Knesset Humor Committee Proposes Listening To Voters

Jerusalem, November 12 – A bill originating with the Knesset Humor Committee to take the electorate’s wishes into consideration while legislating passed its initial vote Tuesday to raucous laughter.

The Make Obligatory the Consideration by Knesset Electees of Represented Yearnings (MOCKERY) Act would make it an enforceable legal requirement of legislators to put the stated wishes and demands of their constituents ahead of personal or partisan agendas. In contrast to other pieces of legislation, the success of a Humor Committee bill is measured in the percentage of delegates it can cause to laugh, and its content is not legally binding.

The bill, sponsored by MK Ahmad Tibi, who also chairs the committee, succeeded in causing more than half the ninety legislators present to double over as they guffawed, wheezed, and snorted to the point that tears began streaming down their faces. Two Members of Knesset were forced to leave the chamber so they could breathe, and Speaker Yuli Edelstein had to call a recess to allow the plenum to regain composure.

In addition to calling for some indication of democracy, the MOCKERY Act ordains a carpool for cabinet ministers instead of the new luxury car that each one receives, and instructs the body to hire as a real-time sign-language interpreter the man who gesticulated randomly in that role at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. In reading that portion of the bill aloud, MK Tibi himself began flailing at the lectern, his less-than-slender figure jiggling violently. The sight brought MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud) to such fits of laughter that he soiled himself.

The Humor Committee functioned extensively during the State’s early years, when austerity and the pressures of building a fledgling country demanded relief from the stress borne by MKs. The committee fell into disuse in the aftermath of the 1967 war, with no new members inducted or chairman chosen until after the the First Gulf War in 1991. Shimon Peres manned the committee himself though most of the 1990’s, though no one seemed to realize that his ideas were intended as jokes, and a good number of them were adopted into law, including ratification of the Oslo Accords granting autonomy to Palestinians in parts of Judea and Samaria. The Committee reciprocated several years ago by spearheading the election of Peres as president, following several terms of presidents felled by scandal. Committee members and alumni continue to debate which part of that series is the bigger joke.

Earlier this session the Knesset rejected a Humor Committee proposal to mandate the inclusion of at least one Arab cabinet minister in every government, an idea dismissed as “not funny.”