Last April I had the misfortune of attending stand-up comedy at the Classic Comedy Bar in Auckland. I had just flown in from working 12 hour days at a firm in New York. I needed some laughs and had been asked to attend by The Boy whose childhood friend was performing. I wasn’t holding out much hope. This friend can be funny on occasion but he is not funny in the it-is-worth-risking-your-dignity-by-telling-jokes-on-stage-in-front-of-strangers way. He also lacks a sense of appropriateness. This was the same guy who in his groom’s speech in front of 150 or so relatives (including many in-laws whom he had not yet met) said “So what did we learn from our ceremony’s bible reading? That Jesus hung around with whores.” Needless to say, he can’t read his audience. I knew, however, that making people laugh on cue was a difficult task and out of respect for his sheer courage I decided to lend my support.
His routine was centred almost entirely around laughing at gay people. Unlike heterosexual people, gay people generate a wealth of comedy: “Ever seen a gay person play rugby?” At this point he ran squealing around the stage waving his hands in the air. Hilarious.
Having exhausted all he could with gay people, he then moved on to the next exploitable minority group: Jews. Jews also generate a wealth of comedy. Especially when coupled with the Holocaust.
“Any Jews here?” He asked the audience.
Silence.
“That’s German efficiency for you!” He noted cheerily. Ba-da-BOOM!
It was at this point that I felt a weird sensation start at my toes and move its way at rapid speed through my body and out my eyes. I was crying. And it wasn’t just a normal cry. It was an entire body cry. I was shaking and at some point I knew I was going to throw up.
I fled the club, running across Queen St to my hotel trying not to get hit by cars in the process.
The next day I received a text message: “What a fool I am! I forgot that you were there.” Yes, unlike the 6 million people whose deaths he was mocking, I was there. If only I hadn’t been there then the joke would have been just fine. I apologise for spoiling the joke.
I didn’t want to punish this comedian for his appalling joke by getting angry and yelling at him. I knew that this would only turn him into a martyr with misplaced assertions of “free speech” being thrown in my face. In any event, the complete lack of laughter from the audience was humiliating enough. I decided to try to educate him. So the next day I wrote him an email explaining why this joke was simply not funny and was actually extremely offensive. As I see it, racist or homophobic jokes only work if they make people aware of their own prejudices; they should laugh at the perpetrator not the misfortune of the victim. Raybon Kan is brilliant at this. More importantly, however, was that his joke wasn’t funny because it was true. The reason that there are fewer Jewish people in the world is precisely because of the efficiency of people like Adolf Eichmann. Through systematic murder the Nazis managed to kill two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. In total they murdered 6 million Jewish people and five million communists, socialists, gypsies, disabled people and other “undesirables.” That is over three times New Zealand’s population. And this doesn’t even include the people they sterilised and displaced and those who survived the camps only to go on to live a greater hell in a world where all their family and friends had been killed. It is deeply, bitterly, darkly, sickenly ironic that Germany’s reputation for efficiency was demonstrated most evilly during the Holocaust. But just not funny.
Thinking the matter buried, last week, out of the blue (well, not entirely out of the blue – also accompanied by a 9/11 conspiracy theory email and one about the “Jewish lobby”), I receive an email from the comedian’s brother. It was awful when I walked of the comedy show, he exclaims. If only I had put my hand up and admitted to the club that I was Jewish. Then the joke would have been “So much for German efficiency!”
Apparently the reason the joke didn’t work was because of me.
If that is comedy, you’ll excuse me if I don’t laugh.