T HE POL ITICS OF HUMOUR

Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century

GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES

General Editor: Rebecca Wittman

The Politics of Humour
Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion
in the Twentieth Century

Edited by Martina Kessel and

Patrick Merziger

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2012
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

isbn 978-1-4426-4292-8

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with

vegetable-based inks.

German and European Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

The politics of humour : laughter, inclusion, and exclusion in the twentieth

century / edited by Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger.

(German and European studies)

Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 978-1-4426-4292-8

1. European wit and humor – History and criticism. 2. American wit

and humor – History and criticism. I. Kessel, Martina II. Merziger,
Patrick III. Series: German and European studies

pn6149.p64p64 2012 809.7′93581 c2011-906205-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the

Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing
activities.

This book has been printed with financial support from the Fritz Thyssen
Foundation, Germany, and the Series on German and European History,
University of Toronto.
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Landscapes of Humour: The History and Politics of the

Comical in the Twentieth Century martina kessel 3
1 When Are Jewish Jokes No Longer Funny? Ethnic Humour in
Imperial and Republican Berlin peter jelavich 22
2 Creole Cartoons mark winokur 52
3 Talking War, Debating Unity: Order, Conflict, and Exclusion in
‘German Humour’ in the First World War martina kessel 82
4 Producing a Cheerful Public: Light Radio Entertainment during
National Socialism monika pater 108
5 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The Disappearance of
Destructive Satire in National Socialist Germany patrick
merziger 131
6 Laughing to Keep from Dying: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry
Sanders Show vincent brook 153
7 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands: The Rules
and Attraction of Clandestine Humour giselinde kuipers 175
8 ‘The Tongues of Mocking Wenches’: Humour and Gender in Late
Twentieth-Century British Fiction eileen gillooly 202

Contributors 221
This page intentionally left blank
List of Illustrations

1.1: Anti-Semitism: In the zoo a parrot squawks ‘Yid yid!’ (1924) 42

1.2: Gross: Two men pass by a manicure salon (1924) 43
1.3: The Epitaph: A man sees a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery
(1924) 44
2.1: Frame capture from Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902) 59
2.2: Frame capture from The Enchanted Drawing (1900) 59
2.3: Frame capture from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces
(1906) 59
2.4: Detail from Thomas Nast, ‘The Champion of the Fenians’
(1876) 60
2.5: Detail from Winsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Wonderland’
(1906) 60
2.6: H. Strickland Constable, ‘Ireland from One or Two Neglected
Points of View’ (1899) 62
2.7: Frame capture from Little Nemo (1911) 63
2.8: Frame capture from Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923) 66
2.9: Frame capture from Felix in Hollywood (1923) 67
2.10: Frame capture from Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929) 69
2.11: Cab Calloway frame capture from Minnie the Moocher
(1932) 76
2.12: Ghost walrus frame capture from Minnie the Moocher
(1932) 76
2.13: Frame capture from The Old Man of the Mountain (1933) 76
3.1: Censored postcard from the First World War 93
5.1: Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Harmony’ (‘In Eintracht’) (1938) 145
5.2: Robert Högfeldt, ‘The Optimists’ (‘Die Optimisten’) (1937) 146
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

This volume had its origins in a conference on Humour in the Twen-

tieth Century, held at the Munk Centre of the University of Toronto.
We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support provided
by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Historical Institute in
Washington, DC, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the
Munk Centre of the University of Toronto. Not all original participants
could be included here, but we thank all for stimulating discussions.
Jeff Kopstein and Edith Klein at the Munk Centre provided intellectual
and administrative support. We would like to thank the Series on Ger-
man and European History at the University of Toronto for including
the volume and providing financial support, as well as the Fritz Thys-
sen Foundation for supporting the publication financially. Finally,
we would like to thank University of Toronto Press for taking on this
project and for providing excellent editorial support.

M.K., P.M., Bielefeld/Berlin, January 2011

This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction. Landscapes of Humour:
The History and Politics of the
Comical in the Twentieth Century

MARTINA KESSEL

Narratives of the twentieth century usually focus on ‘big issues’: war,

violence, and ethnic cleansing; the Holocaust; the conflict between
democratic and authoritarian politics; or the development of nation-
states and empires. So far, despite an immense literature on humour
and the comical in general, humour and laughter have not figured high
on historians’ agendas for this century.1 But humour is an important
means to negotiate identity and belonging, and in the twentieth cen-
tury, comics and funny magazines sold extremely well while cheerful
radio shows and films attracted a huge audience both in democratic
and authoritarian societies. Using humour as a category of historical
analysis allows us to see not only how humour entertained, but also
how it worked as a cultural practice that both organized social order
and revealed shared assumptions about society and politics.
This volume seeks to redress the balance, analysing humour in its
political and social context in the twentieth century from an interdis-
ciplinary perspective. In a century defined by mass death, Germany
occupies centre stage.2 A certain emphasis on humour in Germany in
the first half of the century characterizes this collection, as a number
of papers search for the links between humour and the increasingly
intolerant redrawing of social boundaries that marked this period in
German history. When the ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) turned
deadly in Germany, humour became a practice of exclusion while at
the same time hiding the terms of exclusion by projecting a cheerful
state of normalcy. But historical humour research should not focus
on authoritarian societies alone, although its impulse for the twen-
tieth century so far is to go in this direction, singling out Nazi Ger-
many or various communist countries for attention. Accordingly, the
List of Illustrations

1.1: Anti-Semitism: In the zoo a parrot squawks ‘Yid yid!’ (1924) 42

1.2: Gross: Two men pass by a manicure salon (1924) 43
1.3: The Epitaph: A man sees a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery
(1924) 44
2.1: Frame capture from Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902) 59
2.2: Frame capture from The Enchanted Drawing (1900) 59
2.3: Frame capture from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces
(1906) 59
2.4: Detail from Thomas Nast, ‘The Champion of the Fenians’
(1876) 60
2.5: Detail from Winsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Wonderland’
(1906) 60
2.6: H. Strickland Constable, ‘Ireland from One or Two Neglected
Points of View’ (1899) 62
2.7: Frame capture from Little Nemo (1911) 63
2.8: Frame capture from Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923) 66
2.9: Frame capture from Felix in Hollywood (1923) 67
2.10: Frame capture from Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929) 69
2.11: Cab Calloway frame capture from Minnie the Moocher
(1932) 76
2.12: Ghost walrus frame capture from Minnie the Moocher
(1932) 76
2.13: Frame capture from The Old Man of the Mountain (1933) 76
3.1: Censored postcard from the First World War 93
5.1: Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Harmony’ (‘In Eintracht’) (1938) 145
5.2: Robert Högfeldt, ‘The Optimists’ (‘Die Optimisten’) (1937) 146
 Introduction 5

