Televised Humor and Social Cleavages in Israel

This book represents a first attempt to examine in a systematic manner televised humor in Israel. It focuses on the Israeli “comic canon” – a bunch of sketches, characters and programs that were produced between the early 1970’s and late 1990’s. In the course of the years, these texts have accuiraed a unique status and became part of the cultural DNA of many Israelies. The analysis investigates the interrelationship between humor and six prominent social cleavages in Israeli society: national, ethnic, class, political, religious and gender. A close reading of the texts shows that “a joke is never just a joke” – the social, political and economic dramatic transformations that Israel has undergone in the last three decades are capsulated in televised humor. Moreover, humor has served as a sensitive seismograph, capturing processes in early formative stages and sometimes even functioned as an actor in socio-political transformations. The book uncovers the polysemic, or multi-meaning, qualities of popular televised humor, which make it unifying and dividing, conservative and subversive. These qualities enable the “comic canon” to contain the set of paradoxes underlying the Israeli society without resolving them. This polysemity also allows the comic texts to serve as a “cultural core” – shared by different, opposing groups, each of which interprets the texts according to its own needs and perspective.