a gimlet eye and said "Was there anything anti-semitic in there?"
And he did compliment Adam Sandler, who was wearing goatee for a film, for being able to grow a beard without looking "all jewy" -- which if said by a non-Jew would have sounded pretty racist.
That might be a big part of the problem, of course: so few middle eastern comics. Earlier this year Comedy Central had the "Axis of Evil Comedy tour" with 5 middle eastern comics and it was interesting to see how some of the same jokes that would be racist in a westerner's mouth were completely transformed in theirs. The difference between laughing from the inside with someone, and laughing from the outside at them, is all the difference in the world.
Michael