Essay on Humour in Holocaust Representations PDF

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What are the implications of using humour in Holocaust representation? Discuss with reference to Life is Beautiful and/or relevant films/ texts of your choice....

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What are the implications of using humour in Holocaust representation? Discuss with reference to Life is Beautiful and/or relevant films/ texts of your choice.

In Terrence Des Pres’ article, “Holocaust Laughter”, he stated that Holocaust fictions “should be approached as a solemn, or even sacred event… laughter is simply taboo.”1 Humour has often been avoided when representing or speaking of the Holocaust due to the vast evil and suffering that occurred in the event. Laughter almost seemed disrespectful and dishonouring the suffering of victims or even undermining the severity of the Holocaust. However, Des Pres noticed that in Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, Lanzmann and his witnesses take up “a sardonic tone, a kind of mocking irony that on occasion comes close to laughter”2 leading Des Pres to explore whether laughter is possible in artistic representations of the Holocaust. In this essay, I will explore some of the implications of humour and satire in Holocaust representation with reference to films such as Life is Beautiful (1997), Jojo Rabbit (2019), and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940).

Scholars of the Holocaust have learnt that laughter and humour was present in the ghettos and camps and it was a common defense mechanism.3 However, many representations often leave out this aspect to avoid misrepresenting the Holocaust in an inappropriate and disrespectful manner. For example, throughout László Nemes’ film, Son of Saul (2015), there is a sense of solemnity, seriousness, and tension, and laughter is not present until the final scene where Saul knows he is going to die and breaks into a smile for the first time in the film almost as a form of liberation of emotions that he has had to bury to cope with the inhumanity of the camps. Humour in Holocaust representations explore on the aspect of laughter being present and worked as a defense mechanism in coping with the events. Survivor Felicja Karay argued that “humour was an integral part of our spiritual resistance.”4 She explains that laughter helped the victims preserve their personality and defied Nazi authority by resisting and refusing to let the Nazis take everything away from them. The Nazis had tried to turn them into robots through extremely 1 Terrence Des Pres, Writing into the World: Essays, 1973-1987 (New York: Viking, 1991), 278. 2 Des Pres, Writing, 279. 3 Chaya Ostrower, “Humor as a Defense Mechanism during the Holocaust,” Interpretation 69, no. 2 (April 2015): 183. 4 Ostrower, “Humor,” 183.

harsh labour, walking in lines, disallowing display of emotions, disposing them without a thought of consciousness of human life. Laughter allowed the victims to be released from this order and reclaim a form of agency by bringing chaos through laughter and humour. Karay saw that laughter was “the integral part of our inner, mental struggle for our human identity”5 suggesting that laughter helped victims to remain human. This could be linked to Bergson’s idea that only human beings can both laugh and be a reason for laughing.6 By the victims not laughing, it would have meant the Nazis had taken away their humanity and victims had lost the resistance to personality preservation.

Massimo Leone in his article points out that in Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, the Nazi Germans never laugh with the exception of a German doctor, Dr. Lessing. In the first part of the film, we see that both Lessing and Guido are amused by riddles. While Guido is presented to the audience as a light-hearted and comedic character, Lessing enjoys riddles in a different way to Guido. He seems to have a fanatic obsession with them. For example, in the scene in the hotel restaurant where Guido works in the first half of the film, Lessing refuses to have dinner until he resolves the riddle. This idea is reinforced in the second half of the film where Guido hopes for Lessing to help him and his family escape but Lessing only seeks Guido about solving a riddle which he loses sleep over. In this scene, the way Lessing has fun with riddles is no longer funny because it is “a funniness which implies a denial of humanity.”7 Lessing cannot have fun in the second half of the film because he is no longer human but an instrument of death which supports Bergson’s link of laughter and humour to humanity.

