COMEDY

114 POLITICSself-centredness of the over-privileged modern bourgeois is madeutterly risible.Other attempts at considering Holocaust themes in comedy have beenhorribly ill-conceived. The American comedian Jerry Lewis directedand starred in a 1972 film entitled The Day the Clown Cried, a storyabout a German circus clown, Helmut Doork, who is arrested for adrunken impersonation of Hitler and sent to Auschwitz. During hisincarceration he befriends the children of the camp and performs forthem with the hope of bringing some laughter into their lives. At the endof the film he tries to shield them from their fear by leading them to thegas chambers, while, the screenplay says, playing the harmonica like the‘pied piper’. That the film lacked judgement is borne out by the fact thatit remains unreleased. Lewis’s unfortunate project underlines the extremedifficulty of attempting to treat the subject of the Holocaust withoutreducing it to banal sentimentality or simply using it as the backdrop forclowning. The problems of the meeting of comedy with content of thiskind are obvious. Not only is comedy generically and tonally unsuitedto a treatment of the Holocaust, but there is a structural misfit too.Comedy concludes with a standardized happy ending, ‘a conscioussuperimposition of a formal pattern on material that may until the verylast moment whirl with turbulence’, in Zvi Jagendorf’s phrase, but herethere no question of such a thing (Jagendorf, 1984:43).Let us consider three films that have attempted to do so with varyingdegrees of success and controversy: Charlie Chaplin’s The GreatDictator (1940), Frank Beyer’s Jakob the Liar (1974), based on thenovel by East German writer Jurek Becker, and remade in America as avehicle for Robin Williams in 1999, and Roberto Benigni’s triple OscarwinningLife Is Beautiful (1998). While each of these films has adifferent strategy for dealing with this jarring incompatibility, none ofthem can resist the implied trajectory of comic narrative as a means ofinjecting their stories with some optimism and the possibility of futurehappiness, even if it exists way beyond the final scene. We see this in theequation of laughter with hope, and the implication that comedy is therepresentative of a caring and inclusive human spirit that cannot beextinguished by fascism. In The Great Dictator, set in fictionalTomainia, Hitler look-alike Adenoid Hynkel has risen to power on anti-Semitic policies and by fermenting international unrest. The filmcontrasts Hynkel’s rampant megalomania, revealed in a scene where heperforms a delicate ballet with an inflatable world globe, with theparallel story of a humble Jewish barber who returns to the ghetto afterseveral years in hospital suffering from amnesia. Chaplin played both