Too clever by half

MICHAEL VISONTAY

FIRST a joke. It’s World War II and two Jews are at a train station in Germany, waiting for a train to arrive with Hitler on it so they can assassinate him. They wait and they wait. After a few hours the train has still not shown up. One Jew turns to the other and says: “I hope nothing’s happened to him.”

Everyone laughed out loud when a Jewish comedian told this at a show at the Hakoah Club several years ago. It stuck in my mind because here was a joke, albeit a self-deprecatory one, about the war and by implication – the Holocaust.

Jewish humour about the Holocaust has never been, as some claim, taboo. The real question has been: What is its purpose? As The AJN reported last week, Mel Brooks’ The Producers was a classic: it used slapstick to lampoon the whole idea of the Third Reich.

The 1997 Italian film Life is Beautiful was more problematic, setting a fable against the Holocaust, which critics claimed was trivialising it. Some (like myself) found the film profoundly moving for conveying an emotional truth about childhood. Others could not forgive the director, Roberto Benigni, for creating such a naive tone, for taking an artistic leap that was too removed from the horror of reality.

Last month the hip American Jewish youth magazine Heeb went too far the other way by publishing an art photo that has offended a lot of Jews around the world and provoked debate about the role of humour and irony in relation to the Nazi genocide.

The photo featured Roseanne Barr, the Jewish comedian, dressed as Hitler. She was pulling a tray of burnt Jew cookies (little people) out of an oven. On the surface, it appeared to be making a joke of Jews going to the gas chambers.

In response to the uproar, the magazine’s publisher was compelled to offer an explanation on its website. “Heeb is a satirical Jewish culture magazine that interrogates stereotypes and ideas (hopefully in creative ways) that many hold sacred in order to represent the complex and nuanced perspectives that many Jews have about their identities.

“And what better way to capture this moment in popular culture than by having the original ‘domestic goddess’ don the Fuhrer’s famous moustache? For better or worse, hasn’t the Holocaust itself been domesticated?”

So the aim is to demonstrate to us that the Holocaust has become commonplace, fodder for so many TV and film comedies, thus reduced to a cultural snack in domestic life. And to ensure everybody noticed they asked a famous TV mother to drive the point home.

Is it relevant? Definitely. Is it sophisticated? Certainly. The photo drips with post-modern irony and layered meaning. But is it successful? Absolutely not. The execution of this idea has fallen far short of its ambition, and all we are left with is the offence: a juxtaposition of gross images and references that looks more like self-loathing than anything else.

Any art that has to be explained for us to understand its aim is by definition a failure. It has failed to communicate its message. Without the explanation from the magazine’s publisher, the aim of this photo is incomprehensible.

The proposition that the Holocaust has become domesticated is legitimate. It debates a critical question: Has its power as the benchmark for human evil and weakness been eroded? Within this debate, there is no reason for the Holocaust to be exempt from humour, even tough humour. For if we place a taboo on that, we effectively place a limit on society’s capacity to look at itself and learn from its mistakes. Humour is one of the most powerful tools we have for gaining insight.

Borat employed brutal satire to achieve this. Sacha Baron-Cohen’s entrapment of unwitting people to lower their guard showed us the anti-Semitism and other prejudices lurking so dangerously beneath the polite surface of American life.

In Borat, the audience could immediately see what the satire was attempting to achieve. That’s why it succeeded and became a touchstone of popular culture. In Heeb’s attempt, we can’t tell what’s going on. The photo is too clever by half. That is its real sin.

Check out the photo on Heeb’s website and see if it makes sense without the explanation

Michael Visontay lectures in media at the University of NSW.