The idea of laughter and humour as a coping mechanism during the Holocaust was also conveyed in Benigni’s film through the translation scene in the concentration camp where Guido sets up a game and its rules as a framing device to help Giosue cope and survive. Although many argue the unlikely reality of such happening and Giosue coming out alive, I think Benigni did not attempt to portray this as an accurate depiction of the Holocaust. In the beginning and ending of the film, he uses a voice-over as a framing device presenting his film to be like a storybook with an opening and ending of the tale. He also 5 Ostrower, “Humor,” 183. 6 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Dover Publications, [1911] 2015). 7 Massimo Leone, “Shoah and Humour: A Semiotic Approach,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2002): 190.

uses the word “fable” to introduce the film conveying to the audience that he is presenting a moral story with universalising meaning rather than an accurate representation of history. Guido sets up the camp existence as a competition for Giosue where it embodies the idea of the survival of the fittest. He sets up the rules of the game to help Giosue come out alive of the ‘game’. In doing so, Benigni is presenting a grotesque way of ridiculing the absurdity of the camps. Through humour, Guido tries to preserve the humanity of his son, both physical, literally staying alive, and emotional, to cope with his surroundings. For example, when Giosue tells Guido that he heard that victims were being turned into soap and buttons, Guido laughs at this and ridicules the notion. Despite knowing that it is true, he still had to weave the narrative of the game and hide the realities of the camps for Giosue to survive. Hence, humour in representations could convey how laughter worked as a coping mechanism for the victims and spiritual resistance to Nazi German authority as laughter did in camps and ghettos during the Holocaust.

However, some find fault with the humour in Life is Beautiful because “humour is not just represented, but also evoked as a reaction in viewers.”8 For victims in the camps, laughter was a coping mechanism but if the audience were to laugh at those points of humour, it could lead to greatly downplaying the historical significance of the Holocaust. According to Caillois’ theory about games9, there are at least four types of games: alea, agon, mimcry, ilinx games, which are hazard, competition, simulation, and vertigo respectively. For this argument, I wish to focus on agon and mimicry, that is competition and simulation. In the translation scene in the concentration camp in Life is Beautiful, Guido invents an agon game for Giosue which is created by a set of rules and is temporarily separate from reality. Therefore, Giosue’s experience in the camp was all a competition to him, a reality that is separated from the real. However, the film sets up a different game that is outside the film for the audience that is mimicry or simulation. For this type of game, the audience are merely in a simulation where the “separation of the two universes [that is, simulation and reality] remains absolute.”10 Like a theatrical performer where on stage they are in a simulation and when the curtains go down they step back into reality, in the same way, the film is merely a simulation for the audience and is completely separate from reality. 8 Leone, “Shoah and Humour,” 188. 9 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, [1958] 2001). 10 Caillois, Man, 45.

Leone argues that the main risk with what Benigni has done with humour in the film is that the audience may confuse the two games and play with the first, competition, instead of the second, simlutaion. He is concerned that the audience may step into Giosue’s shoes and takes the events of the Holocaust as a game and not as a historical event which leads to undermining the historical significance of the events. If the audience see the happenings in the camps as an agon game, they become distracted from reality. However, a strategy to avoid this confusion is to watch the film twice.11 Leone argues that when the audience watches the film for the second time, they are familiar with the ending and hence, cannot identify with the Giosue as he plays the game as they are aware of the reality outside of the game and the simulation becomes more clear. In the first viewing, the audience do not know the outcome of the story hence they discover the plot together with the characters and learn what will happen to Giosue the same time he does, therefore, the audience could easily confuse agon and mimicry. But when the audience are aware of the result, the audience only play the mimetic game and laugh less compared to the first viewing because they are aware that they are receiving a representation of the Holocaust and the distinction between game and reality becomes clear.

While humour was a defense and coping mechanism, humour also allowed the victims to laugh at the enemy and deflect fear. Linking back to the translation scene, in Guido creating his own game while pretending to translate the German officer’s rules of the camp, this could be seen as denying the authority of the Nazi Germans. Guido could be seen as almost mocking the officer and by Benigni turning a serious event to a humorous one seems to deny their authority and Guido claims back some agency and control over his life. In many Holocaust representations, satire is a common tool in using humour to challenge the enemy through use of mockery and exaggeration to ridicule the enemy. The use of satire and humour when portraying Hitler and the Nazi regime strips them of their power and the fear they imposed and presents them for who they really are. Hitler would no longer be seen as this god-like figure but exposed to be merely a man. Satire and humour breaks the façade and exposes reality and in doing so, disempowers them.

