Sacha Baron Cohen is loose in Israel, and he's creating some confusion over the thin linguistic line between hummus and Hamas. Posing as his character Bruno, a gay Austrian rock star, Cohen has been interviewing unsuspecting Israeli and Palestinian political experts, leaving them flabbergasted by his "confusion" between chick pea paste and the militant political organization. This delicate differentiation has been dealt with before, most notably in West Bank Story, winner of the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, and an official selection of Sundance Festival.

Hungry for more? Check out this video of Adam Sandler discussing the hummus factor in his recent flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

It's the year of Arab-Israeli comedy. Comics are the new rock stars and, in lieu of major stadium concerts for peace, we have stand-up, sitcom, and movie hilarity taking on the bitterest simmering geopolitical conflict of the past century (with India-Pakistan a close second). The Israeli Palestinian Comedy Tour is out again making the rounds, and Israel's Channel 2 just finished its first season of a sitcom about Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Avoda Aravit. Heading the list, however, in terms of both finances and audiences, is Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan: the first comedy about the Arab-Israeli conflict to get a major release since Monty Python's Life of Brian in 1979.

People always ask whether it's too early to make a joke about recent disasters. It's the wrong question. Wars and terrorist events, in themselves, are never funny - 9/11 is not funny per se, now or ever. Yet, at a certain moment-say, the moment of Team America: World Police in the case of 9/11 - the event becomes susceptible to a certain type of comic analysis. You don't want to test the funny bone with a broken arm, but as with a physical trauma, surgery and other interventions are possible and necessary immediately, while rehab and detailed diagnostics of the wound must wait until a certain amount of healing has occurred.

The wound in the case of the Middle East is not borne of a single discrete trauma. You can point to the Declaration of Independence of Israel in 1948 as that moment, as many Palestinians do, but there are a number of other possible starting points. Some would start with Napoleon's 1798 arrival in Egypt from the first European nation state, others to the establishment of the British Mandate separating Palestine and Transjordan from the French Mandate of Syria. Abdelrahman Munif starts Cities of Salt with the arrival of the Americans looking for oil in the 1930s, and it seems to be taken as a given by most commentators that the contemporary era really begins in 1967, with Nasser and the Six Day War. The truth is that the complex of issues that are captured by the phrase "Israel/Palestine" have been created by ongoing racial, cultural, religious, social, ethnic and military conflicts that have served both to fix the general locus of the difficulty and to re-sensitize the affected populations in a continuous way.

None of this makes any simple sense for the citizens of the United States.

In the United States, power relations for the past century have generally been stable. The legacy of genocide and slavery has been relegated to a legal footnote and, with its geographical manifest destiny achieved, it's only Michael Moore who is questioning the border on the 49^th parallel (and his yearning for the north is cultural, not expansionist). For a country in which (perhaps ironically for a former colony) the only real challenges to the seemingly natural centralized power of the state are a tug between states' and federal rights, the real, nuanced, and historically complex conflict happening in the Middle East is unfathomable. Americans wonder why these Middle Easterners can't, their admitted religious and political differences notwithstanding, just make love, make money, and eat hummus in peace?

This is the underlying point of Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan if "point" is not too strong a word. Zohan makes a lot of love, including to his obligatory beautiful Arab wife; he ends up with his own successful store; and there is more hummus in the film than sperm in a porn movie (an instructive parallel for your second viewing of the film). Zohan's American dream is to reverse the macho Zionist transformation of the effete European scholar Jews into laborer soldiers of the thorny Holy Land. Zohan wants to escape his superhero counter-terrorist Israeli persona to come to America and make hair "silky smooth." The number of times he gets called a "feigele" (Yiddish for "homo") for admitting this dream is exactly equal to the number of Jews he tells about it. Only at the end, with his financial and personal success, do his parents accept Zohan.

