US President Donald Trump was MIA for the first time in a month on Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s leading sketch comedy show on Channel 12, Wednesday evening, but Ali Khamenei (Yaniv Biton), Iran’s supreme leader, was front and center, telling host Eyal Kitzis that he had no idea what was going to happen next.
“I’ve been in a bunker,” he explained, adding that he had cancelled a vacation because of the threat of war between Iran and the US. “There’s no refund, they’re Persians,” he complained, referencing an Israeli ethnic trope that Iranians are penny pinchers.
Kitzis suggested he may have gone into his bunker too early. He seemed to agree, saying he had already binged all the television shows he wanted to watch while in hiding. “Even Eviatar Banai, I watched,” he said, referring to a documentary on Yes Docu about the popular Israeli singer and complained that the four-part series went on too long.
Asked to speculate on whether negotiations might prevent another war, he said he wasn’t sure, and painted four scenarios, each one of which seemed to contradict his previous prediction, and finally appealed to N12 News’s military correspondent, Nir Dvori (Lior Ashkenazi).
Dvori simply played a recording from the defense department saying information would be given when it was available. Next, the military reporter listed all of Israel’s various defense systems, starting with the Arrow ballistic missile defense system, but then mentioning avoidance as a defense, and finally the fourth system which was, “Your aunt, who says, ‘Oh, is Europe any better? … Do you know how much antisemitism there is there now? They’re putting the mezuzot inside the houses!”
Eretz Nehederet parodies NBA All Star Deni Avdija, controlling father Zufer
More upbeat was a bit about Deni Avdija (Ori Laizerouvich), the first Israeli player in the NBA to make the All Star team, and his controlling father, Zufer Avdija (Eli Finish), who played basketball in the former Yugoslavia before coming to Israel. Deni, looking exhausted and a little dazed, thanked his fans for making his dream come true, but seemed shocked when his father, who has a reputation for pushing his son hard, tried to show affection.
There were the usual skits about day-to-day political conflicts and media stars, and a sketch where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, gets to star in her own movie, like Melania Trump, where she cooks, browbeats her staff, and gets AI filters to make her look so young she could be a child.
The show opened with a darkly comic skit about the problem of crime and murder in Arab society, with a man in Lod calling the police about a shooting in his neighborhood. An indifferent police woman answered and quizzed him to find out if he was Arab or Jewish before sending help.
A slightly weary-looking Kitzis promised the show would be back next week, unless the war had started by then.