“Hvad er værre end at finde en orm i sit æble? Nakbaen”

Tragikomisk katastrofe eller: hvem griner af palæstinensernes lidelser?

Resumé

By closely reading the Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef’s performance in the talk show Piers Morgan Uncensored on October 17, 2023, and the Palestinian artist Mona Benyamin’s sitcom Trouble in Paradise (2018), this article investigates the aesthetic and socio-political potentials of making fun of the Palestinian history of suffering in front of a global audience. Dwelling on Youssef’s highly performative television interview—which I treat here as a work of art in its own right—as well as Benyamin’s use of canned laughter, odd timing and rigid body language, I show how their mutual tragicomical trivialization of the Palestinian suffering seem necessitated by a human catastrophe that, despite its own constant reactualization, remains socio-politically, culturally and aesthetically neglected within the existing global world order. I suggest that while the sympathetic, but also potentially alienating idiom that is often associated with the representation of the Palestinian history of suffering seems strangely familiar to a global audience, both Youssef’s and Benyamin’s works relate to this audience through a more unheimlich and uncomfortable register; they confront the urge to hold these sufferings at arm’s length by posing the question whether the global human rights discourse (Meister) applies, in fact, to all human beings.