There's a joke about God failing to get tenure at an Israeli university that sheds some light on the nature of Israeli insecurity. According to the joke, the committee expressed threefold reservations: He only wrote one book, it was in Hebrew, and some people claim that He didn't even write it Himself. Sandler turns that inferiority complex around into a specifically American superiority complex and says "your superhero is good enough to be our superhairdresser." The American's burden is to relieve immigrants of their historical and tribal baggage and transform their faith into belief in consumer culture. Until then, like the native Africans in the eyes of nineteenth century Europeans, you deserve what you get.

Despite certain nods at outrage the film is quintessentially conservative. The plot of the film buys into the "we're all the same" philosophy so clearly that Zohan's arch nemesis, Phantom (John Turturro) has an exactly parallel dream to Zohan's - of opening a shoe shop. And on the level of casting, the color blindness is so strong that Emmanuel Chriqui and Rob Schneider - both Jews - play the two key Arab roles (Dalia and Salim) that aren't played by the Italian American John Turturro. Jokes about homosexuality not being set aside, Zohan establishes his hetero-masculinity through his counter-terrorist exploits and through his flaunted and vaunted sexual prowess. His maturation process is shown by how he replaces the childish craziness of the Middle East with the sanity of the United States (New York serving as cipher for "diverse nation") and his adolescent promiscuity with monogamous marriage. We end up with the bourgeois, monogamous, hetero businessman, the hero of every American dream.

The real conflict in New York is not between Arabs and Israelis but between the rich white Walbridge who wants to knock down the neighborhood and build a mall, and the working middle-class towelhead/kyke coalition of hummus-eating swarthies who currently occupy the real estate. Through a narrative deus ex machina, the coalition is in the end able to appropriate Walbridge's plan but without his ownership - they build their own mall where each can live out his own flavor of the bland American dream. Malls are good, religious and racial difference is illusory or superficial, blanket bigotry is the province of Midwestern white men, and heterosexuality and monogamous marriage are natural parts of growing up.

People born in Israel are known as "sabras." A "sabra" (Heb "tzabar") is literally a cactus, prickly on the outside but sweet and soft in the middle. If the plant didn't live in the desert, logic might follow that it wouldn't need its prickly exterior and it would just be a soft and sweet plant. But then it wouldn't be a sabra. The same is true for the relocated Arab/Israeli conflict. Arabs and Israelis and Jews and Muslims may be able to get on with each other in the United States, and they may even be able to have an effect on the situation in the Middle East, but the model of downtown New York (as seen from Hollywood, California) does not begin to encompass the facts on the ground in the Middle East.

Despite a couple of dialogues between Arabs and Israelis that gesture to complexity - Zohan and the terrorists mention valid disagreements while he is kicking their asses, and the street coalition pays lip service to the difficulties of tolerant co-acculturation when they are provoked by Walbridge's hired thugs - neither Zohan nor its direct antecedent, West Bank Story, escape the blindness or perhaps tone-deafness of California to what is going on in the Middle East. But perhaps it doesn't matter. Zohan (and Adam Sandler) have made a comedic contribution by simply opening the door to more analytic comedies about the conflict.

One such analytic comedy is Avoda Aravit, currently between series on Israel's Channel 2. Written by the comic novelist Sayed Kashua - an Israeli Arab - it is, in format, a fairly traditional family sitcom whose premise, that Israeli Arabs and Jews are constantly interacting, competing, and working with one another, is radical in its simplicity. Kashua has come in for a lot of flak from Arabs for his work as a "collaborator" with the Jewish television station, but that is to be expected when someone works from deep within the conflicted nexus of Israeli and Arab society. More importantly, the show has met with popular success - albeit mostly in Jewish households.

Literally meaning "Arab Labor" the Hebrew phrase "Avoda Aravit" has come to mean "shoddy work" and the multiple meanings of the title include Kashua's desire to reclaim the term from ethnic derogation to an ironic allusion to the daily social, personal, and economic entanglements of Arab/Israeli life. The Jews and the Arabs in the program are all very human and all slightly crazy - nothing they do happens in a vacuum and the context is almost never mono-ethnic. When a tree falls in the wood of Avoda Aravit, it is surrounded by multiple representatives of the major two ethnicities arguing about exactly what damage was done, and whose fault it was that it fell. 