11 Leone, “Shoah and Humour,” 189.

In Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, satire is used to mock and ridicule Hitler and the Nazi regime. Waititi, who plays imaginary Hitler, in an interview12 talked about disempowering Hitler from within. By putting on Hitler’s uniform, dressing like him, and wearing his moustache but being able to act in however way Waititi liked, it was like taking possession and controlling Hitler enabling him to ridicule Hitler from within. He could make Hitler be nice if he wanted or make him look like a fool. In this representation, the audience are able to laugh at the enemy and deflect fear, challenging their authority. The enemy is stripped of his power and is presented as a fool. Furthermore, Waititi is a Jew and thought that him playing the role of Hitler would ridicule Hitler even more as he tweeted “what better way to insult Hitler than having him portrayed by a Polynesian Jew?” (@TaikaWaititi, June 2, 2018)13 The fact that Hitler is played by a Jew could be linked to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator whereby a Jewish barber is mistaken for a dictator, whom represents Hitler, and is asked to take his place whom Chaplin plays both roles. A further link is to Benigni’s Life is Beautiful where in a scene in the first half of the film, Guido pretends to be an inspector, who is pure Aryan, and has to give a talk on “our race is superior” when he is, in actuality, Jewish. By Guido being able to pretend to be Aryan, Benigni essentially undermines the discourse of racism and presents the notion of racial superiority as absurd. If Guido could pretend to be pure Aryan, Benigni questions what makes the Aryan race more superior or more special than others and rejects the Nazi belief of racial superiority. Hence, there is humour when Guido is mistaken for the inspector or the Jewish barber for the dictator in Chaplin’s film because one is supposedly the superior race and the other inferior. The fact that the two races could be confused and mistaken for the same is something that should not happen if there was any objective truth to the notion of racial superiority.

Benigni further reinforces the absurdity of supremacism in Guido’s “our race is superior” speech when Guido accredits the reason to him being chosen as the perfect Aryan because of “the perfection of this ear”, his “original superior Aryan leg”, and his tight belly button ridiculing the idea of Aryans as the superior race. On 13 July 1939, the Italian government had introduced an Aryanization program whereby 12 Associated Press, “‘Jojo Rabbit’ director felt shame dressing as Hitler,” Oct 17, 2019, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuWfdP1yw2A. 13 Taika Waititi (@TaikaWaititi), Twitter post, June 2, 2018, https://twitter.com/taikawaititi/status/1002584074274463744?lang=en.

“a special commission could simply declare arbitrarily that a Jew was not a Jew.”14 This clearly reinforces racism as absurd hence, Guido’s speech is an absurd response to an absurd reality. Therefore, through satire and humour, Waititi, Chaplin, and Benigni ridicules the enemy and exposes the falsity of Nazi belief of Aryan superiority and presents it as absurd.

Satire also implicitly attempts to encourage social change. It uses “humour to expose and critique some folly or vice within society”15 and when the audience become aware of the evil present in society, it hopes to lead people to take action and rid the evil and hence, result in social change. In the case of Holocaust representations, Hitler and the Nazi regime are often the subject of ridicule and satire. Political satires like The Great Dictator tries to reform society by mocking and attacking those in power like Hitler, the Nazis, and ideas of anti-Semitism but it also awakens the audience to the vices within their society and exposes the evil of Nazi beliefs. In Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for example, in the scene where the dictator gives his speech16, Chaplin uses slapstick comedy to break the façade of god-like figures and present them as fools and the subject of laughter. He also plays on language where the dictator is not speaking a real language but gibberish implying that there is no substance to Hitler’s speech and that his ideas are illogical. Chaplin also plays on the names and titles such as Adenoid Hynkel as the Phooey resembling Adolf Hitler with ‘Phooey’ a parody of the term Führer, Garbitsch a parody of Joseph Goebbels, and Bacteria a parody of Italy with Benzino Napaloni as the Diggaditchie which is a parody of Mussolini as Duce, that is Italian for leader. With ridiculous names and titles and a leader who speaks gibberish, Chaplin invites his audience to reject their views and ideas because they are absurd and worth laughing at because of its insensibility and hence, goes on to spur social change and encourage viewers to take on a different view from those in power, challenging mainstream and widely held views.

