For his stand-up shows in Israel next week, Avi Liberman has the perfect joke based on the Duke students who walked out of Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech at graduation. “See, now Jerry knows how I feel when we do our show..
.. To be fair, I blazed that trail: I had Palestinians walk out on me when I performed in Dubai,” he said about being the first Jew to perform there.
If, as the old saying goes, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” Liberman has been forced to toy with the exact formula. “There’s no yardstick for how much time or tragedy,” said the doe-eyed 52-year-old from Los Angeles in his fast-talking, observational, comedic way. He’s brought .
Liberman started bringing stand-up shows to Israel after the suicide bombings in 2003, “just to brighten people’s mood, because the mood was so awful there,” he said. And for the last 16 years, he’s been doing shows a few times a year to benefit the Koby Mandell Foundation, which helps bereaved families rebuild their lives after losing someone to a terrorist attack, in memory of 13-year-old Koby Mandell and his friend Yosef Ishran, who were murdered by terrorists. “I remember in the van on tour of Israel comedian John Mulrooney was reading the book The Blessings of a Broken Heart, which Sherri Mandell gave him, and he turned to me and said, ‘When did they put that part about Koby loving comedy in the book? Like how long after we started touring?’ And when I told him that Koby always loved comedy and.
