As the time for my act approached, I realised that I wanted to go home. The impact of my laid-back, surreal, laconic style would almost certainly be lost in translation. On a sudden impulse, I decided instead just to talk on the subject of prejudice. This seemed to me to be appropriate in the context of the successes of the far right across Europe in 2009, culminating in the election of the BNP MEPs Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons.
However, the question in the back of my mind was would this be acceptable on a night of stand-up comedy. As I walked on stage to polite applause, I began with the revelation that I was Jewish. I felt a collective intake of teenage breath… or was I just being paranoid? Not a very hilarious opening, I grant you, but it was my way of dealing with the elephant in the room. I then told them that I didn’t like too much applause at the start, “because that’s how fascism began.” I added that because they were so young maybe they hadn’t even heard of fascism. There was a little nervous laughter, but unfortunately it came from me.
However, I felt they were now at least beginning to listen to what I was trying to tell them. And so I began my discourse on the evils and the disastrous results of prejudice, as seen through the eyes of my Uncle Harry character.
“A remarkable man… 99 and he’s still got all his own prejudices intact.”
I explained that Harry had always resented the German habit of being first down on the beach in the mornings, “particularly during the Second World War”. I went on to underline how irrational prejudice could be — it was illogical, for example, to blame the Spanish today for the crimes carried out by the Spanish Inquisition. “It’s like blaming Enrique Iglesias for these atrocities. I just detest him for what he is doing now,” I told the audience.
Next was the touchy subject of the Christian antipathy towards the Jews for the killing of Christ. “It would have been far better for us Jews if we’d just roughed him up a little,” I suggested.
All in all, I admit, the reaction to this serious stuff was certainly not ecstatic, but I knew I had managed to inject a thought-provoking dimension to the show that evening. I wound down with a final example of my Uncle Harry’s irrational prejudices.
“The other week,” I began, “Harry was standing outside the Tower of London when he heard a German accent. He rushed up to this tourist and started shouting at him: ‘Why!? For God sake’s why!?’
“The tourist broke down in tears and ran back to his mother.
“That’s what Uncle Harry always said: ‘You have got to nip fascism in the bud. Get them before they grow up’.”
The evening before I returned home to London, my hosts took me to see The Producers, Mel Brooks’s outrageous satire of the Nazis. All the swastikas were replaced on stage by pretzels. In the circumstances, it seemed the best way to say goodbye to Berlin — with pretzels.
