CHAPTER 81

Hood Qaim-Maqami stops doing the suicide bomber joke,

I dropped it … except for one time when Manny very kindly suggested that I re-try it at the Cellar. I did and immediately got heckled with a very loud, ‘That’s not funny!’ Oddly enough, the heckle was a perfect lead-in to the follow-on plane/Israel jokes. But it didn’t feel right. I’m confident that Manny would have supported my continuing to use it. But for me, it wasn’t about having the courage or being comfortable with the cringe. It also wasn’t about the thin-skinned PC types who would heckle without having been directly impacted. In fact, I was more directly impacted by 9/11 than ninety-nine per cent of Americans and New Yorkers. But that’s still not one hundred per cent. And for me, it was about avoiding that rare instance when someone more directly impacted, someone who had lost a loved one, was actually in the crowd. Others might look at it as an opportunity to be New York edgy. I think it’s just callous.