ried on a meta-discourse on the particular national character of Ger-

man humour. The distinctiveness of this discourse, however, still
needs to be analysed in a comparative perspective. Reaching back
to a tradition that authors like Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb
Fichte had invented around 1800, renowned conservative writers like
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1910 claimed the existence of a special
kind of German humour that supposedly could be distinguished from
other forms of humour, namely satire.7 Their main argument was that
this German form of humour pointed out conflicts and problems in
society just like satire did, but that it did so with the intention of heal-
ing, not hurting. Their humour, so the argument went, showed real
feeling and told ‘the truth’ about society. At the same time, they classi-
fied irony as French or Jewish and damned it as politically undesirable
or aesthetically and emotionally wanting. In the nineteenth century,
for example, conservatives accused social critics and satirists like
Heinrich Heine of not being or acting German,8 a tradition that con-
tinued into the twentieth century. Thus, whoever claimed a particular
German form of humour mirrored the German obsession with defin-
ing their self through an enemy other, using the term to delegitimize
opponents as non-German. Such humour, and its negotiation, never
became dominant before the wars of the twentieth century, but it be-
came fused during the latter half of the nineteenth century with the
notion of ‘catastrophic nationalism,’9 the conservative position which
claimed that only war and fighting created real unity. This imaginary
developed its full deadly impact during National Socialism, and so did
so-called German humour, turning both into a discursive and social
practice of exclusion.10
Still, as in all modern Western societies, the field of the comical be-
came widely differentiated after the nineteenth century, and in the
media explosion of the early twentieth century humorous entertain-
ment in general continued its secular rise. The First World War in par-
ticular was a gigantic media war. All major warfaring countries relied
heavily on caricatures or humorous trench journals to whip up emo-
tions at home, offer visions of continuing social order, and denigrate
the opponents. But at least Western governments could never control
the mass media entirely, and how they dealt with humour they did
not ask for also tells about war societies’ suppleness in dealing with
conflicting positions. In France, for example, the satirical journal Ca-
nard Enchaîné, established in 1915, turned into an influential voice of
criticism against the war.11 In Germany, on the contrary, all satirical
6 Martina Kessel

journals stayed on a rather official line until the end of the war. But
while the dominance of what was called German humour was now
obvious, it still could not quell the diversity of political opinions, ex-
pressed in cartoons, funny postcards, or jokes. Furthermore, German
censors had to cater to the taste of the public as they needed to shore
up energy for the war and at least in Berlin grudgingly accepted caba-
ret that made fun of important politicians.12
Weimar culture is a synonym for modern culture in general – a witty,
sarcastic onslaught of satire that appealed to many but may in fact
have frightened more. But just as the famous examples of anti-war lit-
erature like that of Erich Maria Remarque have to be read within their
context of widely published and always present pro-war literature,13
democratic satire should be perceived within the continued presence
of either conventional entertainment or outright right-wing humor-
ists, who touched people’s emotions with their diatribes against Ver-
sailles, the Weimar Republic, and German Jews. Since the late 1920s,
the majority of the German population preferred seemingly unpoliti-
cal, cheerful entertainment to the democratic political exchanges that
had until then often taken place on stage, but even more so in the new
mass media like the radio or in films with competing political mes-
sages. As a consequence, primarily liberal and democratic voices were
driven from the mass media, while the audience opted for humorous
presentations that were at best paternalistic, at worst outright anti-
democratic.14 A large part of the population carried this preference into
National Socialism and beyond, betraying their preference for security
over democratic politics from the 1920s up to postwar (West) Germany.
Oral jokes in authoritarian regimes have for a long time steadfastly
been interpreted as a sign of everyday resistance.15 West German cul-
tural memory clings to this view regarding National Socialism despite
studies showing that the number of trials conducted for so-called
political jokes was minimal compared with the number of jokes the
Gestapo knew about.16 More recently, humour has been interpreted,
at least for the First World War, as a means of coping and as an outlet
in times of disorder and friction.17 The Nazi elite, in fact, activated it in
this sense, in a permanent debate among the political leadership, hu-
morists, and average Germans about correct humorous speech per-
formances. Walter Hofmann, for example, star caricaturist of the SS
journal Das Schwarze Corps (The Black Corps), in 1937 issued a collec-
tion of his comics under the title Lacht ihn tot! (Laugh him to death).
In one of them, Göring suddenly appears next to a hushed man who
 Introduction 7

had been telling jokes about him, asking the man to come up with
some new jokes as he was bored by the old ones.18 The public, in turn,
asked for and received light entertainment that showed cheerful pic-
tures of German society with no need of exclusion any more.19 As a
number of the permissible jokes about the Nazi party reappeared as
jokes about the SED in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s
and 1970s, we might use insights about the GDR in order to analyse
Nazi Germany. Regarding postwar East Germany, there is an aware-
ness that jokes in the GDR showed grudging respect and even admira-
tion for East German politicians. The same insight still seems difficult
to accept for National Socialism. Here, the argument stops at saying
that, ironically, the constant joking seemed to have confirmed the rul-
ing party’s grip upon a reluctant following.20
Of course, there is another story about National Socialism and the
comical. It happened in the newest media of the time, namely film,
and was told from the outside. Charlie Chaplin with The Great Dic-
tator in 1940 and Ernst Lubitsch with To Be or Not to Be in 1942 both
played with the power of ironical inversion. Through exaggeration
and doubles, they distorted Hitler and other National Socialists into
grotesque figures and helped the audience to see through a charade of
gestures. They did not prevent war or genocide but maybe fissured the
perception of a seemingly unbreakable power through the laughter
of the audience.21 When in 1946 American occupation officers showed
The Great Dictator to German audiences, as part of the re-education
effort, early laughter gave way to hushed silence.22 The real Hitler,
with his immediate pathway into violence, was too close for humor-
ous comfort, due to the audience’s own involvement in a monstrous
history. In recent decades, the debate about whether the Holocaust
can be told in a humorous way has picked up,23 initiated by exam-
ples like Art Spiegelman’s comic Maus: A Survivor’s Tale 24 or films like
Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1997) and Dani Levy’s Mein Führer
(2007). Mein Führer tells the story of Professor Adolf Grünbaum, fa-
mous actor and stage coach, who is brought from Sachsenhausen to
Berlin in late 1944 to restore the power of speech to a burnt-out Hitler.
In the case of this movie, German newspapers debated whether it was
acceptable to laugh about Hitler, while Mein Führer actually played
through various other questions, turning the comical into a deadly
serious historical issue. On the one hand, it is the story of spectators’
laughter about something they consider funny that is also based on
terror, so that their laughter can easily become complicit. On the other
8 Martina Kessel

hand, the film discusses a basic dilemma of power and agency. Thus,
Grünbaum’s sense of irony seems to open spaces of action for him al-
though he is in a hopelessly inferior position in radically asymmetric
power relations. This works as long as Goebbels keeps the agreement,
but the victim’s power of laughter and therefore any hope disappears
the very moment the Nazis decide to replace agreement by dishonesty
and violence.
Right after the Second World War, Germans continued to opt for
paternalistic, non-ironical, and supposedly non-political versions
of cheerful entertainment. Their dislike of satire affected especially
those few who as early as the 1950s and 1960s discussed in a self-iron-
ical and moving way German complicity in genocide and war crimes.
Films like Rolf Thiele’s mocking Mamitschka from 1955, satirizing both
expellees and native Germans, and Wolfgang Staudte’s hilarious Her-
renpartie from 1964, showing the deep involvement in National Social-
ism and war crimes of a complacent men’s choral society on postwar
holiday in Yugoslavia, were defeated fast and hard at the box office
and then wiped out from cultural memory as well.25
What is needed are truly historical analyses of humour in the post-
war era which not only focus on the level of the media or its content,
but connect such analysis with a history of mentalities and politics.
Not only German, but also North American, politicians and intel-
lectuals attacked comic books in the 1950s as a new, politically and
socially dangerous,26 aesthetic form that appealed to youngsters and
was quickly associated with unruly behaviour. The art world, how-
ever, has long since accepted them not only as a form of subversive
counterculture but as art.27 Furthermore, we could ask whether the
rather mellow U.S.-style comedies of the McCarthy era, made for a
white middle class,28 were typical for the 1950s in Western popular cul-
ture in general. Did the prominence of ethnic humour, so important
in the United States in the twentieth century, recede in the 1950s not
only due to the civil rights movement but also due to the impact of
knowledge about the Holocaust? In turn, did the sharp British satire
in the 1960s, with its class emphasis, have effects in other countries?
Generally, notions of humour refer back to cultural norms that may
differ from culture to culture, so the transfer of humour across cultural
borders proved difficult throughout the twentieth century, despite the
increasingly transnational character of comedy shows.29 The turn of
British satire to a more absurd form since the 1960s, with Monty Py-
thon as its most successful icon on television,30 definitely preceded a
 Introduction 9

similar shift in Germany by at least two decades.31 But while for some
decades humour’s possible political meaning might have receded into
the background in democratic countries, as it seemed ‘merely’ pop-
ular culture, it has came back with a bang more recently. Humour’s
sharp political impact and the complex relationship between cultural
norms and censorship of the comical as a touchstone of the permis-
sible were in the forefront again in the belated but harsh Islamic op-
position to caricatures about Mohammed in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten in September 2005.

