Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich

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From legend and history, Levy derives the film’s central conceit that Hitler’s charisma was an affectation learned from others. According to reports, Erik Jan Hanussen, a charlatan mind reader, worked with Hitler on the use of hand movements when speaking to a crowd. (38) The story has been the subject of several films, including Hanussen (O. W. Fischer, 1955), Hanussen (István Szabó, 1988) and Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2001). In all versions, Hanussen is spiritual advisor to Hitler until the Nazis discover his Jewish origins and murder him. Other accounts say that Hitler developed his oratorical style by observing Benito Mussolini’s effect on crowds. A third influence came from the actor Paul Devrient, who in his memoires, written after the war, claims to have trained Hitler early in his career in the art of effective speaking. (39) The question I hope to answer is not if humour is appropriate, but whether there is a line beyond which humour does more than help us cope with tragedy and becomes a means to help us forget or ignore it. The first part of this essay looks at the caricatured portrayal of Hitler and the Nazis in representative films from 1940, the year Chaplin made The Great Dictator, to 2006, when Levy released Mein Führer. The second analyzes Levy’s film, the first mainstream comedy to combine the Hitler/Nazi caricature with the crimes of the Third Reich, moving beyond laughing at the perpetrators of the Holocaust to laughing at its victims as well. (2) The Hitler Laughing Scene, also known as Hitler's Trollface Scene, is a scene in the extended edition of Downfall which is sometimes used in parodies. In search of a Hitler beyond the caricatures, he decided to read Mein Kampf for the first time. "It's written in the style of someone who doesn't normally write: pompous and snivelling, lots of animal metaphors. If one word would do but Hitler knows three, he will use all three." He has two main problems with the movie. One, it makes Hitler seem harmless. And two, as a comedy, it does not go far enough.

We trample under foot, as they have trampled on and laughed at us. We are taking our revenge on the Jews, the homosexuals, the communists in all of Europe for the tortures and humiliations in our nurseries. […] We are a people of disobedient and unloved children! Save me! (The crowd responds in kind, “save me!”). (45)

Comedy in the Third Reich

Of course, goading the Nazis was never a uniquely British pastime – factor in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) and the 1942 Disney short Der Fuehrer’s Face, and many more besides, and the artistic world bent to the task. But, with the exception of The Producers (1967), the sublime American film by Mel Brooks about staging a Hitler musical (that surely wouldn’t get past the censoriousness just displayed at the Cambridge Union either), it is the Brits that have arguably been those most determined to laugh at the posturing idiocy of the regime. Horowitz [a code name for Adolf Hitler in Yiddish jokes about persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich] (7) comes to the Other World. Sees Jesus in Paradise. “Hey, what’s a Jew doing without an arm band?” “Let him be”, answers Saint Peter. “He’s the boss’s son.” (8) A new German movie about Adolf Hitler opened this week. It's the first mainstream German film to make fun of the Nazi leader. And while laughing at Hitler has been a successful form of comedy in the U.S. and Britain, it's been unusual — if not taboo — in Germany. Why I'm telling my daughter to marry RICH: Some might call me anti-feminist, but I wish MY mother had instilled in me how crucial money and status are in a partner... Anyone who says wealth can't buy happiness is kidding themselves!

Many Americans are wondering if this resurgent movement should be ignored, feared or fought. What, exactly, is the best antidote for neo-Nazism? It has not always worked. There have been times when British comedy simply runs disastrously aground on the subject – witness the awful 1990 British sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! – depicting Hitler and Eva Braun living next door to a Jewish couple, cancelled after just one episode.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.