Heckles are one thing, division bells quite another. Veteran standup Ivor Dembina has spent 20 years handling the former, but that's no preparation for when his show is interrupted by a ringing summons to vote on "Lord Tope's amendment", and several members of his Right Honourable audience dutifully shuffle out.
But then, it's not every day a comedian plays the House of Commons. Dembina is here at the request of Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, to perform his show about the Arab-Israeli conflict to a crowd of peers and MPs. It could be a tough gig: there are members of this audience who look like they haven't laughed since before the Boer war. But Dembina pulls it off. The thoughtful tone of this "story with jokes" might leave a standup crowd nonplussed. But in parliament, it's perfectly apt.
The show traces Dembina's trajectory from 60s Jewish childhood in Hendon, north London, to his troubled rejection of his parents' Zionism – and later to pro-Palestinian activism in the occupied territories. There, he meets Arabs unfazed by the claim that the Holy Land was given to the Jews by God. "That's nothing – it was given to us by Great Britain."
There are a few digs at tonight's unique location, "the seat, the very birthplace, of hypocrisy – I mean, democracy," as Dembina calls it. But the show isn't combative, it's reflective and intimate. The laughs are separated by ever longer passages of anecdote and observation. Dembina's love for Jewish humanism and humour, and his sadness as that tradition is bulldozed by Zionism, are more sonorous than any division bell. Parliament may have seen funnier performances, but few more heartfelt.
