COMEDY

116 POLITICSwho, in their 1944 essay ‘The Culture Industry’, felt they gave ‘the lieto the anti-fascist plea for freedom’ and served ‘to confirm theimmutability of circumstances’ rather than proposing a radically newdirection (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:148–149). This would not bethe last time anyone accused Chaplin of inchoate sentimentalism.Becker’s Jakob the Liar was the first important fictional narrative ofthe Jewish wartime experience to come from East Germany (theGerman Democratic Republic). The film tells the story of the middleagedJakob, living in the ghetto and forced to work in the freight yard.One night he is sent to the police station where he accidentallyoverhears a radio report of the Russian army’s advance. Given hope bythis news, he tells his friend Kowalski who pressures him to know howhe could possibly have heard a radio in the ghetto. Jakob tells him thetruth, but Kowalski refuses to believe he would have left the policestation alive. Instead, Jakob tells them he has a radio hidden in hishouse. Soon, the entire ghetto is coming to him for news, and the morehe prevaricates, the more convinced they become that he has access toforbidden information (a perfect example of Bergson’s ‘reciprocalinterference of series’). Faced with the choice of either giving hisneighbours hope or telling them the truth, Jakob chooses the former. Inthis, and Jakob’s simulation of radio broadcasts to tell his niece fairytales, we are asked to condone his fiction as a gift that momentarilyrelieves suffering by extending the promise of a happy ending. There isno happy ending, of course, and the final scene contrasts the journey tothe concentration camp with a fairy tale projected onto the clouds,unhappily indicating the optimism and intangibility of fiction. ForSander L.Gilman, Jakob the Liar is one of the few successful humoroustreatments of Holocaust material, because its comic aspects areexpressions of the accidental rather than the precursors of absorptioninto a comic resolution. ‘Accident’, he writes,is the wellspring of comedy and laughter, not because it is theopposite of tragedy but because it is the instantiation of therandom in life, over which one can only laugh or weep. Beckerprovides the ability to do both in Jokob the Liar and made itpossible to use the elicitation of laughter as a means of presentingthe unpresentable, not only in the Shoah, but the randomness oflife.(Gilman, 2000:304)