Laughing at Hitler

When is Holocaust humor acceptable, and when does it cross the line?

An occasional injection of a sense of humor can be a welcome relief from an otherwise dark and depressing subject, but the line between a tactful laugh and shameless disrespect is thin and elusive, lending itself to "I know it when I see it" rather than a cut-and-dry definition. And people seem to get it wrong more often than they get it right.

So what's the difference? The acceptability of genocide humor seems to hinge on two key elements: The subject of the joke, and the purpose (or lack thereof).

For instance, I love Eddie Izzard's bit on genocide, which makes an excellent point about mass murderers coming from rather ordinary backgrounds -- Hitler was a vegetarian painter, and Pol Pot was a history teacher -- and about how our inability to deal with large scale killing turns into an odd sort of tolerance. ("Somebody's killed 100,000 people, we're almost going, ‘Well done!'")

Evil dictators are, indeed, easy targets -- their eccentricities and delusions make them easy to cut down to size, but we never forget the horrific human suffering inflicted at their whim. Perhaps it's a way to create distance between us and the all-too-common human capacity for cruelty, or perhaps it makes this capacity easier to comprehend. Or perhaps neither. When asked about his caricature of Hitler in the movie/musical The Producers, Mel Brooks commented that by laughing at Hitler, "we can try to rob [him] of his posthumous power and myths." Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator also comes to mind.

(Slighting Germans and even non-Nazi-related German culture more generally has been treated as fair game -- regardless of whether or not it's actually fair -- for comics for sometime, and parts of the "Springtime for Hitler" clip from The Producers are rather offensive. We might be laughing, but we should probably be ashamed of ourselves.)

But turning genocide victims into the subjects of jest treads into far murkier waters. Photos of Roseanne Barr dressed as Hitler, pulling people-shaped cookies out of an oven? Not funny. Turning symbols of the Holocaust into kitschy décor for a bizarre theme party? Not funny -- especially given that the only apparently message of such stunts is, "Lighten up, don't take yourself so seriously," which, when dealing with an issue like the Holocaust, isn't much of a message at all.

Levity is often a beneficial, but it has its limits. Many things in this world are laughable, but others should be left untouched.

[Photo from Creative Commons:  Roger de Bris as Hitler in a stage production of "The Producers."]