WHAT ARE OTHER COMICS SAYING?

The New York comedy scene post-10/7.

ON ANY GIVEN night in New York, you can find a comedian testing out material about Israel and Gaza. A theatrical comic like Gianmarco Soresi might joke about talking to his less progressive family members about Israel-palestine (“It makes you miss those easier-to-swallow debates, like trans women playing sports”).

Palestinian American comedian Atheer Yacoub might share a joke about being fluent in “checkpoint Hebrew”

(“I have friends who are like, ‘You know, I couldn’t learn a new language if there was a gun to my head’—‘you sure about that?’”). Recently, Geoffrey Asmus, who has a penchant for dark non sequitur, began a bit by talking about his desire to blow up obnoxious party buses. “Let’s make [this neighborhood] look like Gaza,” he said. Amid groans, he tagged the joke with a pair of kickers: “Sorry about that joke, you guys. My bombs are less accurate than Israel’s. That joke didn’t do great here, but it killed at a hospital down the street.” Then there are comics with staunchly proisrael jokes. During a set at New York Comedy Club in March, Steve Byrne took aim at queer pro-palestine activists. “Go to Palestine and your pronouns will quickly be known as ‘was/were,’” he said. He added that they’d be thrown “off the rooftops” in Palestine, a punishment complicated only by the fact that Palestine has “no more rooftops.”

While the majority of comics today don’t talk about Israel-palestine onstage, the landscape is a far cry from the days immediately after October 7, when even the boldest comics were wary to touch the subject. “There was ear ringing and tinnitus, and we were just figuring out what people were going to say about this subject,” says comedian Jay Jurden. Gradually, that changed. The shock-value-dependent jokes that inevitably follow any tragedy began surfacing. Eventually, more nuanced material surfaced too. In January, Josh Gondelman did a bit about how he’s less inclined to equate antisemitism with criticism of Israel’s policies than with criticism of Adam Sandler. “If you roll up and you’re like, ‘I don’t think the Netanyahu administration has a commitment to a lasting peace process,’ I’ll hear you out,” he said. “If you’re like, ‘Sandman hasn’t made a good movie since Happy Gilmore,’ I’ll be like, ‘We don’t go to them because they’re good! We go to those movies because they’re tradition!’” The joke’s phrasing, he explains, is intentional to avoid dividing audiences: “Putting the most controversial part of it in someone else’s mouth gives me a little distance. But then I can still agree with it and go, ‘Yeah, that’s an argument I’m not offended by.”