Interfaith comedy show takes a stand
Chicago journalist Ray Hanania, who won awards for covering city hall for the Chicago Sun-Times and just happens to be a Christian of Palestinian extraction with a Jewish wife, has also spent much of his career grappling with Palestinian-Israeli issues in a serious way.
And sometimes in a seemingly not-so-serious way, as he will when he shares the stage Oct. 24 with African-American Jewish comedian Aaron Freeman and Bangladeshi Muslim filmmaker and comic Arif Choudhury, a Northbrook native, for a night of interfaith and intercultural standup comedy at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Deerfield.
“What’s So Funny About…?” is the fourth annual interfaith event co-sponsored at Holy Cross by an association of Lake County churches and synagogues, including Beth Chaverim Humanistic Community, Christ United Methodist Church, First Presbyterian Church, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit and Zion Lutheran Church.
Holy Cross Pastoral Associate Mary Ann Spina said the events were designed partly to bring the association’s various congregations closer together.
“If we can laugh together, that’s healing,” Spina said. “We hope this event will provide a basis for better understanding and more open-mindedness for people who view life differently.”
Hanania said he discovered the value of humor after years of addressing Arab-American issues and the Middle East conflict as a publisher, columnist, broadcaster and a speaker. Particularly after 9/11.
On one occasion, he recalled giving a speech at the University of Michigan and afterwards “being confronted by a little old lady who said, ‘I can’t believe you abandoned your Christian faith to become an Arab.’
“Now, how do you deal with something like that?” Hanania said. “I didn’t know what to say, so I just started making jokes. I said, ‘Listen my mother’s from Bethlehem, Jesus is my cousin, I talked to him to make sure it was okay I could do it.
“And the next thing you know, she’s laughing. And I’m thinking, ‘Okay, there’s got to be something to this.'”
Hanania launched a part-time standup comedy career in 2001, including organizing the Israeli-Palestinian Comedy Tour and Comedy for Peace. And he became embroiled in a national controversy a year later when comedian Jackie Mason refused to allow Hanania to open a series of shows for him at Zanies Comedy Club because of Hanania’s Palestinian ancestry.
But even then Hanania considered standup more a matter of communicating the Arab-American point of view than a secondary career. Not that his shows are overtly political..
“As a matter of fact, one of the criticisms I get from Arabs is that I’m doing self-deprecating humor instead of making political points,” Hanania said. “But I think some of the jokes have a political edge.”
Most of his act is personal, relating to his childhood in an Arab/Jewish neighborhood on the South Side and his marriage to a Jewish woman — all calculated to make people see him as a human being instead of an enemy.
“I think most people don’t really hate Arabs and Muslims,” Hanania said. “I just think they have a lot of anger and fear that sounds like hate. And humor is a great way to reset their circuit boards.”
Source: www.chicagotribune.com