"Warring Land" promo, February 7, 2024/12 Sagittarius
Vinicius de Moraes summed up the fragility of human joy in a poem that begins with the famous line: "Sadness has no end, happiness has and has" (in the perfect Hebrew translation by Ehud Menor). This is also the line that sums up the current season of "Wonderful Country". No matter how many well-honed punches and excellent imitations the show delivers, there will always be some reminder of the great sadness that surrounds everything.
You have to remember how it is not at all obvious that we have a "great country" these days, when nothing feels great, and the country itself also feels so different, with a security strip within the north of the country and a south that is still waiting for residents who are on the wrong side of the border fence. How lucky that there are still a few moments of sanity a week, with an attempt to laugh at everything, including ourselves. It's important, it's blessed, and we should salute all the people who work on this weekly hour that tries to make us laugh at reality, instead of being shaped by it.
Sometimes it works, and in a big way. This, for example, happened last night with Sharon Teicher's very successful impersonation of Yossi Cohen. Teicher was able to break down Cohen's successful rhetorical bluffs into their elements, while using all the typical papers of the former head of the Mossad, it is not impossible that he will be prime minister in the future precisely thanks to those papers.
Tycher by the way is a strange success story of the last year. The elders of the tribe still remember him from his days in the sexy/geek night show "Haberi Lila" in a network franchise on Channel 2 (impressively, he looks exactly the same even after the age of 50) but for years he fortified himself in his successful radio position, and in comic writing, among other things also for "Eretz" Great", where he would rarely flash to the screen in a guest role. The election of Yitzhak Goldknopf to the position of Minister of Housing made Teicher a permanent member of the panel, and also one of its bankers. Every character of his is a stamp of injury.
Later on in the program came one of my personal favorite teams in the last season, of Gia Beer Gurevich and Omer Ribak in the role of Ness and Stila. This is the second time that the duo comes to the studio (not including the one time of the duo "Gila and Stila" with Gila Almagor, one of the highlights of the season) and again brings with it a disturbed energy of pure nonsense, which just works. If it was possible to harness Gia's energy during this simulation and fill the batteries of the entire program, it could have been perfect, but then, as always in the last six months, reality knocked on the door and entered.
It came surprisingly precisely in one of the oldest and stupidest imitations in the "Aretz" arsenal. Pearl Rosenblum by Mariano Idelman. I have often criticized Mariano's "Bibi" as the worst (and most harmful) imitation in the history of the show. Pinina's impersonation is not better in the technical sense, and if it hadn't been running for so many years we might wonder if it is even legitimate for a man to do a mocking imitation of a woman who grew up in poverty, and built herself up with two hands until she became the owner of a huge company that bears her name. Still, the imitation works, precisely because of Mariano's wild exaggeration of the imitation (just like Margol's imitation, by the way) that makes the imitation loving, instead of evil.
"Penina" performed in the studio a new version of the surprise hit "Where were you in the seventh to the tenth" that looks to the future, during which, whether it was planned or not, Mariano stopped being a Pearl, and became Mariano. I mean, he didn't stop making the funny voice, and he didn't stop making the faces and the body movements, but his eyes - an integral part of the imitation - didn't try to be funny anymore. The eyes did not laugh, they were furious. The explicit lines in the song: "return the abducted quickly, now is the time, don't wait a year" cannot be funny, because they are not funny. They remind us of the nightmare we are still living in.
Any mention of the kidnapped in a wonderful country stops the laughter for at least a few minutes. That is precisely why the choice of "Ertez" to continue to mention the abductees in every program, and sometimes several times, is so important. This choice, to forgo laughs in favor of conveying an important message, is what ultimately makes Great Land a category unto itself in our television history.