Scholars have also found that “humorous message also prompt deeper processing of issue content compared to nonhumorous messages”17 because comedy attracts people and “the memorability of the 14 Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust (New York: University of Nebraska Press, [1987] 1996), 39. 15 Lauren Feldman and Caty Borum Chattoo, “Comedy as a Route to Social Change: The Effects of Satire and News on Persuasion about Syrian Refugees,” Mass Communication and Society 22, no.3 (2019): 280. 16 MyCharliechaplin, “charlie chaplin the great dictator,” August 2, 2009, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFRMK9HGyaM. 17 Feldman and Chattoo, “Comedy,” 281.

humorous message encouraged people to think about it more over time.”18 When people begin to think and process the argument, it becomes more persuasive over time. Hence, humour in representations could be an important tool in conveying messages. Further, people also find it hard to counterargue ideas presented through comedy19 because comedy exposes true characters and ideas. It breaks the façade of pretence and presents invisible truths. Comedy such as slapstick is presented in a very simple manner and could be seen as an honest depiction of the truth, not in the sense of accuracy in depiction of a certain event like the Holocaust but rather brings to light the true nature of ideas like anti-Semitism.

In conclusion, the use of humour in Holocaust representations may be seen as disrespectful and offensive by some, however, I think that there is room for humour to be present in representations without downplaying the historical significance. Laughter and humour was present in the ghettos and camps and despite however, little or sporadic it was, it was argued to be vital to victims’ spiritual resistance. It was also a form of defense mechanism in coping with the brutality and reality of their surroundings. Without attempting to portray an accurate historical depiction, Benigni’s Life is Beautiful conveys humour to be a form of coping mechanism like it was for victims of the Holocaust. Humour also allowed victims to laugh at the enemy and challenge them. Similarly, humour in representations is used to ridicule the enemy and also their ideas like racial superiority by having a Jew play or be mistaken for the racial superior exposing the notion as absurd. Representations also use humour as a form to encourage social change in the audience by exposing the evil in society and with the emphasis on humour for it is an important tool in conveying messages due to its persuasiveness.

18 Feldman and Chattoo, “Comedy,” 281. 19 Feldman and Chattoo, “Comedy,” 281.

Bibliography

Associated Press. “‘Jojo Rabbit’ director felt shame dressing as Hitler.” Oct 17, 2019. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuWfdP1yw2A.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Dover Publications, [1911] 2015.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, [1958] 2001.

Des Pres, Terrence. Writing into the World: Essays, 1973-1987. New York: Viking, 1991.

Feldman, Lauren, and Caty Borum Chattoo. “Comedy as a Route to Social Change: The Effects of Satire and News on Persuasion about Syrian Refugees.” Mass Communication and Society 22, no.3 (2019): 277-300.

Leone, Massimo. “Shoah and Humour: A Semiotic Approach.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2002): 173-92.

MyCharliechaplin. “charlie chaplin the great dictator.” August 2, 2009. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFRMK9HGyaM. Ostrower, Chaya. “Humor as a Defense Mechanism during the Holocaust.” Interpretation 69, no. 2 (April 2015): 183-95.

Waititi, Taika. Twitter Post. June 2, 2018, https://twitter.com/taikawaititi/status/1002584074274463744? lang=en.

Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust. New York: University of Nebraska Press, [1987] 1996....