By the end of the first series, the heart of the drama of cohabitation is situated in an Arab-Israeli romance. Amal (Mira Awad), a U.S.-educated feminist lawyer has moved in with Meir (Mariano Idelman), a photographer, but she moves out again because he refuses to tell his mother - "It will kill her!" For the Independence Day / Nakba special Kashua borrows Rushdie's trope of babies born at midnight to symbolize the pressures facing the different communities within the state. The Arab Alayan family (featuring Amjad (Norman Issa)) as a comically Judeophile father) who brought the lovers together are expecting a baby and they think they have a chance of winning a prize offered by a racist Russian-Israeli billionaire (not very loosely based on Ukrainian-Israeli billionaire Arkady Gaydamak) for the first baby born after midnight on Independence Day. At the door of the hospital they bump into a Jewish family also about to give birth and, in racing for the prize, hilarity ensue

Unlike Zohan, the comedy in Avoda Aravit is granular and analytic, taking apart the strands of a life lived and chuckling at the absurd paradoxes and myriad negotiations necessary to get through the day, the month, the year. In both literal and figurative ways different communities speak different languages, and, when they translate themselves into English, Hebrew, and Arabic, they do so with accents and errors. Ceremonies and customs - such as the Seder - are seen through the eyes of the knowingly blasé and the ignorantly excited.

Attitudes to food, names, and clothing are not a shared problem as in Zohan, but a cultural minefield: Amal ditches Meir at their first date because of what he serves and the way he defends it. He makes her a stereotypical Arab spread and she feels treated like a stereotype. Upset by his actions and inability to see his mistake she refers him explicitly to Edward Said's Orientalism - Said's famous critique of western disdain for Arab culture - and Meir asks "Is that a cookbook?" On social and cultural levels both sides fear, emulate and misunderstand the other, but here to comic rather than tragic effect. On a broader level the same political/historical cues (most notably Independence Day itself) also produce widely divergent emotional responses.

As I have written before there are a number of things that comedy can do in the face of prejudice. Avoda Aravit achieves three of the main four. It mitigates the problem by providing a humorous example, it shows how the general culture works, and it decirculates - makes certain words and phrases (like "avoda aravit" itself) unacceptable or useless. Kashua has come in for criticism from the Arab community because he took care to give Arabs as well as Jews equal opportunity to appear foolish. One sitcom is not going to make peace in the Middle East, but Avoda Aravit will make the accommodations and negotiations about daily life more human and more possible by mapping out some of that lived terrain and providing a vocabulary for talking about it.

In countless media offices throughout 2007, executives measured up the public's readiness for Arab/Israeli comedy. Both Zohan and Avoda Aravit indicate that the healing power of comedy is sorely needed - and not just in Israel. It's not too soon. If anything, it's too late.

The New York Times covers the impending release of You Don’t Mess With the Zohan with an interesting article about some of the challenges the film faced in pre-production and while shooting. Zohan, in case you haven’t heard, is about an Israeli assassin who fakes his own death in order to come to New York City and become a hair stylist. One major problem was a dearth of Arab actors willing to even audition for the movie because of Sandler’s affiliation with Jewish and Zionist charities. Zohan: hair dresser/peacemaker?

“Adam Sandler, in the Arab and Muslim communities, is not having a good reputation,” said Sayed Badreya, an Egyptian-born actor who plays one of Zohan’s adversaries in New York. “When it came to working with Adam, I was like, ‘Eh, well, I don’t know.’ My prejudice was bigger than me.” Mr. Badreya said he had been persuaded to reconsider, in part, by his teenage daughter, a huge fan of Mr. Sandler’s films.

