In a recent interview with PBS, Mel Brooks, one of Americas oldest and greatest comedians and creator of the all-time classic movie The Producers, offered this opinion:
The great thing about dictators is, you have to know, if you get on a soapbox with them, youre gonna lose, because they have a way of spellbinding with their oratory. But if you can reduce them to ridicule, then youre way ahead.
Brooks believes that political humor turns the table on dictators, placing them in a demeaning position by subjecting them to ridicule. This has a subversive effect that undermines their authority, and, therefore, strips them of their power. And that gives comedians a silver bullet against authoritarians: jokes and laughter.
Its an intriguing thought.
The only problem is that it isnt true.
To see why Brookss argument doesnt hold up, we can turn to Nazi Germany. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting that political humor flourished under Adolf Hitlers rule; in fact, quips about the dictator and his henchmen were so widespread that they inspired collections of whispered jokes published after the war. The editors of these books were convinced that people who had poked fun at the Nazis were part of a tacit resistance. But in researching my own book Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitlers Germany, I discovered that, in fact, the opposite was true.
Berliners particularly loved jokes about their self-proclaimed Führer. Absolutely everyone was telling them, Carl Schulz, a wartime inhabitant of the German capital, told me in an interview. Yet the streets of Berlin were also the site of some of the wars most vicious fighting. In some parts of the city, the Red Army had to literally fight house by house. If political humor helped undermine the morale of the Berliners, the effect was minuscule. Compared with the fear wielded by the SS and Gestapo, comedy dwindled into nothingness.
In fact, much of the humor even the ostensibly satirical may have contributed to keeping the regime in power.
