Word: hanania
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...Welcome to the "Israeli-Palestinian comedy tour." Organized by Hanania and American-Israeli comedian Charlie Waraday, the January tour took three Jewish and one Arab stand-up comedians to Tel Aviv and three Jerusalem venues, one of them a synagogue. They never made it into the Palestinian territories; two of the comics hold Israeli passports and are banned from travel there. The tour's aim, says Hanania, was to show that "If we can laugh together, we can live together...
...Pirates of the Caribbean. The third comedian is Yisrael Campbell, a former Irish-Italian Catholic who became an orthodox Jew. Campbell appears on stage much as he dresses every day around the Holy City - wearing a long black coat, a hat and a Moses-like beard. Black-suited Hanania has the broad-shoulders of a grizzled street tough, either in Chicago or Gaza...
...Sitting in the Ottoman-style grandeur of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem before a show, Hanania and Waraday trade politically incorrect jokes about the belief, popular among suicide bombers, that 72 virgins await the martyr in paradise. "And what do the women get?" muses Waraday, recalling that a 57-year old Palestinian grandmother recently blew herself up. "What would they possibly have told this woman - that she'll have 72 kids who'll call every day and visit once in awhile? I know my Mom would blow herself up for that...
...Hanania laughs and lets rip with his version: "I'm an Arab, so we read from right to left. There's only one virgin, she's 72 years old, and they promise her to everybody. That ain't paradise." Hanania adds, "The best jokes are the ones that take on the toughest topics. If we allow the tough topics to define us, we become prisoners of that crap...
...Hanania claims to be one of a dozen Arab comedians still working in the U.S. after 9/11. He corrects himself. "Less than a dozen," he says. The others drifted away from the stage; anger towards Arabs was running too high for jokes. But Hanania says, "Humor is contagious, and it's good. It makes us look at each other as human...