II

Humour’s political and social meanings actually stay apparent all the
time if we look at the twentieth century not just chronologically but
through the lens of the processes of inclusion and exclusion that char-
acterize democratic as well as authoritarian societies. Humour was
a device to negotiate belonging and to mark boundaries, just as the
categories of race, ethnicity, and gender have been organizing social
order, probably surpassing class in its importance as a marker of dif-
ference. The essays in this volume are all concerned with inclusion
and exclusion. Anti-Semitism obviously played a major role for the
duration of the whole century. Anti-Semites turned religious confes-
sion into the category of race by using satire, particularly in the in-
tense visualization of anti-Semitic stereotypes in so-called humorous
postcards and caricatures in the modern media since the 1880s.32 Dur-
ing the First World War, the German media machine called for unity
at home in humorous entertainment but excluded Jewish Germans
from this imagined community of fighters and sufferers, as Martina
Kessel argues in this volume. This grasp of humour by the majority
reduced the possibilites for the Jewish German minority to speak, as
Peter Jelavich discusses in his analysis of Jewish jokes in Imperial and
Weimar Berlin.33 While Jewish entertainers until 1914 had successfully
used self-irony on stage to negotiate their ambivalent position in Ger-
man society, violent anti-Semitism after the German defeat in 1918
narrowed dramatically the boundaries of what they could say in a self-
derogatory manner as anti-Semites might pick it up as a ‘true’ descrip-
tion of Jews by themselves. National Socialists radically sharpened the
connection between excluding the so-called enemies of the Reich and
presenting a cheerful facade of normalcy that the average German au-
dience relished, as Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger show.
10 Martina Kessel

The story of anti-Semitic joking in Germany after the Second World

War still needs to be written. The absence of Jewish entertainers and
the loud silence covering the violent jokes of the Nazi era were the
backdrop of the desire for harmonious entertainment. But Jewish
humour and anti-Semitism are also important topics for other, tra-
ditionally more pluralistic, cultures. In the United States, for exam-
ple, Jewish humour has played a highly prominent role in the media
and is debated intensely as a discourse to negotiate boundaries.34 In
this context, Vincent Brook examines the double bind of anti-Semitic
stereotypes and Jewish self-hatred in famous American sitcoms in the
1990s.
The twentieth century was a century of globalization, migration,
and ethnic tension in which ethnicity as the defining criterion for
belonging or non-belonging has often played a deadly role. Its gen-
eral importance as a marker of society has been obvious in the Unit-
ed States, while it was less visible or has been acknowledged later in
Western European countries. In American humour throughout the
twentieth century, ethnicity has been a rather straightforward topic,
often focusing on Jewish, African-American, and more recently Na-
tive American humour.35 Its scholarly assessment goes both ways. A
number of cultural analysts argue that groups on the margins, similar
to Jewish Germans in Imperial Germany, managed to appropriate eth-
nic humour, thereby rendering themselves visible and rewriting their
status from negative projections to members of American society.36
Others argue that black sitcoms, for example, for a long time relied
on negative, stereotypical characterizations of blackness to promote
humour.37 In the continued media explosion of the twentieth century,
new forms of presentation and new technologies offered possibilities
for shifting and blurring ethnic identity. Mark Winokur joins this de-
bate by analysing how animated comic visual art in the early twentieth
century allowed for the crossing of borders between ethnic identities.
Ethnic joking having been carried over from the vaudeville of the early
century to the television stand-up comedy of the late twentieth cen-
tury, the variety of media today can offer new spaces as well. In mov-
ing between clubs, stage, television, and/or movies, black or Jewish
comedians and other groups can redraw comic and perhaps social
conventions by using each medium’s possibilities.38
A similar mechanism applies to ethnic groups in Western Europe-
an contemporary societies, who shifted jokes from one group to an-
other in order to position themselves and others, as Giselinde Kuipers
 Introduction 11

shows in her essay on the Netherlands. In Germany today, however,

ethnic jokes in the media still have an ambivalent status. The rise of
German humour productions after the commercialization of German
television in the 1980s was associated with the new tactic of break-
ing taboos as a source of humour, namely with anti-Polish jokes.39 At
the same time, however, some Turkish comedians entertain their tel-
evision audiences today with gags about the Turkish-German culture
clash, introducing an ironic/self-ironic discourse about the sensitive
issue of national or ethnic identity at the very moment when irony on
a global scale has become charged terrain.
Finally, the category of gender has not been sufficiently studied
by historians of humour, particularly not for the twentieth century.
Other fields like literature studies have been far more innovative
here, though again they focus mostly on the periods up to the nine-
teenth century.40 Women who tried to gain a democratic share in
society have been constantly the butt of jokes that shifted the level
of discussion away from argument. At the same time, women’s pos-
sibilities of speaking up humorously have been tightly proscribed in
any society analysed so far, with lasting constraints remaining even
today.41 Still, there are many insights regarding the history of gender
and humour in the twentieth century, although one should be careful
not to prolong the problem of defining gender as meaning women
only. As gender roles changed markedly during the First World War,
due to the needs of war societies, media makers in the major Western
European states used joke books and caricatures to reassert tradi-
tional gender roles.42 Simultaneously, the second important meaning
of gender as a symbol for power relations played out in endless Ger-
man caricatures that feminized the opponents, trying to render them
ridiculous.43 For the Weimar Republic, we still need fully contextual-
ized studies about the great number of new female stars and literary
figures who showed not only their bodies, but also their sharp wit in
public,44 adding to the sense that gender roles in general were out of
control. During National Socialism, German satirical commentar-
ies rarely passed up the chance to demean Western democracies by
describing sexual and gender confusion as hallmarks of those soci-
eties.45 Staudte’s Herrenpartie (1964) made fun of the self-important
German postwar masculinity of men who revealed their true charac-
ter as willing and greedy Nazis when they found themselves in a tight
spot. This particular sarcasm might well have spurred the film’s im-
mediate rejection.
12 Martina Kessel

Literary scholars and sociologists have pointed out the social con-
straints that often force women to use different forms of humour.
In cultures that mark aggressiveness as masculine and therefore as
threatening in a woman, women, like other marginalized groups, of-
ten preferred wit, understatement, irony, and self-deprecation to deri-
sion and open aggression, thus minimizing the risk of challenging the
status quo.46 It is revealing to look for different forms of humour in
order to make visible both women’s irony and the context of inclusion
and exclusion they argue within, as Eileen Gillooly shows in her con-
tribution on late twentieth-century British novelists. Research with
this focus could help to transcend the hidden assumption still at work
in many studies that women’s humour is ‘the unimportant discuss-
ing the unofficial.’47 At the same time, further research should make
masculinity visible as a category. Up to the present day, international
relations are often symbolized by more or less aggressive caricatures
questioning the other side’s masculinity.48

