SALT LAKE CITY — When Taika Waititi’s Hitler was unveiled to the world, it was both instantly familiar and knowingly inaccurate.
That first trailer for Waititi’s new film, “Jojo Rabbit,” showed the true stuff: Adolf Hitler’s pear-shaped torso, his narrow mustache, his tan khaki uniform. Then there was the not-so-true: the casual, fun-loving foppishness — or, as Waititi described in one interview, the unquestionable “buffoonery” — at the heart of his impersonation. None of Hitler’s self-serious, hyper-masculine posturing here. That’s omitted on purpose — a tradition dating back 80 years as a way of cutting the Führer down to size.
Those omissions also fit nicely with “Jojo Rabbit’s” plot: In Germany during the waning days of the Third Reich, Jojo, a young German boy who’s joined the Hitler Youth, discovers his mom is hiding a Jewish girl in their house. This frustrates Jojo’s imaginary friend, Adolf. Waititi’s Hitler impression doesn’t really need realism; it’s the kind of Hitler a 10-year-old boy like Jojo might actually dream up.
With the film’s release this week, a satirized Hitler once again enters the public consciousness. Society has had no shortage of ruthless dictators, and these tyrants get lampooned in their own countries. But comedic Hitlers have remained international in a way that the Stalins and Mussolinis of the world have not. Is that because of Hitler’s historical prominence, or is he actually the most joke-worthy dictator the world has ever seen?
The body
“The moustache is ridiculous,” Waititi recently told the United Kingdom’s Metro newspaper. “I think only Chaplin managed to pull it off, then Hitler went and ruined it for everyone.
“Then his hair cut is stupid,” he continued. “You look in the mirror and you’ve got the stupid getup on and you feel … the best word is worthless.”
Indeed, Hitler’s body is a checklist of the slightly comical. Steve Soelberg, a standup comedian based in Salt Lake City, told the Deseret News that Hitler had “a little bit of a dad bod, … a little bit of front belly paunch going on,” as well as that tiny mustache, some slight male pattern baldness and perhaps an oddly shaped head.
“And then to have all those silly things, and to appear as someone who is wound so tight — I mean, with all those things going for him, he could have been very funny himself,” Soelberg mused.
Beneath the aesthetics, Hitler had myriad health problems that, in the context of his ever-present scowl, become pretty funny. Health records from Hitler’s chief physicians reveal he had gastrointestinal issues and “suffered from uncontrollable flatulence.” One of these physicians, Dr. Theo Morell, wrote in his diary that Hitler’s “constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before.” (Hitler insisted on a vegetable-focused, high-fiber diet that actually made his flatulence worse; Morell also prescribed anti-gas pills that had high amounts of strychnine, which may have inadvertently poisoned Hitler.)
A lot of these details have emerged in recent years. It’s no wonder, then, that 70-plus years after Hitler’s suicide, the things Western society finds so funny about him have persisted. Hitler’s physical oddities bely all the Nazi rhetoric about Aryan purity — enough to make Hitler seem like the ultimate hypocrite.
According to historian/professor/biographer Brendan Simms, though, this facet of Nazi rhetoric was more the crusade of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party’s minister of propaganda, than it ever was Hitler’s.
“(Hitler) was much keener to say … your racial character was more like an inner sort of a spirit, as it were, and in fact you shouldn’t get hung up on physical characteristics,” Simms told the Deseret News during a recent phone interview.
The history
Simms’ new book, “Hitler: A Global Biography” (Basic Books, 704 pages, nonfiction), reframes many of the characterizations historically placed on Hitler. The dictator’s power, and the ways he’s typically been perceived, have remained tethered to the frenzy of pro- and anti-fascist ideologies he stoked. The last 80 years of “Hitler humor” are no different.
Waititi has said he didn’t do research for his “Jojo Rabbit” version of Hitler. And perhaps he didn’t need to. The earliest Hitler satire — Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film “The Great Dictator” among them — set the tone for the kind of Hitler caricatures we see today. To parody Hitler means borrowing from the depictions that Chaplin and other entertainers have put into the cultural ether for decades.
