REVIEW: Self-Loving Jew (Yohay Sponder)

Taking to the stage to huge acclaim wearing a smart blue suit and his trademark large Magen David, Israeli comedian Yohay Sponder thanked the crowd and acknowledged the support he receives on social media. 

He immediately had the audience in fits, dividing them into the “bringers” (those who wanted to come to see him and the “broughters” (the plus-ones).

The first of his three shows, Self Loving Jew, at the Leicester Square Theatre last night was sold out (he is performing again this evening) and he had the audience belly-laughing pretty much from the start. It is true that people were already on his side, but he had them eating out of his hand.

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“I’m fed up from this f***ing war!” he said, to applause. “We have started no wars. Facts. We love peace. We say ‘shalom’, which means peace, to say hello or goodbye.” If you want to annoy antisemites, he said, “breathe – stay alive”.

He gave the audience what they wanted: life-affirming tales of standing up to racism and ignorance, including from “self-hating Jews” (“enough of the people who start sentences with ‘as a Jew’!”), as well as ways to laugh at ourselves and find the humour in the mundane and in darkness. (I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but he talks about the shiva of his father, who died 11 months ago, as well as his Druze army colleague who was seemingly persuaded by a rabbi to lay tefillin.)

He shared that his wife is “an angel”, thereby denying him the jokes often told by other comedians. Her mother, he said, is a different story, and queried how such a horrible person could produce such a wonderful one. “They say it takes a village… no, it takes a villain!”

Relating his disgust at air stewardesses waking up passengers before landing (“why are you waking me up? I can’t help you fly!”) to mocking the English accent (“you don’t say your t’s, but you love tea”), he got the laughs in. He stumbled over his words at times, asking the crowd to step in to correct his English – speaking about PTHC instead of PTSD, he implored: “You can laugh but don’t leave me hanging like this!”

Asking if anyone in the audience was Muslim, one brave man said he was, and the audience cheered. Sponder asked how he ended up coming to the show and the man said: “Three Jews took me hostage and brought me here.” Sponder exclaimed: “See, when we get hostages, we don’t take them to tunnels; we make them laugh.” He asked a Christian woman in the audience: “Why do people hate us Jews so much?” and then told her: “We are so humble we are in the top five most humble people – I mean we are all of the top five!”

Even the stories that some will have previously heard (“how they can call us colonisers when there are 45 Muslim countries and you can’t even see Israel on a map? You have to zoom, zoom in 17 times – and, even then, the letters of Israel are in Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea!”) caused amusement.

The show is so-called because Sponder retells the story of meeting a British woman who accused him of being a coloniser. “Why are we both speaking English? Why does half of the world speak English?” he asked her. “Someone in India didn’t wake up one day and think ‘I want to speak English’… There are 15 million of us – and half don’t even speak Hebrew. We are a boutique coloniser, a shoebox.”

I was the bringer and thought the show was hilarious – but so did my broughter, who had never heard of Sponder. You can’t get higher accolade than that.

leicestersquaretheatre.com