I went to Porter House, my favorite restaurant. I was with a woman who was not with me for free. I think she had a filet with some kind of a salad and no vegetables, and I think she had wine. I don’t drink at all. I just had unsweetened iced tea.

She didn’t charge me for dinner, because I wouldn’t pay somebody to eat with them. But as a part of the night, she was like, “Yeah, we can go out and eat first, if you want,” so I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then we went home and kind of hung out. I had her for technically an hour, but she was cool with doing something else beforehand because she was kind of familiar with me, so she didn’t mind going out and eating. So we spent probably two and a half hours together.

The problem with the Happy Nakba Day joke was not that a white non-Muslim Canadian told it. The problem was that it was told at all. In Qatar, as in other Arab countries, the “catastrophe” is a crime against humanity that cannot be joked about. Halal Bilal, however, has found a way to weave an Israel joke into his routine. At the Katara show, Bilal riffed on trying to get into the Palestinian territories:

“Any Palestinians here? I wanted to go to Palestine, but to get there I had to go through Israel. I get to the border, and the Israeli soldier says to me, ‘What are you doing here?’ I was like, ‘Dude, I could ask you the same question!’ ” Then he paused. (In his notebook, Bilal had instructions to himself to look for someone in the crowd who was not laughing and make a joke about that.) Then he went on: “I lie — I actually said I’m Jewish! You’re shocked? So was he! He didn’t believe me. I said: ‘Dude, I am Jewish. I have evidence, but it’s circum-stantial.’ Get it?”