Now Only if We Could Find a Joke Somewhere in the Middle East

On Israel's War on Gaza

Ever since Israel began decimating  Gaza May 10, late-night comedy TV just hasn’t seemed the same to me.

Last night, for instance, Steven Colbert began his show by mawkishly feigning surprise that House Republicans were opposing a commission to study the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

At first I was baffled that au so courant Colbert would stoop to telling marginally funny jokes about what is, after all, ancient history.

But then,  realizing that Colbert hasn’t said one peep  about President Biden’s shameful failure to stand up to Israel’s pointless bombardment of the Gaza Strip, the sheer awkwardness of his delivery began to make sense.

Colbert, after all, has spent months almost deifying Biden as the embodiment of the United States’ pivot from venality to morality (particularly toward the Judeo-Christian  principles that Colbert and Biden share as practicing Catholics).

In the last several days, however, Biden has become a global laughingstock for turning a blind eye to the Gazans, where nearly everyone lacks potable water and where 70% of youth are unemployed, only days after promising that as President he would “make America the leading force for good in the world, offering everyone opportunity, security liberty, respect and honor.”

I have no idea whether there’s any connection between the comic decline of Colbert’s recent episodes and the May 11 onset of what Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu calls, with  his characteristic modesty, “Operation Guardian of the Walls.”

But as the son of a musician who partnered with his friend Charlie Chaplin to make a flick,  “Modern Times” (which mocked the machines people then thought might take over their jobs) and as an admirer of how Stanley Kubrick managed in “Dr. Strangelove” to get most Americans guffawing at the nuclear weapons that seemed on the verge of annihilating them, I’ve learned that laughter is especially important in what we usually regard as Times Too Serious for Humor.

It’s easy enough to make fun of Bibi. A politician who’s turned narcissism and opportunism into fine  art, Bibi knows he’ll never achieve his nominal goal of permanently driving Hamas out of Gaza. As Bibi undoubtedly knows from legions of Israeli failures to “take” Gaza—from Operation Pillar of Defense to Cast Lead and Protective Edge—violence against oppressed people tends to radicalize, not subdue them.  

Now only if we could find a joke in there somewhere.