Haunted Laughter: Representations of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust in Comedic Film and Television

Jonathan C. Friedman’s latest book is a welcome addition to the growing body of academic literature concerning the Holocaust and humor. Along with a handful of other recently published works, including Liat Steir-Livny’s Is It OK to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture (2017), Valerie Weinstein’s Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany (2019), and David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt’s edited volume Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020), this wide-ranging study poses a series of ethical questions about the appropriateness and cultural value of comedic forms that take genocide as well as its perpetrators and victims as their main subjects.Haunted Laughter takes these previous attempts to explain why a mirthful disposition might serve survivors and their allies so well. The book focuses on motion pictures and television series that feature caricatured (or not-so-caricatured) versions of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the state-sponsored program of persecution that predated the Second World War that elicits nervous laughter from audiences. The Nazi Party’s systematic oppression of the Jewish people had sparked satirical responses long before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and the history of Holocaust-related humor can be traced back to the first years of that decade, when antisemitic jokes circulated throughout Europe and when Jewish comedians spoke back—joked back—to power at the same time as the first concentration camps were being constructed under the authority of SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Since then, various permutations of both the destructive and generative sides of that comedic discourse have seeped into radio programs, stand-up routines, and global popular culture. To his credit, Friedman accounts for nearly all of its major strains (e.g., gallows humor, absurdism, parody, satire, etc.) across a much wider array of texts, including internet memes, than any of his predecessors.The assortment of case studies includes Depression-era and wartime studio productions like the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) and the Bob Hope vehicle They Got Me Covered (1943) along with episodes of contemporary TV shows on Comedy Central such as South Park (1997–present) and Key & Peele (2012–15) as well as genre-defying experimental films such as Christoph Schlingensief’s “trash horror mockumentary” 100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the Fuhrer Bunker (1989). Given this range of examples, the burden on Friedman to provide a cohesive conceptual framework from beginning to end is real. Thankfully, Friedman hews to a tripartite model of evaluative criteria (“purpose-relevance-originality”) across five thematically and chronologically organized chapters, bringing analytical consistency to each set of case studies. He draws liberally from long-established theories of comedy (e.g., Bakhtinian, Bergsonian, Freudian, etc.) and references some of the most famous purveyors of Jewish American humor (e.g., Mel Brooks, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, etc.), all of which lend his book a faint whiff of familiarity. Haunted Laughter is therefore at once groundbreaking and slightly reminiscent of previously published works, owing to the roster of familiar philosophers and funny people marshaled forth as exemplars of their respective fields. The book is best when it treads on less-traveled ground, illuminating the nooks and crannies of film history that have been either overlooked by other scholars of Holocaust-related humor or consigned to “second-class status” vis-à-vis “worthier” (more serious) objects of study—a discomfiting dismissal given the Nazis’ devaluation of Jewish art as “degenerate” nearly a century ago.For example, in a chapter devoted to the topic of comedy films about the führer, three of the Three Stooges’ slapstick-filled, Yiddish-sprinkled shorts—You Nazty Spy! (1940), I’ll Never Heil Again (1941), and Higher Than a Kite (1943)—are discussed alongside the Hal Roach–produced propaganda picture The Devil with Hitler (1942) and a quartet of Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoons starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. In a rare slip-up, Friedman misidentifies Herr Meets Hare (1945) as a Leon Schlesinger production (the Jewish American producer had already sold his assets and left his position as the studio’s head of animation one year prior to its theatrical release). Friedman situates these and several seemingly minor motion pictures within a broader culture of cartoonish sendups up by famous artists from outside the world of cinema of not only Hitler but also Europe’s other resident fascists, Mussolini and Franco. This group of provocateurs included German visual artist John Heartfield and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who had different political affiliations but whose collective response to the rise of fascism and to the deadly serious yet easily mocked foolishness of the mustachioed führer paved the way for Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019), and countless films made during the intervening years. The author’s insights into these and other motion pictures’ narrative and thematic parallels enrich our understanding of not only their instrumentality but also their sometimes compromised artistry as works that frequently rely on grossly demeaning, overtly racist stereotypes (of Japanese people, for instance).The major Hollywood studios, on the other hand, tended to refrain from such representations during the 1930s, not wanting to offend overseas audiences and thus diminish their box office intake at a time of economic uncertainty. Friedman notes the political underpinnings of anti-Nazi representations (and nonrepresentations), alluding to the film industry’s Production Code, which cautioned the studios from undertaking projects that might show the citizens, institutions, and leaders of foreign countries in an “unfavorable light.” In one of a few instances in which a factual error distracts from his otherwise careful textual reading, the author refers to this set of self-censorship guidelines, which was adopted by members of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1930 and rigidly enforced by Joseph Breen’s office beginning in 1934, as the “1927 Production Code.” Here he confuses MPPDA president Will H. Hays’s lists of “don’ts” and “be carefuls” with the more rigorous codification of those lists three years later. Earlier in the book, in a discussion of social changes that contributed to a resurgence of anti-Nazi comedies in the 1960s, Friedman makes a similar mistake, stating that “the replacement of the Production Code in 1965 with the current rating system had a liberating impact,” paving the way for fearless cinematic works such as Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967) as well as taboo-shattering “sick” humor from the likes of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. But an early version of the current motion picture rating system was not put in place by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPPA) until 1968, though the code had been all but dismantled a couple of years earlier. Such errors are few and far between and would hardly be worth citing were it not for Friedman’s predisposition to historical accuracy.Aside from occasional factual errors, a slightly more vexing issue is Friedman’s insistence on providing the Rotten Tomatoes audience scores for many of the films covered in the book. While it might interest some readers to know that director Otto Preminger’s crime drama Margin of Error (1943) “sits at a lowly seventeen percent” approval rating on the review-aggregation website, in stark contrast to the “seventy percent audience approval” for director Vincent Sherman’s comedic spy thriller All Through the Night (1942) or that the East German film Jakob der Lügner (1975) scores higher than the 1999 remake starring Robin Williams as the ill-fated shopkeeper of the title, the frequency with which such asides interrupt Friedman’s historical accounts and textual analyses becomes conspicuous—especially when he opts to stop short with further details about specific contexts of production and reception that actually merit elaboration. For instance, during his all-too-brief discussion of The Blues Brothers (1980), a John Landis–directed action-comedy in which the titular twosome has more than one hilarious encounter with an Illinois branch of the Nazi Party, the author alludes to the fact that “in the late 1970s, Nazis had been attempting to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie and had taken their case to the Supreme Court” (114). A fleshed-out account of that historical footnote might have revealed how real-world events, including those that are far less consequential than the Holocaust, can be more troubling than the humor-infused narratives seeking to make light of such tragedies.Despite these minor annoyances, Haunted Laughter mounts a persuasive argument for comedy’s therapeutic function and will have readers scrambling to revisit dozens of films and television episodes that demonstrate its author’s belief that the funniest attempts to heal or address the traumas of the past are often the most incisive in their social commentary as well as the most original in their structure and delivery. With growing numbers of reports of antisemitism occurring around the world, the publication of this book is not only timely but a reminder that any catharsis that might come from laughing at big-screen or small-screen Nazis is temporary at best, sure to be replaced by a more haunting type of memory that no amount of grotesquely exaggerated “revenge killing” (à la Inglourious Basterds [2009]) can hope to erase.