III

The essays in this volume are all sensitive to the problems of inclu-
sion and exclusion in authoritarian and democratic societies of the
twentieth century. Beyond this shared interest, the collection covers
a wide range of thematic and methodological approaches. Some au-
thors focus on questions of ethnicity, race, or gender. Others, while
also discussing some of these categories, raise the issue of the modern
media and their inherent possibilities of organizing social order. Some
highlight the problem of inclusion and exclusion from the perspective
of groups on the margin, while others analyse humour that was used
by a majority to support its claim to homogeneity and superiority.
Peter Jelavich opens the volume with general remarks about the
methodological problems involved in analysing jokes. He then uses
the case of Jewish humour in Imperial and Republican Germany in
the early twentieth century to discuss the more general and ambiva-
lent problem of self-deprecatory humour by ethnic groups in front of
others who do not necessarily have a favourable view of them. The
development of the modern mass media broadened the reception of
humour, thereby also intensifying the problem. Accordingly, the dif-
ference between private and public became more important, as jokes
acquired different meanings and resonance in each context. In tracing
how Jewish self-irony after the German defeat of 1918 was turned into
 Introduction 13

an ever greater danger for Jewish Germans, or was perceived as such

by Jewish organizations who feared that anti-Semites might pick up
Jewish self-irony as the ‘true’ assessment of German Jews by them-
selves, Jelavich discusses a basic problem of the Weimar Republic
where a newly established democratic political system had to contend
with a society that was more democratic for some of its non-Jewish
members, but in terms of anti-Semitism became ever more exclusive.
He thus points to the momentous meaning the self-irony of a group
on the margins can acquire: it highlights the basic problem of mod-
ern democracies needing all members of the population to respect its
rules, namely free speech and non-violence.
In the media explosion in the early twentieth century, funny en-
tertainment comprised an ever-increasing share of the market. Mark
Winokur picks up on the theme of race and ethnicity in humour by
analysing early animated films in the United States. His reading of ra-
cialized modernism does not start, as usual, with Walt Disney but with
other early animators whose technology allowed for an uncanny fluid-
ity of ethnic identity. Cartoons moving from ‘Negro’ to Jewish to Irish
to linguistically unidentifiable turned seemingly straightforward racist
representations into ambiguous or uncanny Creole representations.
Keeping all characters rootless, technologies such as cel technology or
the use of sound, Winokur argues, prevented an ethos of victimization
by any one group because all were wounded indiscriminately.
In her essay on German humour during the First World War, Mar-
tina Kessel continues the debate about underlying forms of racism by
looking at the majority’s use of a particular form of humour, classified
as ‘German’ and projecting a united nation. Kessel underlines the var-
ious meanings such German humour could acquire, and the conflicts
in German society that it both transported and bolstered, but also
points to the permanent anti-Semitic undercurrent in humour pro-
duction. Civilians and soldiers used humour to communicate about
the war and discuss the rapid changes the war society seemed to un-
dergo. A trivial counterpart to national pathos, humorous semantics
and images promised the return of the old order and offered particular
speech performances that allowed criticism of what was perceived as
the current disorder. But while German humour envisioned a united
nation, soldiers’ and civilians’ irony in fact splintered this projection.
The humour market remained an embattled arena where producers,
censors, and consumers continuously tested the limits of what could
be said. Regarding anti-Semitism, however, humour served as the
14 Martina Kessel

mechanism of a more deep-rooted inclusion and exclusion. The es-

say coincides with Jelavich’s findings by showing how non-censored
anti-Semitic jokes excluded Jewish Germans both from the imagined
community of cheerful soldiers and from a community at home that
defined itself through its suffering and the right to mock the govern-
ment’s failures.
The articles by Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger explore the un-
canny legacy of this fusion of cheerfulness and exclusion that marked
all media during National Socialism. Radio was one of the most im-
portant new media at the time, its impact going beyond the number
of radio sets as often whole families or groups of friends listened to-
gether. Its political potential had already been apparent during the
Weimar Republic, and Goebbels was keen to use it. National Social-
ist radio politics picked up exclusionary practices fast and on various
levels, combining them with the presentation of a cheerful Volksge-
meinschaft on air, as Monika Pater argues. Like Winokur, she touches
on the implicitly suppressive character of the absence of ethnicity.
After excluding ‘undesirables’ in the workforce, in broadcast content
and in the audience, German radio makers proceeded to structure lis-
teners’ time with humorous broadcasts for every part of the day. The
wireless was a technology that could, through its very character as a
modern mass media, structure people’s daily and weekly experiences.
Pater compares this impact with similar structural effects of the BBC,
pointing to the problem that modern media may work identically in
any political system. However, the radio as an instrument to structure
one’s day was only accepted, Pater argues, when the open ideology of
the early years gave way to cheerfully familiar, seemingly non-political
variety shows.
The German population’s dislike of aggressive humour and its prefer-
ence for harmonious representations of society that simply eschewed
the regime’s real character are also underlined by Patrick Merziger in
his essay about satire before and after 1933. Here again, absence be-
came conspicuous when the audience rejected National Socialist
culture makers’ attempts to continue the sarcastic strategies that had
been successful during the late Weimar Republic. Violent caricatures
in publications like Der Stürmer pinpointed anti-Semitism as this soci-
ety’s integrating disposition. But satire about inner and outer enemies
also perpetuated their existence, while a large part of the audience,
Merziger argues, preferred not to be reminded of them and opted for
the supposedly harmonious version of so-called German humour,
 Introduction 15

even attacking editors of the Brennessel as ‘Jewish,’ ‘pimps,’ and ‘per-

verts.’ Like Pater, Merziger highlights the active role of the audience
in organizing the field of entertainment. Their discussions of humour
point to the intense communication between mass media’s audiences
and the political and cultural elite in an authoritarian society commit-
ting genocide, and thus tell us about the fabric of this society.
The last three articles deal with the inclusive and exclusive dimen-
sions humour could acquire in non-authoritarian postwar societies
like the United States, the Netherlands, and Britain. Vincent Brook
concentrates on the theme of Jewish humour and its meanings at
the other temporal end of the twentieth century, probing Jewish self-
hatred in The Larry Sanders Show within the broader context of an
unprecedented ‘Jewish sitcom trend’ in the United States in the 1990s.
The essay first delineates processes of inter-group stereotyping and
labelling, relating to Jelavich’s analysis by showing Jewish objection to
specific Jewish self-portrayals on screen, due to their being ‘too Jew-
ish.’ Importantly, and this touches on the issue of democratization or
its absence that Jelavich talks about as well, it is the broadening range
of Jewish portrayals being aired next to each other that made each
one less vulnerable to criticism. The show analysed here played with
a number of often-linked prejudices concerning ethnic difference
and sexuality. The Jewish self-hatred played out in some episodes
remained subject to the classical double bind of assimilation: on the
one hand the pressure to assimilate by rejecting a part of themselves,
thereby confirming their otherness, and on the other hand the sur-
rounding society’s suspicion of conspicuous Jewishness as well as its
absence, which is read as false pretext. Brook, like Jelavich, in fact, an-
swers to all the preceding essays regarding the relationship between
dominant and marginalized positions by arguing that humour can be
both a way of keeping up the double bind and one of the communica-
tive processes to help loosen the knot.
Some Western European societies like the Netherlands have changed
during the last half-century from an ethnically more homogeneous to
a multi-ethnic society, and here humour reveals the shifting of social
hierarchies. Giselinde Kuipers describes how scripts of ethnic jokes
moved from one ethnic group to another in the last decades, denot-
ing a change in their position in the ethnic hierarchy of Dutch soci-
ety. Furthermore, jokes now tend to focus less on class and race and
more on culture and religion as attributes that can be influenced by
the people joked about, while downward joking has often been re-
16 Martina Kessel

