The only explicitly antisemitic jokes I’ve heard at Fringe have come from Jews. Hmm

In fact, only half the bill of Jews for Gaza was Jewish: veteran promoter Ivor Dembina, and Israeli (“but one of the good ones!”) Daphna Baram, a journalist and comedian, who had to be brought to Edinburgh especially for the gig. “Ivor always says that he needs an Israeli on the stage so they won’t say he’s antisemitic,” said Baram. (For the same reason, presumably, that I saw a child in a kippah in the front row. I recognised the tactic from church gigs: audiences in churches never laugh unless the minister is sitting on the front row, implicitly giving permission.)

I am not entirely sure it was enough. “I guess it does depend who’s saying it,” observed the non-Jewish comedian Daniel Kitson, also performing at the gig, after a joke about how you can’t trust Jews like Ivor with money. Kitson thought he’d gone too far, even for the keffiyeh-wearing middle classes of Edinburgh. He hadn’t: they laughed as hard as they did when Baram hinted that the collection buckets at the end would be siphoned off by Dembina. “We’ll hope it gets to the right place, but you can never tell with Jews, can you?” she said.

Comedy shows develop momentum through running gags, but I found this one rather unpleasant. A good rule of thumb is if you can imagine your joke being the caption in an edition of Der Sturmer, you probably ought not to do it.

The next day I went to Rachel Creeger’s hastily rearranged show in a tent in Nicolson Square. It’s fair to say the audience came from a different demographic to Jews for Gaza, as you would expect from a show entitled Ultimate Jewish Mother. There was nothing about Gaza except for a plea for peace and the release of the hostages. (Creeger is not “one of the good Jews”, as defined at the previous night’s gig.)

It is a free show, and, like all the free shows at the festival, a bucket is passed round for donations. (For this show, however, it is a stockpot in which Rachel makes her chicken soup – she is, after all, the ultimate Jewish mother.) And Rachel makes a bucket speech – again like all the free shows – asking for cash; and made an offhand reference to the myth that Jews were all about the money.

But that, for some reason, didn’t feel uncomfortable. (The only uncomfortable bit in Rachel’s show was when a woman in the front row admitted to putting a tomato in her chicken soup; I have never been present for the start of a broigus before.) I tried to put my finger on why.

It wasn’t just that greed is legal but embezzlement, as they joked about at Jews for Gaza, is not. (I would far rather money raised for Palestine was embezzled by a struggling comedian than by Hamas, although I accept that that may have been a minority opinion at the gig.)

I squirmed when an Israeli and a London Jews made jokes about Jewish greed

And the cliché Kitson recycled, that it depends who’s saying it, doesn’t work either: I squirmed when an Israeli and a London Jew made jokes about Jewish greed even more than when he picked up the gag and ran with it.

There are three elements to comedy: the teller, the joke and the audience. Comedy doesn’t exist without an audience: it’s the reason we come to Edinburgh every year. You can write a novel that no one reads and still be a novelist; a comedian without an audience is nothing. And because the audience is an integral part of the joke, the idea that an antisemitic joke becomes a “Jewish joke” if it’s told by a Jew, is too limited. Jokes that might sound like teasing around a Shabbat dinner table become antisemitic, I would argue, if they are told to a bunch of people who have just been subject to a barrage of anti-Israel vitriol.  

I suppose it’s good news that the only explicitly antisemitic jokes I have heard this Fringe – including one vile joke predicated on Holocaust denial – have been from Jewish comics; it’s probably better news that I haven’t heard them get a laugh outside of Jews for Gaza.

Andrew Watts’ show Love Tory is at 16.15 at Boston Bar, Edinburgh: edinburghfestival.datathistle.com/event/2697125-love-tory