New Voices blogger Max Moncaster recently discovered the Hitler YouTube parodies. He sent me one and suggested we might make it the subject of the Round Table this week.
The one that caught his fancy was this one, in which Hitler can’t find Waldo:
For those whose heads aren’t as firmly planted in the internet video meme world as the rest us, there’s this scene from a relatively recent German film about Hitler. In this scene, Hitler has a German-language meltdown about something or the other. These joke videos all feature different fake subtitles that make Hitler’s rant hilarious. Especially if you don’t know German. Which I don’t.
I was gonna include videos throughout the post, but most of the good ones have had embedding disabled, which sucks.
So the questions I sent to our bloggers this week is:
Too soon? When it comes to making jokes about tragic events, when is it too soon?
Max Moncaster: Our generation the first that can laugh at Hitler
Drawing a universal line for it being “too soon” is virtually impossible, given that people grieve in different ways over various spans of time. But in regards to these videos–which had me in gut-busting laughter for a good hour–I felt that maybe they were inappropriate but could not quite put my finger on why. Interestingly, I have a suspicion that our generation might be one of the first able to really find humor in this. I can’t imagine my mom finding this funny, and certainly not my grandma.
Joshua Reback: This video isn’t funny
Personally, I do not have much to say about the video. It is not that I have been avoiding watching it because of the feelings it induces, nor because I am so busy. It’s just sort of a lame premise. Three and a half minutes cursing about not finding Wally is sort of overdoing it. Youtube has produced a lot of random, priceless and creative videos. This one is too simple and tries to gain its laughs from the mere shock value of seeing Hitler yelling about Waldo. I think that it could have been more creative and included other things he could get frustrated with. Personally, I think it misses the mark.
And you all might think I am missing the mark with that paragraph.
I am wondering if the theme of this discussion is sort of irrelevant. Do the Jewish people still need to evaluate their lot in the world by how much they can make fun of Hitler? More importantly, I want to ask if the special attention we give him and his legacy has been misappropriated – have we squandered our collective efforts to memorialize the past and failed to affect the future?
As for making fun of Hitler, we have been doing it for decades. Mel Brooks may have been the one to lead the charge and break the taboo, but he made The Producers in 1968. It is not just that we have been dealing with the question of using Hitler as a butt in our jokes, but we have dealt with it. We should have moved beyond it and relegated this question to historians by now.
Harpo Jaeger:
I think they’re hilarious. Especially the one where Hitler reacts to the Hitler parodies being taken off YouTube due to copyright infringement:
(Thankfully, that one was still available for embedding.)
Carly Silver: Funny at first, and then…
It’s funny at first, but then I started to watch more and I felt a bit nauseated.
El Weiss: I’m torn
I am really torn. The Holocaust is an extremely sensitive topic to me, I’m the granddaughter of Auschwitz survivors and I bear a lot of the scars. Hitler isn’t a funny image to me–it’s a frightening one. I think it’s overused and it’s not creative at all, and it’s a bad idea to trivialize the image of the Holocaust. The image of Hitler shouldn’t be banal. It should be an image of horror. But then again, I do see the healing value of humor. This [Editor’s note: See video below, which is not a Hitler video] is blatantly raunchy and misogynistic and yet, it makes me laugh. So yeah, we all have our lines.
Alex Howie: In comedy, anything goes
I don’t find these videos of Hitler in bad taste, but I also don’t find them particularly funny. I think anything is fair game in comedy. If there is one place where political correctness has yet to overtake us it is comedians, and I like it that way–I think they should be able to make fun of virtually anything. At a recent comedy show I attended, a few individuals were offended by jokes of anorexia and women on their periods. In my opinion, people that are going to be offended so easily shouldn’t go to a comedy club. What is comedy without being able to make fun of any and everything? I’d seen this Hitler video before, and like it better in conjunction with this Daily Show clip.
Leigh Cuen: It’s always too soon for lame jokes
I was introduced to these parodies a few years ago when my ex-boyfriend, a fresh off the boat Iraqi-Israeli here to make his post-military fortune peddling novelties in the mall, laughed so hard that he cried at the hitler parody video about the impossibility of parking in Tel Aviv. I personally don’t think that there’s anything offensive about them. If the joke was about the victims of the holocaust, then I never find that funny. But the concept of acknowledging Hitler’s existence doesn’t offend me. Why shouldn’t we laugh at a joke which makes light a vicious dictator, not his actions but his personhood? I’m down for it. As long as it’s actually clever. It’s always too soon for lame jokes.