placed by a more varied, multi-ethnic landscape that allows joking

back. Like Jelavich, Kuipers also discusses the changing boundaries of
private and public which allow or disallow for joking about sensitive
issues. But although Dutch society has markedly changed regarding
its ethnic composition, Kuipers argues that the rules regulating public
jokes do not differ fundamentally from rules that applied in a more
homogeneous society, at least in the very basic sense that ethnic jok-
ing is still a fraught issue. The fact that ethnic humour has been more
evident recently should, in her eyes, be understood as a reaction to a
growing political sensitivity regarding the subject.
Finally, Eileen Gillooly combines gender and humour in her analy-
sis of a classic medium, namely late twentieth-century British novels
by female authors. In these novels, the role of technology is played by
the narrative voice that marks femininity not in an essentialist way but
as a phenomenological distinction, subtly subversive and self-depre-
catory. Similar to cross-ethnic ambiguity, gender makes its presence
felt humorously, however fleetingly. Such research uncovers strands
of the comical that have long been neglected in the canon of literary
humour. Like Jelavich and Kuipers, Gillooly discusses the private/
public divide, here in the sense that it has excluded women’s voices
from the realms considered public and important. This paper, in turn,
highlights the private, traditionally prescribed as the female sphere
and considered rather boring, as a major source for irony. Often refer-
ring back to their famous counterparts in the late nineteenth century,
these equally acclaimed authors of the late twentieth century turn
understatement into lethal sharpness but, by emphasizing the absurd
features of gender hierarchy and women’s exclusion, shield the blows
of reality to their heroines.
In sum, by revolving around the problems of inclusion and exclu-
sion, all the essays in this book debate humour’s role in integrating or
suppressing voices, not only by being subversive or affirmative, but
also by constructing or deconstructing identity, disputing boundaries,
and negotiating appearances. The taboos that jokes point to may have
changed, from sexuality in Freud’s times to ethnicity today, allowing it
only in supposedly non-serious communicative ways. More historical
studies would be necessary to show humour’s power in the twentieth
century to mark these problems and construct, express, or alter their
dynamic. To analyse modern societies, research could use as one per-
spective their vastly diverging and historically changing willingness to
tolerate ambiguity in the form of the comical.
 Introduction 17

notes

1 This also applies to the interesting collection by Jan Bremmer and Her-
mann Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity
to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). I would like to thank
Levke Harders, Ruth Federspiel, and especially two anonymous readers
for the University of Toronto Press for their helpful comments.
2 Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann, ‘Death and Twentieth-
Century Germany,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place
of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Paul Betts et al. (New
York: Berghahn, 2008), 1.
3 Hans-Peter Mathis, Napoleon I. im Spiegel der Karikatur: Ein Sammlung-
skatalog des Napoleon-Museums Arenenberg mit 435 Karikaturen über
Napoleon I. (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1998); Thilo König et al., ‘Die Stecher von
London: Englische politische Karikatur unter dem Einfluß der franzö-
sischen Revolution,’ in ‘Nervöse Auffangorgane des inneren und äußeren
Lebens.’ Karikaturen, ed. Klaus Herding and Gunter Ott (Gießen: Anabas
Verlag, 1980), 58–86.
4 Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladdera-
datsch & Simplicissimus 1890–1914 (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1984), 14–47.
5 Ursula Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin: Von der Märzrevolution bis zu Bismarcks
Entlassung. Illustrierte politische Witzblätter einer Metropole 1848–1890
(Cologne: ILV, 1991), 127–9, 177f.; Reinhard Hippen, Das Kabarett der
spitzen Feder: Streitzeitschriften (Zurich: pendo-Verlag, 1986), 46.
6 Patrick Merziger, ‘Die Ermächtigung des Publikums im Nationalsozialis-
mus? Leserbeschwerden und NS-Propaganda in den Unterhaltungsme-
dien – die Satirezeitschrift “Die Brennessel,”’ SOWI 34 (2005): 26–39.
7 For the time around 1800, see especially the essays in Sprachen des
Ernstes – Sprachen der Ironie, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2000). Regarding Schiller, see also: Peter von Matt, ‘Lachen
in der Literatur. Eine Überlegung zur Frage, warum Schillers “Glocke”
so ernst ist,’ in Peter von Matt, Das Schicksal der Phantasie: Studien zur
deutschen Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1994), 91–101; Arthur Moeller van
den Bruck, Lachende Deutsche (Minden: Bruns, 1910).
8 Jefferson S. Chase, Inciting Laughter: The Development of ‘Jewish Humor’
in 19th Century German Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000).
9 Michael Geyer, ‘The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in
Twentieth-Century Germany,’ German Studies Review 15 (1992): 75–110.
10 Martina Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death? “German Humour” in the Two
18 Martina Kessel

World Wars,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss, 197–218, here
199–201. See also Martina Kessel, ‘Gewalt schreiben. “Deutscher Humor”
in den Weltkriegen,’ in Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur politischen Kulturge-
schichte 1900–1933, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007),
229–58.
11 Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor: The Canard En-
chaîné and World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
12 Jan Rüger, ‘Laughter and War in Berlin,’ History Workshop Journal 67
(2009): 23–43.
13 Wolfgang Natter, Literature at War, 1914–1940: Representing the ‘Time of
Greatness’ in Germany (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1999).
14 Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Radio, Film, and the Death of Wei-
mar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also
Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
15 For West Germany, this myth was firmly established by the early postwar
joke collections such as Harry Harden, Als wir alle Nazis waren … Notizen
eines Zeitgenossen (Öhringen: Residenz-Verlag, 1952/53).
16 Meike Wöhlert, Der politische Witz in der NS-Zeit am Beispiel ausge-
suchter SD-Berichte und Gestapo-Akten (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997),
esp. 81–6.
17 Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale, and Collapse
in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008).
18 Waldl [pseud. Walter Hofmann], Lacht ihn tot! (Dresden: Nationalsozialis-
tischer Verlag für den Gau Sachsen, 1937), n.p.
19 This is the argument of Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger in this volume.
See also Patrick Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und ‘Deutscher
Humor.’ Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung
1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010).
20 Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch, eds., Shattered Past: Reconstruct-
ing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 160,
166. Sylvia Klötzer, Satire und Macht. Film, Zeitung, Kabarett in der DDR
(Köln: Böhlau, 2006), focuses on the dynamics between the government’s
desire for entertaining satire and its wish to control the comical. For the
East German ‘niche society’ of the 1960s and 1970s when people combined
conformity and grumbling, see Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship.
Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 139.
21 Regarding The Great Dictator, see Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter
as Subversive History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 266–7.
This page intentionally left blank
20 Martina Kessel

(London: BFI, 1987); George C. Perry, The Life of Python, rev. and updated
ed. (London: Pavilion, 2006).
31 For German television in the 1990s, see Joan-Kristin Bleicher, ‘Vom
Volkshumor zur Comedy: Streifzüge durch die Humorgeschichte des
Fernsehens,’ in Humor in den Medien, ed. Walter Klingler et al. (Baden-
Baden: Nomos, 2003), 75–85, here 82–3.
32 Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger, eds., Abgestempelt. Judenfeindliche
Postkarten (Heidelberg: Umschau/Braus, 1999). Michael Graetz, ‘Vom
Text zum Bild. Die antisemitische Karikatur,’ in Ein Leben für die jüdische
Kunst. Gedenkband für Hannelore Künzel, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidel-
berg: Winter, 2003), 163–79; Andrea Hopp, ‘Zur Medialisierung des antise-
mitischen Stereotyps im Kaiserreich,’ in Antisemitische Geschichtsbilder,
ed. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Sieg (Essen: Klartext, 2009), 23–37.
33 See also Peter Jelavich, ‘Performing High and Low: Jews in Modern
Theater, Cabaret, Revue, and Film,’ in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New
Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), 209–35, esp. 216–18.
34 For an overview see James D. Bloom, ‘American Jewish Humor,’ in Com-
edy: A Geographical and Historical Guide, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Charney
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 93–105.
35 Dennis R. Perry, ‘Hybrid History: The Pequot War and American Indian
Humor,’ in Studies in American Humor, new ser. 3 (2000): 25–34; Allan J.
Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Native Art
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999); Arnold Krupat, ‘Native American Trickster
Tales,’ in Comedy, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 447–61.
36 Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, ‘Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Sur-
vival,’ in American Humor, ed. Arthur Power Dudden (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 97–117; Mel Watkins, On The Real Side: Laughing,
Lying, and Signifying; The Underground Tradition of African American
Humor That Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard
Pryor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
37 The Cosby Show in the 1980s being the exception because it depicted
an upper middle-class black family without stereotyping it as deficient.
Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. Mcllwain, ‘The Hidden Truths
in Black Sitcoms,’ in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed.
Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2005), 125–37, here 125.
38 John W. Lowe, ‘African American Humor,’ in Comedy, vol. 1, 34–47, here
44. An overview of stand-up comedy is in Lawrence E. Mintz, ‘Stand-Up
Comedy,’ in Comedy, vol. 2, 575–85.
 Introduction 21

