38 | SEPTEMBER 3 • 2020
N
o topic seems as uninviting as
Holocaust humor. How can you
laugh at that? How dare you?
And yet, before and during the Holocaust,
people did tell jokes about Jews, Nazis
and mass murder. Even now, decades
afterwards, people still tell jokes.
Who tells these jokes, about whom, to
whom? Exactly who finds the jokes funny,
and who finds them intolerable?
Scholars examine who does Holocaust
humor and why in Laughter After Laughter:
Humor and the Holocaust (Wayne State
University Press, 2020). The editors,
David Slucki, Gabriel Finder and
Avinoam Patt, professors in Australia
and the United States, include essays by
experts in television, film and literature
in the high and low culture of coun-
tries across the globe. Their sampling of
Holocaust humor includes:
Works by antisemites for non-Jews:
Before the Holocaust, Nazi propagan-
dists used the traditional iconography of
antisemitism in cartoons, movies and sto-
ries, showing Jews with exaggerated phys-
ical features as financial and sexual pred-
ators. Ilan Stavans, in his essay in Laughter
after Laughter, presents modern Latin
American cartoons that use the same set
figures. Stavans sees the cartoons as part
of an orchestrated antisemitic campaign
“to deliberately erase the border between
antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” The car-
toonists cast Israel as Nazis, Palestinians
as victims and Jews as unwelcome in
Latin America.
Humor that identifies with the Nazis,
sadly, has a place in the modern world,
and not just in Latin America.
Works by Jews or allies for non-Jews:
Rebekka Brilleslijper, a Dutch Jew, per-
formed Jewish material in cabarets in
the 1930s before appreciative non-Jewish
audiences. In one of her favorite routines,
she sang an Eastern-European Yiddish
song in which a naïve Yeshiva student
innocently asks his teachers about the
king’
s life and gets an exaggerated answer
of the king’
s extravagant luxury.
Brilleslijper was sent to the camps,
where she allegedly witnessed the death
of her friend Anne Frank. She herself
nearly died. She moved to East Germany
— she had become a communist — and
began performing again. Now she mod-
ified the song. She would not mock the
observant Jews of Eastern Europe after
their destruction. She did mock the past
Kaiser, Franz Josef, and a current West
German political leader, Franz Josef
Strauss, a too-easily rehabilitated Nazi. In
East Germany, she could safely make fun
of the hypocritical capitalist.
On the topic of too-easily rehabilitated
Nazis, in 1960, Warner Brothers made
a sanitized bio-pic about Werner Von
Braun, I Aim for the Stars. Mort Sahl sug-
gested a subtitle: “But I Hit London.”
Charlie Chaplin made one of the first
anti-Nazi films, The Great Dictator, in
1940. The Three Stooges did one earlier.
“Had I known of the actual horrors of the
German concentration camps,” Chaplin
famously wrote in his autobiography, “I
could not have made The Great Dictator.”
That knowledge did not stop Mel
Brooks. The Producers, as a film in 1968,
later in other versions, presents unrecon-
structed Nazis as inherently ridiculous
losers. Brooks defends the The Producers,
saying, “You can bring down totalitarian
governments faster by using ridicule than
you can with invective.”
In this volume, Stephen Whitfield calls
How
Can You
Laugh
at That?
New book takes a look
at Holocaust humor.
LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
TOP LEFT: “Lin Jaldati as the Yeshiva Boy,” 1935, photo by Boris
Kowadlo. Courtesy of the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, and
the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. BOTTOM: Advertisement for “An
Evening of Song and Dance by the Famous Yiddish Artist from Holland,
Lin Jaldati,” Stockholm, Nov. 25, 1946. Courtesy of the Akademie der
Künste, Berlin.
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