Remixing my reaction to @standupdan because it was making me laugh so hard – I thought you should see how hard I was laughing and maybe you need a laugh from Dan Ahdoot too! pic.twitter.com/46h9N8ihYU
— Mayim Bialik (@missmayim) January 29, 2024
Two things about this video, uploaded by the notoriously insensitive Mayin Bialik (listen to it for just a minute):
1. The comedian, a guy named Stan, makes a joke about “from the river to the sea” by saying it’s the new “to the window, to the wall” (from Lil John’s legendary “get low”). This could be funny, because it does make an unexpected connection between two separate realms of reality, but it is not really funny.
It is not just the nervous delivery, but something deeper. You see, far from being simply a creative and quirky juxtaposition, the content in the two parts of his joke is actually very much interrelated.
The black man’s lewd sexuality and the native’s wild political barbarism always went hand in hand in the colonialist mind. This is so well-known and substantiated I don’t even need to say anything about it. You know it. And so “form the river to the sea” and “to the window, to the wall” are not two totally different things in the white colonial mind, but rather two aspects of one reality. This is why, even if you don’t get it immediately, it doesn’t really make you laugh.
It doesn’t feel like it connects people (as really funny things always do, because they take down defenses and cancel imagined hierarchies). It feels like it separates them. Which it does, and is meant to achieve.
2. Notice how these two people, who are not particularly ugly, and certainly not physically repulsive, appear wholly robotic and without even a shred of grace. This is what holding on to unnatural, counterintuitive ideas does to you. This is why Israel could never in a million years have an effective communicator. Effective communicators are emotionally authentic and accessible. The unnatural stance they’d have to assume speaking for Israel would make anyone who tried it stiff and unpleasant, just like these two.