39 Bleicher, ‘Vom Volkshumor zur Comedy,’ 83.

40 Marianne Flassbeck, Gauklerin der Literatur: Elizabeth von Arnim und
der weibliche Humor (Rüsselsheim: Göttert, 2003); Helen Chambers,
Humor and Irony in Nineteenth Century German Women’s Writing. Stud-
ies in Prose Fiction (Rochester, NY: Cambden House, 2007). American
literature studies have covered the twentieth century more often. Nancy
A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary
Novel by Women (Jackson: University Press of Mississsippi, 1990). See also
Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
41 See Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern
America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), on nineteenth-
century America. For the twentieth century, see Helga Kotthoff, ed., Das
Gelächter der Geschlechter: Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen
und Männern, 2nd rev. ed. (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1996).
42 Pierre Purseigle, ‘Mirroring Societies at War: Pictorial Humour in the Brit-
ish and French Popular Press during the First World War,’ Journal of Euro-
pean Studies 31 (2001): 289–328.
43 Examples in Pension Debberitz, ed. Alfred Brie (Berlin: Verlag der Lustigen
Blätter, n.d.), 44–5. See also Christine Brocks, Die bunte Welt des Krieges.
Bildpostkarten aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2008),
224–6.
44 Atina Grossmann, ‘Sexualität, Körper und das große Unbehagen. Konti-
nuitäten und Brüche in der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,’
in Geschichte und Geschlechter. Revision der neueren deutschen Geschich-
te, ed. Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert (Frankfurt am Main: Cam-
pus, 2008), 290–316, here 299.
45 For example, Das Schwarze Korps, ser. 6/2 (1936): 13.
46 Nancy A. Walker and Zita Dresner, ‘Women’s Humor in America,’ in
What’s So Funny? Humor in American Culture, ed. Nancy A. Walker
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Ressources, 1998), 172–5.
47 Regina Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humour
in British Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 17.
48 Dorothee Wierling, ‘War die DDR eine Frau?’ Berliner Debatte INITIAL 10
(1999): 165–73, here 166.
1

When Are Jewish Jokes No Longer

Funny? Ethnic Humour in Imperial
and Republican Berlin

PETER JELAVICH

Jewish comedians have long been a fixture of the mass media in the
United States and Canada. The association of Jews with joking is com-
mon in many parts of Europe as well – indeed, it commenced in Cen-
tral Europe in the nineteenth century. But inevitably, the catastrophic
fate of European Jews in the twentieth century casts its shadow back
upon earlier entertainers and encourages us to examine their per-
formances more closely. Historical inquiry informs us that from the
beginning, Jewish jokes were considered problematic by some ob-
servers. Before the First World War, Jewish entertainers could tell Jew-
ish jokes on public stages with little opposition, but by the mid-1920s
they faced widespread criticism for doing so: by then, for many Jews,
Jewish jokes were no longer funny. Although this case will be my fo-
cus, it is obvious that many of the issues and conundra I discuss are
not specific to Jews: they apply as well to other ethnic comedians who
perform publicly, such as people of Hispanic or African descent, or of
Islamic faith, in Anglo-American or European societies today. To pro-
vide a more general framework for understanding the prevalence and
recurrence of these concerns, I will begin by briefly discussing some of
the problems and complexities involved in analysing jokes, and then
move on to a particularly vexing case: that of self-deprecatory ethnic
humour. What does it mean when a group makes jokes about itself?
And more problematically: what does it mean when a group which is a
minority makes jokes about itself in front of others who do not always
have a favourable view of them?
Jokes – which can be so light and light-hearted, and which are so
ubiquitous – are surprisingly complex phenomena, as scholars and
theorists have long observed (and as practising comedians have al-
 Introduction 5

ried on a meta-discourse on the particular national character of Ger-

man humour. The distinctiveness of this discourse, however, still
needs to be analysed in a comparative perspective. Reaching back
to a tradition that authors like Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb
Fichte had invented around 1800, renowned conservative writers like
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1910 claimed the existence of a special
kind of German humour that supposedly could be distinguished from
other forms of humour, namely satire.7 Their main argument was that
this German form of humour pointed out conflicts and problems in
society just like satire did, but that it did so with the intention of heal-
ing, not hurting. Their humour, so the argument went, showed real
feeling and told ‘the truth’ about society. At the same time, they classi-
fied irony as French or Jewish and damned it as politically undesirable
or aesthetically and emotionally wanting. In the nineteenth century,
for example, conservatives accused social critics and satirists like
Heinrich Heine of not being or acting German,8 a tradition that con-
tinued into the twentieth century. Thus, whoever claimed a particular
German form of humour mirrored the German obsession with defin-
ing their self through an enemy other, using the term to delegitimize
opponents as non-German. Such humour, and its negotiation, never
became dominant before the wars of the twentieth century, but it be-
came fused during the latter half of the nineteenth century with the
notion of ‘catastrophic nationalism,’9 the conservative position which
claimed that only war and fighting created real unity. This imaginary
developed its full deadly impact during National Socialism, and so did
so-called German humour, turning both into a discursive and social
practice of exclusion.10
Still, as in all modern Western societies, the field of the comical be-
came widely differentiated after the nineteenth century, and in the
media explosion of the early twentieth century humorous entertain-
ment in general continued its secular rise. The First World War in par-
ticular was a gigantic media war. All major warfaring countries relied
heavily on caricatures or humorous trench journals to whip up emo-
tions at home, offer visions of continuing social order, and denigrate
the opponents. But at least Western governments could never control
the mass media entirely, and how they dealt with humour they did
not ask for also tells about war societies’ suppleness in dealing with
conflicting positions. In France, for example, the satirical journal Ca-
nard Enchaîné, established in 1915, turned into an influential voice of
criticism against the war.11 In Germany, on the contrary, all satirical
24 Peter Jelavich

