‘I love when people ask, ‘Oh my God, Martin, aren’t you scared of Iran and Hezbollah?’ I’m like, ‘Listen, I just drove a scooter in the middle of the street surrounded by cars driven by Israelis. I’m ready to die.’”
Gallows humor is at the heart of Martin Winiar’s stand-up comedy routine because, let’s be honest, Jews, in general, and Israelis, in particular, find relief in laughing about the seeming precariousness of our existence.
“We live dark lives,” says Winiar. “We live in a country where if you hear there’s a rocket coming, you ask, ‘From where?’ before you panic and wake up the kids. In any other country, it would just be pandemonium. Here, if you find out it’s from the Houthis, you’ll go back to sleep, and if it’s from the Iranians, you’re like, ‘Ugh, okay, I’ll get up.’”
Living in Tel Aviv, Winiar is well aware of the devastation wrought by Iranian bombs. He and several other up-and-coming comedians, branded Anonymous Comedy TLV, did benefit shows to aid local businesses damaged during the 12-day war. They’re planning another benefit to aid Druze residents of the North.
Comedy is his “professionalized hobby,” Winiar says – a serious sideline to his full-time job as an economist with a major firm’s tax-advisory team.
Scammed into Israel
Winiar arrived in Israel from Buenos Aires in January 2015 with a contract to play professional indoor volleyball – or so he thought. That dream gig never materialized because he’d “trusted the wrong people” and got scammed.
He’s very philosophical about that fiasco. “I deeply believe the balance in life is always positive – maybe not by a lot. It’s about what you choose to focus on. I could have focused on the guy who lied to me when I first got here, but then I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate all the people who helped me when I was down. You can’t dwell on the darkness in life,” except, of course, on the stand-up stage.
“Almost everyone in Israel is very nice,” he continues. Like the Tel Aviv stranger who helped him figure out how to use a public bike and then invited him to Shabbat dinner.
“When you encounter your first ‘not nice’ person six months in, if you go running back to your parents, you didn’t make aliyah; it’s like you’re still living with them. Or you could work seven days a week, stop going out, get back on your feet, and realize that you can handle it on your own.” Which is what he did.
When Winiar finally had enough money to treat himself to a beer and a toasted cheese sandwich, he took a selfie that he still cherishes. “It’s important to have those moments and appreciate them. Now, I’m in an amazing position that I can buy a beer without thinking twice.”
Zionist upbringing
Winiar grew up in “a very Zionist household” as one of some 300,000 Jews in Argentina’s capital city. “It was a diverse population across the spectrum of Judaism, from haredi to secular, and I’m somewhere in the middle.”
When he got to university, he struggled to identify his career path.
“I didn’t know who I wanted to be. I needed something to shake me up. In our home, we were very connected to Am Yisrael and the country of Israel, so it wasn’t that hard a decision when I decided to make aliyah. I know people here, and there are not a lot of countries that welcome and help new immigrants,” he explains.
“For at least half a year before aliyah, I sat down with myself and asked myself if I wanted to leave or stay. After that, it’s your choice if you want to stay; you can’t blame your circumstances on fate. A lot of my process was about starting to take accountability for where I would live.”
IDF uplan
Never mind that he’d visited only once before, in 2008, for two weeks. Never mind that his Hebrew was basic. Ultimately, the best ulpan proved to be the army. He served almost four years in the Home Front Command’s Search and Rescue Unit, became an officer, and still does reserve duty in that unit.
“We don’t just fly to countries after earthquakes or if a Florida building collapses. Our mission is to assist the civilian population when rockets start hitting cities,” he says.
His release from the army in 2020 coincided with the corona pandemic, quashing his grand travel plans. Instead, he did reserve duty, dealing with recovering COVID patients housed in hotels. He also started studying toward a degree in economics and, in his downtime, wrote comedy routines. The next step was open-mic night at the Dancing Camel Comedy Club in Tel Aviv.
Starting stand-up
“Turns out I love being the center of attention! I was shy as a kid, but I also loved being that person who says the thing that cracks everyone up. What I like about stand-up comedy is that you only get better by performing in front of people, finding out if what you wrote is funny. It’s not like a musical instrument – you can’t stay in a room until it’s perfect.”
He believes that mastering the craft of comedy takes “a mix of luck and effort,” so after graduating in 2023, he went to New York hoping to hone his act for a few months. But two months later, he returned to Israel for reserve duty. After Oct. 7, he recalls, “The Brooklyn open-mic comedy scene made it very uncomfortable to be a proud Jew and Israeli, and I felt very relieved when I got back home.”
Winiar feels he’s part of the “next generation” of Israeli comics performing in English, in the footsteps of comedians like Yohay Sponder and Shahar Hason. He also recently started a monthly Spanish comedy showcase in Tel Aviv geared to the many Israeli residents from Spanish-speaking countries.
Winiar and his fiancée, a Canadian expat he met through a dating app, will wed in mid-September and are expecting their first child in January. When he says he is excited about raising children in Israel, it doesn’t mean he wears rose-colored glasses.
“As an immigrant, you have to understand that Israel is not your idea of what it is, or what your teacher said it is. If you come to Israel idealizing this perfect milk-and-honey land, you’ll get disappointed because nothing and nobody is perfect. If you come with the realistic expectation that people are people and countries are countries, you will notice that most Israelis are good, and it’s a wonderful country.” ■
Follow Winiar on Instagram (@martinwiniar) or on his website (www.mwcomedy.com).