Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich

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Thomas Pigor, a cabaret performer who does a popular chanson about the Führer's aftershave, maintains that the only way to still get any comic mileage out of the Hitler impressions these days is to explore the gap between cardboard cut-out madman and the private human being. "When I do Hitler, I can't start out with the volume at full tilt – people wouldn't find that funny. I give him a low burr – that's where you get some comic potential, in the tension between monstrosity and banality". Forget puppy dog eyes! Cats have nearly 300 facial expressions, including a 'play face' they share with humans, study finds

In the run-up to the opening of Mein Fuhrer, the German media was consumed with the question of whether it's OK to laugh at Hitler. At this point in history, many Germans say yes. Goldstein and McGhee describe over 10 theories of humour from biological to psychological in The Psychology of Humor. Aaron Smuts focuses on four main theories: superiority, relief, incongruity, and play in his internet essay in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Chaplin homes in on his target

Hynkel bloviates mindlessly and unintelligibly. U.S. and English audiences were already quite familiar with Hitler’s untranslated radio speeches, and Chaplin took advantage of this, making Hynkel’s speeches an amalgamation of gibberish, non sequiturs and vaudeville German dialect humor, as when he shouts, “Der Wienerschnitzel mit da lagerbieren, und das Sauerkraut!” (“The wienerschnitzel with the beer and the sauerkraut!”) Would Hitler laugh at himself? But this is difficult territory. Hitler as buffoon is a joke as old as Charlie Chaplin. But Hitler as human being also makes many uneasy. The reviewer, Cornelia Fiedler, of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, attributed the book’s success not to its literary quality but to an unsettling obsession with Hitler. “A very strange fixation on Hitler has developed in Germany and it has something of the manic about it. The focus on Hitler – be it as a comic figure or as the embodiment of evil – risks washing away the historical reality”. All of this is now being debated in Germany. Attitudes have changed, according to Rudolph Herzog, who wrote a study called Dead Funny: Humour in Hitler’s Germany. “The first reaction after the war was to say he was a demon. That is saying that he was like a hypnotist who hypnotised everyone so we're not really responsible. The hypnotist is responsible. Und Äktschn! (And Action!), a critically acclaimed comedy released in German cinemas last month, tells the story of an amateur film-maker trying to make a movie about Adolf Hitler's private life. In an interview with Der Spiegel, its director, veteran Bavarian satirist Gerhard Polt, argued that there must have been a likable side to Hitler – otherwise how could he have penetrated the salons of Munich high society? "The likable guys are the dangerous ones. When a likable person gives you a hug and says something terrible, it's much harder to let go." In 1949, the year of the foundation of modern Germany, West Berliners enjoyed a cabaret show by satirist Günter Neumann called I Was Hitler's Moustache, about a Hitler body double who gets carried away with his new-found fame. Der Spiegel gave it an emphatic thumbs up: "Hitler's first step on to a Berlin stage was laughed at loudly and at length." Laughing at Hitler was a way of showing you were on the right side.

Sao Paola Mostra de Cinema, 24 October 2001; Coachella Valley Festival of Festivals, 1 November 2001; Munich Film Festival, 29 June 2002 The image of Hitler watching “The Great Dictator” a second time – admiring the work of the only public figure whose sheer charisma before the cameras could rival his own – is a compelling one.

Would Hitler laugh at himself?

Levy removes Hitler and the Nazis from their historical, although not geographical context. Two years earlier, Oliver Hirschbiegel had also created an ahistorical portrait of the Nazi leader in Der Untergang, but he kept his figure in a world that simulates reality, preventing viewers from seeing Hitler as caricature or self-parody. Hirschbiegel’s Hitler thus retains the danger of a man who was capable of sanctioning the murder of millions of people. Levy in contrast situates Hitler in a fantasy, the absurdity of which not surprisingly emasculates Hitler. The film’s Hitler resembles the Hitler portrayals in the films of earlier directors; he is a blustering tyrant and nothing more. Though used to controversies over the past 200 years, even by its noisy standards the Cambridge Union has caused uproar this week with a spat that may well go down in the annals. The cause? Adolf Hitler, and the rights and wrongs of deploying him in a debate about artistic taste, and whether it is allowable to impersonate him to make an argumentative point, even if that point is to condemn him.

Wir treten in das lächerliche Antlitz, wie man uns getreten und ausgelacht hat. Wir rächen uns an den Juden, den Homosexuellen, den Kommunisten in ganz Europa für die Qualen und Demütigen in unseren Kinderzimmern. … Wir sind ein Volk von ungehorsam, ungeliebten Kindern! Heil mich selbst!” to which the Volk responds “Heil mich selbst!” Chaplin was warned in 1939 that the film might be refused release in England and face censorship in the United States. Political factions in both nations were anxious to placate the unpredictable, angry Hitler, and “The Great Dictator” could be calculated to enrage the Nazis, who reviled Chaplin as a “Jewish acrobat.” This was not the United States, Poland, South Africa. This was Germany. The twenty and thirty-somethings in the studio audience, the children and grandchildren of Nazi lieutenants and SS troops, were not just laughing at Hitler, they were roaring. (29) What has comedy at the expense of the Nazis consisted of? Jokes that were off-hand, or glib, weren’t there to diminish the horror of the regime, but to forever draw attention to its risibility, to never aggrandise the perpetrators. Peter Cook, for instance, went big on insouciance. “Hitler was a very peculiar person, wasn’t he?” he once drawled. “He was another dominator… And he was a wonderful ballroom dancer. The only trouble was, he was very short…” The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.Incredibly, Hitler knew Rosa, aged just seven when the picture was taken, was considered Jewish under German racial laws at the time.