Though Hitler jokes circulated within Nazi Germany during Hitler’s reign, England and the United States pushed Hitler humor into the world at large. Chaplin’s impression, the BBC’s anti-Nazi comedy radio programs, and the Three Stooges were among the initial comedic groundswell. German society embraced this humor more slowly after the war, though Hitler parodies showed up in postwar Germany as early as 1949: German satirist Günter Neumann’s show “I Was Hitler’s Moustache” opened to strong reviews that year, and a compilation of jokes about the Nazi regime was one of postwar Germany’s first literary hits. History suggests, though, that this particular kind of humor waxed and waned in postwar Germany.
“The main reason, I think, was the fact that people had themselves been complicit in the Third Reich, so they wanted to kind of conceal that,” Simms told the Deseret News. “And even if they weren’t complicit, they didn’t want to open up old divisions, they just wanted to kind of get on with things. People had been through a war.”
While Hitler comedy flourished in America during the 1960s — “Hogan’s Heroes,” “The Producers” and other shows and movies took aim — this wasn’t the case in Germany. Student protests in Germany during the ’60s invited more critical responses to Germany’s Nazi past, complicating the country’s relationship to Hitler humor. In a piece for The Guardian, journalist Philip Olterman noted, “It became harder to do comedy about Hitler without looking suspiciously like an apologist.”
Germans have changed their tone in recent years. “Look Who’s Back,” a satirical novel by German author Timur Vermes, got worldwide attention after its release in 2012. In the book, Hitler reawakens in modern-day Germany, unaware of what’s happened over the last 70 years. Unlike other comedic depictions of Hitler, this version undoubtedly takes himself seriously. The book’s premise is silly, of course, but with real insight: “Look Who’s Back” shows Hitler becoming increasingly popular, first as a comedic punching bag, then as a genuine rallying force for neo-Nazis. The book was later adapted into a German-made Netflix film.
“Key to Hitler’s innate hilarity is the fact that he was utterly, completely and totally devoid of any sense of humor about himself,” writer Jacques Peretti noted. “This lack of self-knowledge combined with his insane megalomania is a winning combination.”
Peretti compares Hitler to Ricky Gervais’ character from the British version of “The Office,” David Brent — albeit a David Brent “with clicky heels: a pompous egotist with ambitions not just to control paperclips and stationery in Slough, but to take over the whole world (oh, and get rid of Jews and Gypsies along the way). How mad, and therefore how rich in comic potential, is that?”
Hitler’s self-seriousness, and specifically his rage, has driven this other version of Hitler satire — one that leverages the dictator’s temper instead of removing it completely. For every toothless “Jojo Rabbit”-style Hitler, there’s another rage-filled, red-faced Hitler out there. The popular “Angry Hitler” meme, which used a scene from the 2004 film “Downfall,” milked Hitler’s anger for all its comedic worth during the mid-2000s. Hitler’s anger became the joke itself. German comic Thomas Pigor has said, “When I do Hitler, I can’t start out with the volume at full-tilt — people wouldn’t find that funny. I give him a low burr — that’s where you get some comic potential, in the tension between monstrosity and banality.”
The failures
Through all these caricatures, Hitler’s own failures remain the common thread. As a young man he was twice rejected from art school. He’s responsible for the deaths of millions, and lost World War II. Hitler has become pop culture’s vision of the ultimate loser — which ultimately keeps these depictions grounded in humanity, no matter how falsely silly or truly terrifying they are.
In 2011, after a Madame Tussauds Hitler statue drew controversy, journalist David Mitchell wrote, “It’s perfectly possible — and important to our understanding of the human condition — to find that amusing, to laugh at the goose-stepping, the shouting and the pomposity, while simultaneously holding in our heads the tragic murderous consequences of Nazi power. That’s what makes the joke bite and also what reminds us that the massive disaster was human.”
And that humanity — Hitler’s failures, his health problems, his capacity for otherwise unfathomable evil — remains at the heart of Western society’s urge to make him a joke. As long as comedy = tragedy + time, Hitler will likely remain in the equation.
“It’s kind of cool to be … in the hall of the king, and then go, ‘You’re the joke, man,’” Soelberg explained. “It flips the whole room around, and suddenly the jester is the king. And the king is sitting on the throne looking like an idiot.”
