The 2011 book
Dead Funny by
Rudolph Herzog explores, among other things, the first two aspects: the humor of the oppressed and the humor of the oppressors. One of Herzog's points is that the German humor of the era reveals the extent to which ordinary German citizens were aware of the atrocities of the regime. She wrote that until recently the question of humor in concentration camps was little known to the general public and had little attention in scientific community. Among many reasons for this was the common belief that the discussion of humor in the Holocaust may be seen as diminishing the Holocaust, hurting the feelings of the inmates, and trivializing the issue of extermination - if it was possible to laugh, then it was not so terrible after all. Another reason is the reluctance of the survivors to recall harsh memories associated with the unnatural circumstances that evoked humor. Also, the scholars treated humor to be only of second importance in the life of Holocaust survivors. In 2009
Yad Vashem published a book in Hebrew "Without humor we would have committed suicide". In 2014 it was published also in English "It kept us alive: humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust". In this book you can find interviews with 55 Holocaust survivors, carried out by Dr. Ostrower where the main question was "Can you describe or tell us about humor in the Holocaust?"
Terrence Des Pres,
Sander Gilman, and
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi were among the first scholars to consider the appropriateness of humor about the Holocaust and who has the right to tell Holocaust jokes. while "executioner's humor" is an instrument of aggression. "An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is in the nature of normal behavior". Chaya Ostrower recognized three major categories of jokes in the book of interviews,
Without Humor We Would Have Committed Suicide: self-humor, black humor, and humor about food. She noticed that food jokes were unique for the Holocaust period. Humor about food constituted about 7 percent of humor discussed in the study. The interviewees mention that there was lots of humor about food, because food was a common subject, because there was never enough of it. An interviewee recalls: there was a group which liked to discuss recipes. Suddenly one of them lost her mood and stopped talking. "What's wrong with her?" - "I think her cake has burned".
Anti-Semitism Demonstrating that Holocaust humor is international, Dundes and Hauschild cite two versions of a joke recorded in Germany and the United States in the early 1980s: "How many Jews will fit a
Volkswagen" – "506: six in the seats and 500 in the ashtrays".
Admissibility of Holocaust humor In a 1988 article "Holocaust Laughter",
Terrence Des Pres argues that "a comic response is more resilient, more effective in revolt against terror and the sources of terror than a response that is solemn or tragic". Adam Muller and Amy Freier note that in modern times increasingly many people are becoming comfortable joking about the Holocaust. They attribute this, among other reasons, to the fact that since the generation of
Holocaust survivors had passed, and there is no more witnesses of the atrocities, who could provide emotional firsthand testimonies. Nevertheless the "Holocaust etiquette" prescribes to consider it as a unique, solemn and, to a degree, sacred event, and laughter related to the matter disrupts this convention and is viewed as bad taste. Some other people see modern Holocaust "comedy as a vehicle for coming to terms with the memory of Nazis' horrors".
Public controversies • 2009: Despite being Jewish herself,
Roseanne Barr was heavily criticized for her photo-shot of Hitler with a tray of "burnt Jew cookies" for a satirical Jewish magazine
Heeb. • 2016:
Katie Waissel competed in the British reality series
Celebrity Big Brother 18 in 2016. Housemate
Christopher Biggins was removed after making a racist joke about the Holocaust towards Waissel, who is Jewish. • 2020:
Concerns and controversies at the 2020 Summer Olympics: On 21 July 2021, Japanese media reported that
Kentarō Kobayashi, who was the director of the opening and closing ceremonies, utilized
The Holocaust by
Nazi Germany in a script for his comedy in 1998, and he made malicious and anti-Semitic jokes including "Let's play Jews genocide game (Let's play Holocaust)." After that Kobayashi was dismissed by the Olympic Committee. • 2022: British comedian
Jimmy Carr received a significant amount of backlash after saying that the
Romani Holocaust was a "positive" during his
Netflix comedy special,
His Dark Material. Carr's remarks were widely condemned by Holocaust memorial and anti-racism charities, as well as by a number of politicians in the UK, with calls for Netflix to remove the special from its library. ==In film==