there is a part of you that delights in breaking the taboos of your own
value system. Yet that does not mean that you have given up those
values by laughing at the joke. One cannot automatically infer the be-
liefs of the joke-teller or the laugher from the contents of the joke. The
opposite can be true as well: just as you can laugh at a well-made joke
even if you do not agree with its implications, you can laugh at a rather
lame joke if you subscribe whole-heartedly to its gist. Freud gives the
example of jokes aimed at authority-figures, such as caricatures: ‘We
laugh at them even if they are unsuccessful simply because we count
rebellion against authority as a merit.’2
Analysis – and it need not be psychoanalysis – can ascertain which
part of the joke (the technique or the content) causes us to laugh. In
actual life, however, we do not usually analyse why we are laughing;
otherwise, indeed, we would not laugh. But that very slipperiness of
joking makes it a powerful, if insidious, vehicle for influencing opin-
ion. Since people can and do laugh at jokes whose implications they
do not consciously share, it is conceivable that if they hear enough
jokes of a particular tendency, they might slowly and subtly be won
over to that opinion. This is especially true in cases where the listener
does not have a pre-established opinion on a particular subject. The
seductiveness of joking, abetted by the fact that it is a form of release,
usually establishes a rapport with the joker. Freud noted that a joke
will ‘bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with
us without any very close investigation, just as on other occasions we
ourselves have often been bribed by an innocent joke into overesti-
mating the substance of a statement expressed jokingly.’ This dynam-
ic is expressed in the common German phrase, ‘die Lacher auf seine
Seite ziehen’ (to pull the laughers over to your side).3
This fact underscores an obvious aspect of joking, namely, that it is a
social event. Again, it was Freud who said that the joke is ‘the most so-
cial of all the mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure.’4 But like
the ambiguity of language and the ambivalence of sex and aggression,
the social situation of joking is often two-sided. Sharing jokes creates a
sense of community, even if only two people are involved: joke-telling
allows you to ‘laugh with’ someone. But the same jokes can be used to
‘laugh at’ someone else, that is, to exclude and denigrate other groups.
Indeed, by definition, tendentious jokes imply a triad: the joke-teller,
the listener, and the target of the joke. Inasmuch as the breaking of
sexual taboos and especially the outlet of aggression can be under-
taken at the expense of others, the liberation provided by jokes can
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 25

occur at great cost to the butt of the humour. Sometimes, we might

say, the target deserves it: when it is a hypocritical politician or a self-
righteous clergyman or a mendacious spouse. But whole swaths of the
humour landscape are aimed at groups of people towards whom the
joke-teller feels varying degrees of antipathy. Jokes provide a means of
venting aggression on these groups in an indirect way, when the forces
of law prevent more direct violence. This includes misogynist jokes as
well as ethnic jokes. The fact that jokes can both embody and release
vast resources of aggression was demonstrated anew by the violent
global responses to caricatures of Mohammed published in a Danish
newspaper in 2005.
In this essay I would like to examine not the more obvious cases of
jokes aimed by one group against another, but rather a more com-
plicated subset of ethnic joking, namely, self-deprecatory humour.5
What does it mean when members of an ethnic or religious minority
make jokes about themselves? And does it matter whether the audi-
ence is limited to members of that group or includes others as well?
There are a number of reasons why minorities in general, and Jews
in particular, make jokes about themselves. Self-deprecatory humour
can be a means of coping with adverse situations: laughing about your
troubles, or about the faults that others impute to you, might not im-
prove your condition, but it could make the adversity bearable in the
short run. At the far end of this manner of joking we find ‘gallows hu-
mour,’ which arises under conditions of danger or persecution, up to
and including the extreme conditions of the Shoah. But self-mocking
humour can also develop when the external threats have (seeming-
ly) abated, when the minority feels secure enough to engage in self-
criticism, even in public. This is especially true when the corpus of a
group’s humour also recognizes the strengths of the community: that
is, when self-deprecatory and self-congratulatory jokes intermingle.
Again, it was Freud who claimed that the excellence of Jewish jokes
is based on the fact that they take account of the faults as well as the
virtues of the Jewish people: ‘The jokes made about Jews by foreign-
ers are for the most part brutal comic stories in which a joke is made
unnecessary by the fact that Jews are regarded by foreigners as comic
figures. The Jewish jokes that originate from Jews admit this too; but
they know their real faults as well as the connection between them
and their good qualities […] Incidentally, I do not know whether there
are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of
its own character.’6
26 Peter Jelavich

Various theories have been advanced to explain the perceived im-

portance of jokes – and self-deprecatory jokes in particular – among
Jews. To be sure, from biblical times through the early modern era,
joke-telling has not been a major part of Jewish tradition (despite hu-
morous passages in the Talmud and other texts). Many, if not most
jokes in the standard repertory of Jewish humour probably date to
the nineteenth century, and to Central and Eastern Europe. That be-
ing the case, analysts of the genesis of modern Jewish humour can
point to a number of possible causal factors. Some were endogenous
to the Jewish community: traditional ideas and values were being
challenged from within, most notably by the Haskalah, the Jewish
enlightenment, which called into question major tenets of the Bible,
the Talmud, and other spiritual texts – and this, in turn, challenged a
number of precepts of everyday life. Other causal factors were exog-
enous, and concerned relations of Jews – as an ethnic, religious, and
linguistic minority – to their surrounding gentile communities. Jews
in Eastern Europe routinely had command of three languages: Yiddish
for everyday life, Hebrew for ritual purposes, and the local vernacular
for communication with the outside world. Sometimes the language
of officialdom (say, German or Russian) was different from the local
vernacular (for example, Polish or Ukrainian). Having to cope with
three or four tongues obviously provided excellent training for learn-
ing the complexities and fallacies of language, especially if users of the
other languages were trying to trip you up. And that was because – and
here we finally get to the most obvious point – the surrounding com-
munities almost always felt varying degrees of antipathy to the Jews in
their midst.
This was a complex situation, and jokes were one means of engaging
it. It is obvious that Jews would make fun of their oppressors, and that
the others would make jokes about Jews. But why would Jews make
fun of themselves? Here endogenous factors played a major role: jokes
were one means of negotiating the major clashes over values, family
structure, and gender roles brought about by internal challenges to
traditional Jewish beliefs and ways of living. When members of eth-
nic groups make jokes about themselves among themselves, they are
doing a number of things: sometimes self-regulation, sometimes self-
criticism – and in cases where differences are irreconcilable, jokes can
be a way of laughing off the irritation. That is especially important
in groups that were legally or informally ghettoized: in other words,
situations where potentially contentious individuals could not simply
8 Martina Kessel

hand, the film discusses a basic dilemma of power and agency. Thus,
Grünbaum’s sense of irony seems to open spaces of action for him al-
though he is in a hopelessly inferior position in radically asymmetric
power relations. This works as long as Goebbels keeps the agreement,
but the victim’s power of laughter and therefore any hope disappears
the very moment the Nazis decide to replace agreement by dishonesty
and violence.
Right after the Second World War, Germans continued to opt for
paternalistic, non-ironical, and supposedly non-political versions
of cheerful entertainment. Their dislike of satire affected especially
those few who as early as the 1950s and 1960s discussed in a self-iron-
ical and moving way German complicity in genocide and war crimes.
Films like Rolf Thiele’s mocking Mamitschka from 1955, satirizing both
expellees and native Germans, and Wolfgang Staudte’s hilarious Her-
renpartie from 1964, showing the deep involvement in National Social-
ism and war crimes of a complacent men’s choral society on postwar
holiday in Yugoslavia, were defeated fast and hard at the box office
and then wiped out from cultural memory as well.25
What is needed are truly historical analyses of humour in the post-
war era which not only focus on the level of the media or its content,
but connect such analysis with a history of mentalities and politics.
Not only German, but also North American, politicians and intel-
lectuals attacked comic books in the 1950s as a new, politically and
socially dangerous,26 aesthetic form that appealed to youngsters and
was quickly associated with unruly behaviour. The art world, how-
ever, has long since accepted them not only as a form of subversive
counterculture but as art.27 Furthermore, we could ask whether the
rather mellow U.S.-style comedies of the McCarthy era, made for a
white middle class,28 were typical for the 1950s in Western popular cul-
ture in general. Did the prominence of ethnic humour, so important
in the United States in the twentieth century, recede in the 1950s not
only due to the civil rights movement but also due to the impact of
knowledge about the Holocaust? In turn, did the sharp British satire
in the 1960s, with its class emphasis, have effects in other countries?
Generally, notions of humour refer back to cultural norms that may
differ from culture to culture, so the transfer of humour across cultural
borders proved difficult throughout the twentieth century, despite the
increasingly transnational character of comedy shows.29 The turn of
British satire to a more absurd form since the 1960s, with Monty Py-
thon as its most successful icon on television,30 definitely preceded a
28 Peter Jelavich

