As preparations have begun for the single concert trailblazing comic Louis C.K. will perform in Jerusalem on August 18, Arab journalist, humorist and screenwriter Sayed Kashua is already upset because he fears the comic will betray the Palestinian cause—even though the comic has never declared his political views about the Middle East, other than to compare Israel and the Arabs on LNS to his two daughters having a tantrum fight. Or as Kashua put it on Friday, in his Ha’aretz column: “If he doesn’t cause a political scandal — me and Louis C.K. are finished.”
With brisk sales for the one-time event, and with prices reaching almost $200, Kashua already detects signs that the most innovative and popular American comic of the day is selling out the Arabs: he first announced his Israel concert on the Howard Stern radio show, Howard Stern whom Kashua calls “the shallow racist who thinks that if he were Israel he’s have eliminated all the citizens of Gaza in five minutes. Who claims that the Jews arrived at a totally empty place, that there were no inhabitants in that desert.”
Kashua sees the Louis C.K. visit as far more than a cultural event — to him this is a political event which legitimizes Israel’s policy, especially in Jerusalem, although the Pais Arena, where the concert is scheduled to take place, is just inside the ancient “green line” separating the pre- and post-1967 eternal city.
Kashua declared that he is suspending his binge watching of the Louis C.K. hit online for-pay series Horace and Pete until after the comic’s short tour of the holy land. “Only if he causes a political scandal that will dominate the local and world press, will I forgive him,” Kashua vowed. “And not something about a regional peace and a hope for equality, but the kind of criticism that would force the state leaders to enact anew law that bans the entry of artists who support free speech.”
Until then, Kashua promises, Louis C.K. can forget about his next three bucks.
Sayed Kashua was born in the Arab Israeli town of Tira. After a successful career as columnist for Ha’aretz and screenwriter for Israel TV (“Arab Labor”), in which he examined honestly and humorously his ambivalence as a successful Arab intellectual in Israel’s Jewish society, Kashua moved to Chicago, Illinois, with his wife and three children, to teach at the University of Chicago, as well as at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
