Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich

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Now that we are living in an age of offence, such convulsions as we have seen at the Cambridge Union are perhaps inevitable. Inevitably, this coincidental resemblance results in the two men being mistaken for one another, but not until the film's climax. After 1945, though, as the world became aware of the Holocaust, laughing at Hitler seemed wrong, even if the comedic narrative excluded references to genocidal crimes. The protagonist is a tough, good-hearted, chatty Berlin housewife who, through her manic monologues, complains about injustices, rationing and the contradictions of everyday life during the war, all the time displaying a robust common sense.

This is the age of the "Hipster Hitler", run by a group of New Yorkers, in which the 21st-century, design-aware "Hipster Hitler" wears T-shirts that say "Heilvetica" and starts another beer-hall putsch because his local doesn't serve the latest craft beer. Perhaps those letters provide enough justification if you wonder – as Charlie Chaplin did after he learned about the atrocities of the Nazis – whether it was morally appropriate to ridicule them, as he did in The Great Dictator. Kern recites the monolog that Beckert delivers in his defence after being captured and tried in a kangaroo court. This cumulates in a scene when Hitler climbs in bed with Grunbaum and his wife, and she really tries to smother the German leader.

The artistic peak of this cinematic effort was the mordant Ernst Lubitsch comedy “ To Be or Not to Be” (1942), in which Hitler is explicitly compared to a ham actor-manager who embarks upon a vanity production of – what else? Meanwhile, in his palace, Hynkel – aka the Phooey rather than the Führer – frets about how to outmanoeuvre his Mussolini-like rival, Benzino Napaloni.

The photo, taken by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, is signed by Hitler in dark blue ink: 'The dear and considerate Rosa Nienau, Adolf Hitler Munich, the 16th June 1933. Die Mörder sind unter uns ( The Murderers Are Among Us, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946), for example, focuses on hunting down a war criminal, a post-war profiteer who wraps his lunch in a newspaper bearing the headline “2 Million Gassed”. He looks for his favourite newspaper, the People’s Observer, but it doesn’t seem to be on the stand – only Turkish papers.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. Lucas had been working for the German Service of the BBC ever since it haphazardly sprang to life during the height of the Sudeten Crisis in September 1938. The photo, taken by Hitler's official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, is signed by Hitler in dark blue ink which says: 'The dear and considerate Rosa Nienau, Adolf Hitler Munich, the 16th June 1933'. Did not our beloved Führer already say in 1939 that our friendship with the Russians is irrevocable and irreversible?