‘So Moses and Muhammed walk into an open mic…’

David Cole writes:

As described by the Jewish Daily Forward, in Hayman’s routine “he pretended to be Anne Frank reading a typical teenage girl’s summer camp diary entries—only the camp in this instance was Auschwitz. Hayman’s routine had Frank—who actually died in Bergen Belsen—innocently wondering why the Dachau and Auschwitz softball teams wore the same uniforms, referring to the pulling of gold teeth as a camp arts and crafts activity and offering lewd descriptions of sexual encounters with historical figures such as Jackie Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.”

I’m not going to pretend to be objective here—I would have laughed. I despise the “punch up” school of politically correct comedy, which dictates that comedy must only target the big and powerful. To me, comedy has one goal: get a laugh. If you can do it by mocking the high and mighty, fine. If you can do it by kicking a destitute old man in his withered nutsack, equally fine. You either get the laugh, or you don’t.

Well, yenta Korzen wasn’t laughing. She disrupted the performance, heckling and berating Hayman for such a blasphemous routine.

That’s pretty funny sounding.

Further to Cole’s point — that Jews will write something like this but Muslims never would (about themselves; we all know they make Anne Frank jokes…) — fragments of an unfinished Mordechai Richler manuscript suggests a subplot involving a “Westworld” style concentration camp “experience.”

And then there are novels like My Holocaust and Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel.