Here in Israel, it’s halfway through Chanukah, and we have finally resigned ourselves to the winter cold, foraging in the depths of our wardrobe for coats, hats and matching gloves, warm boots and thermal undies. Our cold may be less vicious than the North Sea wind that strikes icy glances at you in London, or the soft downy snowfalls of Eastern Europe, but it is more pervasive.

A chilly blast will hit you when and where you least suspect it, since insulation, as I mentioned elsewhere, isn’t on our national priority list. We have a few weeks of this foul weather, and then—poof!—we throw out the unwanted leftovers of soups and stews, cursing aloud when a favorite sleeveless top hasn’t made it back to our wardrobe. Then the scorching heat, our daily bread, resumes.

This Chanukah I had the rare honor of—woolies n’ all—performing at an all-Anglo stand-up event organized by the charming yet eccentric Benny Leva. Benny greets me at the door looking harassed; he’s multi-tasking with tech and tickets and trying not to be mad at people who happily volunteered but should have showed up an hour ago.

His love of comedy prompted him to pull in the Jerusalem funnies (eight comedians, naturally) for a night of Chanukah entertainment and to warm ourselves temporarily from the literal and metaphorical storms raging outside. Strangely enough, one of the funnies happened to be me.
Help!

Crafting Laughs
If you think churning out regular newsletters and blogs—and meanwhile uttering a fervent prayer that one of them will gain traction—is bloody hard (especially since you are competing with a flood of AI slop), put your creativity to the real test when you try to tease as many laughs as possible from your audience in seven minutes flat. To up the ante, try performing it on stage with nonexistent heating, whilst praying the mike doesn’t act up.

Comedy writing, unlike the stuff I’m penning now, doesn’t involve churning out ever-growing lines of personal expression via metaphors and meanderings in Arial font. No, to be funny, I have to be extremely low-tech. I take out my pen and a notebook from my ever-growing pile that are slowly colonizing my home, and scribble furiously during the inconvenient moments when my creative muse decides to pay a visit.

Then I ask myself, “Is this really funny?” If the answer is no, I erase the offensive stuff and toss the book angrily across the floor. If the answer is yes, I’ve gone up to level 2—that of figuring out the next punchline. And then I might backtrack, asking myself yet again, “But Ella, is it actually a joke that will produce laughs? I mean, maybe you’re the only person in the universe who thinks it’s funny?” Then I’ll spend the next half an hour in an angst of self-doubt and existential doom.
The editing is merciless, the inner voice torturous. When I’m not butchering my own script with a red pen, I’m rehearsing the ultimate cop-out: cancelling. A hundred times a day.

Compared to this, blogging is patient, tolerant and benign. Less responses........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)