Is it me, or does Badreya come across like a silly comedy villain there? The Times continues:

Mr. Sandler attempted to ease any discomfort during filming by encouraging his co-stars to gather outside his trailer at an area furnished with tables and lawn chairs, where they would smoke cigars and talk shop during breaks. Inevitably, some heated debates about Mideast politics occurred during these conversations. (“Don’t think it was always nicey-nicey,” Mr. Badreya said.) But the talks also yielded at least one spontaneous trip to Las Vegas, attended by Arab and Israeli actors alike.

It sounds like Zohan is trying to be a typical Adam Sandler comedy - simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic, with embarrassingly bad accents and a weirdly sweet take home message—but with an added level of serious intentions that may or may not appeal to summer moviegoers.

Zohan probably won’t be a work of comedic or political genius, but it’s interesting that Sandler, unlike so many stars, is willing to take on such a weighty and contemporary subject matter. All the movies about Israel that we see these days take place at least five years ago, if not twenty.

And then there’s the issue of portrayals of Arabs in movies:

Mr. Badreya said that the comedy in “Zohan” was not quite evenly divided between ridiculing Arabs and ridiculing Jews. “The jokes are not 50-50,” he said. “It’s 70-30. Which is great. We haven’t had 30 for a long time. We’ve been getting zero. So it’s good.”

Really? Adam Sandler is the one helping us get on more even ground with the Palestinians? I can’t decide if this means the apocalypse is upon us, or that we need better diplomats. Both, probably.

Words I thought I’d never say: The new Adam Sandler movie (trailer below) looks kind of…good. And not totally-competent-romantic-comedy good like The Wedding Singer, or look-at-me-I-can-do-indie good like Punch-Drunk Love. Don’t Mess with the Zohan, about a Mossad agent who fakes his own death so that he can pursue his secret dream of becoming a hairstylist, might actually be funny.

This is probably due in large part to Sandler’s co-writer, Judd (Knocked Up ) Apatow. But I think it’s also because this might be the first time a mainstream comedy has tapped into Israel’s inherent comic potential.

Americans tend to find the hallmarks of Israel’s pop culture—the tight jeans, the Euro-disco music, the machismo—completely hilarious. Then again, we’re equally amused by any country where men wear tight pants. But what makes Israel funnier than, say, Spain, is the lethal military gloss over the entire nation, and the fact that everyone’s Jewish, which in America has become a kind of lazy shorthand for comedy.

Borat has pretty much killed the genre of jokes about how non-American males are more comfortable with their bodies. Years of bad news have made it difficult to say anything truly funny about Israel’s military situation. And Keeping Up with the Steins may have tossed the final scoop of dirt on the coffin of Yiddish shtick (OMG she said "shtick"! FUNNY SOUNDS!) But when you combine those three elements, you get something new. Something fresh-feeling. Even if it stars Adam Sandler.

 

Adam Sandler & MatzoballDave Letterman unexpectedly took ill and needed a last-minute replacement on Tuesday's "Late Show" so CBS called upon scheduled guest Adam Sandler, there to plug his new movie "Reign Over Me." Sandler was pretty funny (though he would disagree) and hands-down was much more capable late night host than either Jimmy Kimmel or Carson Daly. Anyways, Sandler interviewed his dog, Matzo Ball (see clip below) as well as "Reign Over Me" co-star Don Cheadle and race car driver Danica Patrick. Clearly, the night's star was Matzoball, but we think Adam Sandler did a pretty top notch job as well.

While Adam Sandler's cinematic dramatic turn has been more successful than other comedians (er, Jim Carrey), it's still hard for me to watch him be all serious on-screen without yearning for "Billy Madison." Given that his new film, Reign Over Me, slated for release in Marcy 2007, is about 9/11 and I've yet to see a film approach this subject matter in a way also co-starring Don Cheadle and centers around the relationship between Cheadle and Sandler in the aftermath of 9/11 this film might possibly hold some promise.

We'll let you be the judge, tho. The trailer was released today.