(Both are now in their late 50s.) Actually, the pair weren’t really friends they merely attended the same private tuition classes. The narrator is an audience member, an ex-judge whom Dovaleh was briefly friends with as a child. (His opening gag is to express regret for not bringing a flak jacket: Netanya is evidently a place where protective cladding, of the soul if these days not so much the body, is advisable.) What follows is basically a long description of Dovaleh’s performance, in which every joke, every gesture, every reaction gets reported. We first encounter Dovaleh G as he takes the stage in a comedy club in the West Bank-adjoining town of Netanya. A Horse Walks Into a Bar is an attempt to wrench off that protective cladding, and to contemplate – if only for an instant – the unadorned truth. Humour, perhaps especially in a country like Israel, tends to have a protective role both individually and collectively, it helps to smooth over trouble, make life bearable. Grossman has good reason to understand those limits: one of Israel’s most prominent writers, the author of such epoch-defining works as See Under: Love and The Book of Intimate Grammar, he suffered a scarcely imaginable personal tragedy in 2006 when his son Uri, a tank commander in the Israeli army, was killed in action in Lebanon.
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