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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