Israeli couple heckled out of Edinburgh comedy show for saying Israel joke not funny
Reginald D Hunter tells Fringe Festival audience that documentary where abusive wife accuses husband of mistreatment makes him think of ‘being married to Israel’
An Israeli couple were heckled out of a comedy show in Edinburgh on Sunday after they told the comedian they didn’t find his joke about Israel funny, according to a reporter from The Telegraph who attended the show.
Dominic Cavendish, the chief theater critic for the British newspaper, titled his review of comedian Reginald D Hunter: “This was the ugliest Fringe moment I’ve ever witnessed.”
The joke that set off the incident reportedly came midway through the performance at the famed Edinburgh Festival Fringe, when Hunter mentioned watching a documentary where an abusive wife accused her husband of mistreating her.
“My God, it’s like being married to Israel,” the comedian said of the scene.
According to Cavendish, the audience laughed, but an Israeli couple, who were seated in the front row, called out: “Not funny.”
Hunter then engaged with the couple, making fun of them and telling them that they “look foolish” for calling a joke not funny when the audience laughed.
“Look at you making everyone love Israel even more,” he continued sarcastically. The crowd then reportedly joined in heckling the couple, booing and shouting slogans like “Free Palestine,” “Genocidal maniac,” and “f*ck off.”
Amid the vitriol, the couple got up to leave, and even after it transpired that the man was disabled, Hunter continued to “laugh openly” at them, according to The Telegraph.
The review added that after the couple left, Hunter repeated a comment made by his partner about the Jewish Chronicle, a British Jewish newspaper.
According to Hunter, his partner had said, “Typical f*cking Jews, they won’t tell you anything unless you subscribe,” referring to an antisemitic trope that Jewish people are money-hungry by insinuating that the website has a paywall, which it does not, although its searchable archive does have a paywall.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism called the incident “extremely concerning” on Monday, saying that “watching on and cracking jokes as Jews are hounded out of your show is a sickening low that cannot be disguised as comedy.”
The campaign added that its lawyers were examining the incident and urged other audience members to share what they witnessed.
In 2006, Hunter was accused of antisemitism after joking about Holocaust denial during one of his shows. In that incident, he said he ought to go to Austria where Holocaust denial is illegal, get arrested for denying it, and then tell the judge he was referring to the Rwandan genocide, not the Nazi-led mass murder of Jews during World War II.
After his comments caused outrage, he told Reuters that “the joke isn’t about the Jews, it is about freedom of thought and freedom of expression.”
Sunday evening was not the first time Israelis have been driven out of a comedy show. In February, an Israeli man was thrown out of a London theater by comedian Paul Currie after he refused to applaud the Palestinian flag.
During the show, Currie pulled out Ukrainian and Palestinian flags and asked the audience to stand up and applaud, which the Israeli man refused to do. When asked why, the Israeli man said, “I enjoyed your show until you brought out the Palestinian flag.”
In response, Currie yelled at him to “get out of my show. Get the f*ck out of here. F*ck off, get the f*ck out of here” as several audience members cheered the comedian on and shouted “Get out” and “Free Palestine” until the young man left with several others.
