In his forthcoming comedy You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Adam Sandler plays an Israeli assassin and tough Jew who fakes his own death so that he can escape his violent life and pursue his dream of a becoming a hairdresser. As Dave Itzkoff puts it in The New York Times, "Trailers for the film promise plenty of broad farce, physical comedy and at least one lewd dance routine. What the ad campaign for Zohan does not emphasize is that the film also attempts to satirize the continuing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and provide humorous commentary on one of the least funny topics of modern times with a comedian who is not exactly known for incisive political wit." Itzkoff adds that "If you’re already wondering what gives the Zohan crew the right to tackle such sensitive subject matter, well, so are they." The movie, which has been in the thinking for eight years, was conceived by Sandler, who invented the character (which sounds a little like a comic, Israeli variant on Mickey Rourke's runaway IRA terrorist in the beleaguered 1987 film A Prayer for the Dying) and commissioned Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel to build a script around it. It's a measure of how long ago this was that, at the time, Apatow had not yet begun to create successful movies and was instead cultishly revered for his failed TV series. As for Smigel, the creator of "TV Funhouse" and the voice of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, had not yet begun writing movies, though he had already started contributing cameo performances to Sandler's movies. (Maybe the high point of his acting career would come in 2003's Punch Drunk Love, in a scene where Sandler, playing his brother-in-law, asks him for his professional opinion about the bad feelings in his mind, only to have Smigel remind him that he's a dentist.) Because they're talented, funny guys who aren't afraid of a challenge, they took the job. Because they didn't want to be beaten to death by strangers on the street, they decided to set it aside after 9/11.
After awhile, though, they began to work at it again. There was a period when they made a half-hearted attempt to fudge their targets by assigning phony names to the Mideast nations involved; Itzhoff writes that "their ancient territorial feud became a dispute over orange groves. However, Mr. Sandler and his team ultimately returned to a draft that did not disguise the political subject matter, believing that some filmgoers would be upset by it no matter how subtle their approach." The filmgoers did go out of their way to cast actual Mideasterns, including both Israeli and Arab performers, in the movie. One of the bad guys is played by Sayed Badreya, fresh from his chores playing one of the bad guys in Iron Man. Badreya has a lot of experience playing various terrorists and representatives of sinister Mideastern regimes, yet he almost drew the line at playing one for Adam Sandler. "My prejudice was bigger than me,” he says, ading that his daughter helped talk him into it. The cast members inevitably wound up sometimes talking politics during breaks in filming, and Badreya told Itzkoff, “Don’t think it was always nicey-nicey.” But in the end, he feels that he was part of a comedy mocking both sides in the Mideast debate where, he says, “The jokes are not 50-50. It’s 70-30. Which is great. We haven’t had 30 for a long time.”
