Dawn French, aka the Vicar of Dibley, is the cosy sofa on which millions have always snuggled. Once on a swimming trip to Cornwall, I swam in a cove overlooked by her house. It was cold and rainy but exciting and atmospheric, thanks in part to the big grey edifice of her home looming over the grey and angry sea.
But all that cosiness is gone now as French added her name to the winding roster of other famous names of people in showbiz who just can’t “stay silent” on the situation in Gaza. Her video, now copiously analysed, was a new level of gross. Not just for its content, but for its mocking tone. This wasn’t an undercurrent, it was the main event. She used a wheedling squeaky taunting tone to mimic the Israeli position about what followed 7 October 2023: “but they did a bad thing”.
Most of it is quite garbled. "Complicated, no, but nuanced. But [the] bottom line is no." Then: the high-pitched voice of nightmares. “Yeah, but you know they did a bad thing to us, yeah but no. But we want that land... and we have history… No. Those people aren't really even people, are they really? No."
In adopting the taunting mockery of a certain kind of mean-spirited bullying mode – I think here of the schoolyard bullies whose defence for reducing another child to hair-pulling anguish is “it was just a joke!” – French is using a tactic with old roots. (She has apologised quite fulsomely, however, which does set her apart at least a bit).
Comedians of the present, certainly, love to deploy their art or its milieu to spit scorn and falsehoods at the Jewish state, flying dangerously close to the outright anti-Semitism winds as they go. Dave Chappelle’s SNL rant about the Jews of Hollywood comes to mind. Chappelle said the "crazy" part about Kanye West’s Nazi-spewing is that the star said antisemitic things "out loud." On he went. “If they’re Black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob,” Chappelle said. “But if they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.” As the writer Adam Feldman posted: “That Dave Chappelle SNL monologue probably did more to normalise antisemitism than anything Kanye said. Everyone knows Kanye is nuts. Chappelle posits himself as a teller of difficult truths. It’s worse.”
Indeed. In Blighty, we’ve got Reginald D Hunter, the “comedian” who at last year’s Edinburgh heckled a pair of Israeli Jews who left after a joke about how being a woman in a relationship with an abusive man is like “being married to Israel”, or how the paywall of the JC was “typical Jews”. The comedian Paul Currie unveiled a Palestine flag during his show earlier that year and ordered a man in the audience to leave immediately; other audience members joined the feeding frenzy, shouting at him.
The desire to pull of stunts in order to pillory the Jews also finds expression in the likes of Polish artist Igor Dobrowolski walking round Auschwitz draped in a Palestinian flag with the words "Never Again is For Everyone” – everything, literally everything, is fair game when the punch-line is Israel.
One older model for this performative trickster mockery mode is, of course, the Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock is slowly and crushingly mocked, until, befuddled and bamboozled in court for the “pound of flesh” that is his insurance on a loan to Antonio, borrowing for his friend Bassanio to woo Portia, he – on pain of death – converts to Christianity and scuttles out of sight.
The Nazis loved the Merchant of Venice, which was seized by the Ministry of Propaganda to spread antisemitic propaganda. Their versions amplified the mocking elements, cutting and editing and reducing Shakespeare’s work to the pinpoint of mouth-frothing sadistic anti-Jew obsession. In 1933 alone, it was performed nearly 100 times, while Kristallnacht in November 1938 was accompanied on the airwaves by a radio version.
One of the most famous was a 1943 production of The Merchant of Venice at Burg theatre in Vienna, with Werner Krauss as Shylock, described as “demonic” and, wearing a “bright red wig and exaggerated beaked nose” as he frantically “[scurried] back and forth” spewing “gurgles,grunts and quarks”. Ha ha ha!
One reviewer described him as “something revoltingly alien…[creeping] across the stage”. Like in the comedy shows of Hunter and Currie, the crowds at the Nazi productions were often very revved up, as was the intent, and shouted and jeered at key moments of Shylock disgust.
Dawn French is not original, she is not clever. But in deploying the comic mode to lambast the Jewish state for crimes it has not committed, she finds herself in step with those who have used such tactics to send up matters Jewish in a way that is neither funny nor nice.
