Holocaust humor

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning wrote: "To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation"... "The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living." Frankl further gives an example of humor in dreary circumstances. They were being transported to another camp and the train was approaching the bridge across the Danube. Over the river was the Mauthausen death camp. "Those who have never seen anything similar cannot possibly imagine the dance of joy performed in the carriage by the prisoners when they saw that our transport was not crossing the bridge and was instead heading only for Dachau." When the inmates learned that there was no crematorium in the camp, they "laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all <they> had to go through."[8] "An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is in the nature of normal behavior".[9]

Chaya Ostrower recognized three major categories of jokes in the book of interviews, Without Humor We Would Have Committed Suicide:[10] self-humor, black humor, and humor about food. She noticed that food jokes were unique for the Holocaust period.[5]

Self-humour: One of the interviewees in Without Humor... was telling about their hair being cut upon arrival to Auschwitz. Many women were crying, but she started laughing. When asked why, she answered that never in her life had she had a hairdo for free.[5]

Black humor was a means of reducing anxiety of the awareness of death. An example well-known in Warsaw: "Moishe, why are you using soap with so much fragrance?" - "When they turn me into soap, at least I will smell good".[5] Jokes about soap were in response to rumors which started circulating in 1942 about soap produced from the fat of the Jews. Other jokes of this kind: "See you again on the same shelf!" or "Don't eat much: the Germans will have less soap!"[11]

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 always not 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".[5]

The Holocaust-era archive clandestinely collected by a team led by Holocaust victim Emmanuel Ringelblum ("Ringelblum Archive") documented the everyday life in Nazi-organized Jewish ghettos, in particular, the Warsaw Ghetto. Among other things, the archive documented the humor perspective of the inhumane Jewish life. The archive includes jokes about Poles, Nazis, Hitler, Stalin, etc. A good deal of them were self-jokes about life, death, disease, hunger, and humiliation.[11]

Telling Holocaust jokes in public is illegal in Germany.[12]

Demonstrating that Holocaust humor is international, Dundes and Hachild 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".[6]

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".[13]

• 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.[14][15][16]
• 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.[17]
• 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.[18][19]
• 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.[20]