parent advantage. His nose has the boldly curving line of the Chosen
People. It is white and huge and sweats constantly. The moustache
under this nose resists being forced to look like that of the Kaiser.’
Furthermore, Markwitz considered himself ‘the paradigm of a beauti-
ful Teuton,’ despite the fact that he spoke in a ‘guttural’ fashion and
walked with a ‘Jewish’ gait.8 On the most obvious level, this character
parodied a converted German-nationalist Jew; and by making fun of
Jews who were overeager to assimilate, Reinhardt was exercising one
of the functions of self-deprecatory humour, namely, self-regulation
of his own community. But his skit also employed some of the most
offensive anti-Semitic clichés. The same can be said of the ‘Chorus of
Investors’ in Reinhardt’s parody of Aescylus’s Oresteia: ‘They are well-
fed and well-dressed men with hats and frock coats and intensively
Roman noses. They bow and bend, murmur and sigh, as if before the
Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.’9 Why did Reinhardt do this? One obvious
reason comes to mind: by presenting exaggerated representations of
some of the more persistent and egregious stereotypes regarding Jew-
ish looks and Jews’ purported worship of Mammon, Reinhardt made
the clichés themselves look ridiculous. This might have allowed his
Jewish audience to laugh off some of their built-up anxieties over the
prevalence of such tropes. It also might help substantiate one rather
ironic theory of Jewish self-derogatory humour: namely, that Jews
make jokes about themselves to beat the anti-Semites at their own
game, to show that they can excel even at that perverse endeavour if
they put their minds to it.
Be that as it may, it appears that no members of Reinhardt’s pre-
dominantly Jewish audience took umbrage at these scenes as long
as they were performed privately. But Sound and Smoke went public
in the fall of 1901, and already by March 1902 two of its performances
were disrupted by several Jewish students. They protested a skit in
which the actor Emanuel Reicher, made up to look like ‘an old Polish
Jew,’ told anecdotes about a recently deceased rabbi, a righteous man
(Zadek).10 The script included a couple of quips involving marriage
brokers (Schadchen) which were probably stale even then, as they
were already part of what was becoming a standard repertory of Jew-
ish jokes. But most of the scene consisted of a sympathetic recount-
ing of the fictitious rabbi’s humane and generous deeds. Nevertheless,
the students seem to have taken umbrage at the telling of Jewish tales
in a pseudo-Yiddish dialect, though it is not clear whether they did
so because of religious sensitivity or their belief that it was politically
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 29

or socially unwise to toy in public with stereotypes of Jewishness. In

any case, Reinhardt seems to have learned his lesson: he promptly
pulled the number from his cabaret, and he no longer dealt humor-
ously with Jewish characters in subsequent performances. Indeed, as
he matured into a major director of serious drama, he sponsored plays
that portrayed Jews in an earnest and sympathetic manner – a relative
novelty on Central European stages.
In general, though, it seems that such protests against Jewish hu-
mour were rare in the late Imperial era, before the outbreak of the First
World War. There were apparently a number of reasons why the telling
of Jewish jokes, and the portrayal on stage of humorous Jewish charac-
ters, was not deemed excessively problematic at that time. One reason
had to do with the increasing security that many Jews felt in late Impe-
rial German society. The attempts by the preacher Adolf Stöcker and
others to mount a sustained anti-Semitic campaign in the late 1870s
seemed to have foundered by the mid-1890s. More importantly, Jew-
ish jokes were acceptable because they belonged to a larger context
of entertainment in which a variety of Germanic groups caricatured
themselves: not just Jews, but also Bavarians, Swabians, Rhineland-
ers, Saxons, Prussians, and Austrians. In such a context, there would
have been an obvious benefit for Jews to be part of the lineup, since
it implied that despite their differences, they were as much a part of
Germany’s national mix as any of the other groups marked by distinc-
tive dialects and customs.11
That attitude found its purest expression in the performances of the
Gebrüder Herrnfeld Theater, an extremely popular institution in late
Imperial Berlin devoted to ethnic comedies written and performed by
two Jewish brothers. In all of their self-scripted plays, Donat Herrnfeld
played a Jew and his brother Anton took on a Christian role: usually a
Bohemian or Czech, but sometimes a Bavarian or a Berliner. The the-
atre was known as the prime example in Berlin of what was called Jar-
gontheater (jargon theatre), since Donat spoke an artificial dialect that
was a conventional marker of Jewishness on stage: basically German,
it was liberally peppered with well-known Yiddish and Hebrew words,
and employed a modified syntax that was supposed to sound Yiddish.
Indeed, the genre was often, though erroneously, referred to as ‘Yid-
dish theatre.’ The implied message of these skits was unequivocally
pluralist. The Herrnfelds made benign fun of Bohemians, Bavarians,
Berliners, Saxons, and Jews as well, but they also dramatized how, in
the end, these groups could coexist happily and appreciate their dif-
30 Peter Jelavich

ferences. Indeed, some of the skits provided sympathetic portrayals

of romance and marriage between Jews and gentiles. The Herrnfelds
presented Germany as a multicultural nation, and their plays can be
seen as contemporary counterparts of the wildly popular, multi-eth-
nic dialect comedies in the United States, such as Anne Nichols’s Abie’s
Irish Rose (a romance between a young Jewish man and a young Irish
woman).12
Nevertheless, there was opposition to the Herrnfeld Theater from
some Jews. In 1908, the Jüdische Rundschau reprinted an article enti-
tled ‘The Anti-Semitic Herrnfeld Brothers.’13 What worried the author
most was the possibility that gentiles in the audience might come to
believe that Jews in general were like the ‘dopes’ (Trottel) they saw on
stage. To be sure, the Jüdische Rundschau might have had another
implicit reason for rejecting the Herrnfeld enterprise: that newspaper
was the mouthpiece of Germany’s Zionist movement, and hence it op-
posed the assimilationist principles implicit in the Herrnfeld brothers’
skits. But without making the point explicitly, the article also seems to
imply that there was another, very profound reason for objecting to
ethnic comedy: if Jews were presented almost exclusively in humor-
ous roles, then being Jewish in and of itself could come to be seen as
something ludicrous and risible. Many jokes had nothing to do with
standard topoi of Jewish life or Jewish stereotypes, but rather dealt
with general human foibles; yet they were repeatedly told via Jew-
ish characters and in a pseudo-Yiddish dialect. Freud described such
jokes as ones in which ‘it is only the setting that is Jewish; the core
belongs to humanity in general.’14 The fact that Jewish attributes were
retained in jokes where they were not required – in jokes where any
ethnic identity, or none at all, would have functioned just as well –
might have made Jewishness appear to be a form of clowning. And
to the extent that performing Jewishness on stage was conflated with
clowning, it had the potential to damage the respect that generations
of Jewish citizens had fought to attain. It was the beginning of what
Elliott Oring has called the transformation of ‘The People of the Book’
into ‘The People of the Joke.’15
After 1914 the debate over Jewish jokes took on greater urgency. To be
sure, the performance of comedy during wartime is a fraught issue for
any society. But the situation of Jews was particularly acute: as frustra-
tions mounted over rising casualties and Germany’s inability to win
the war, Jews were increasingly targeted as scapegoats and anti-Sem-
itism surged. In response to charges that Jews were shirking military
 Introduction 11

shows in her essay on the Netherlands. In Germany today, however,

ethnic jokes in the media still have an ambivalent status. The rise of
German humour productions after the commercialization of German
television in the 1980s was associated with the new tactic of break-
ing taboos as a source of humour, namely with anti-Polish jokes.39 At
the same time, however, some Turkish comedians entertain their tel-
evision audiences today with gags about the Turkish-German culture
clash, introducing an ironic/self-ironic discourse about the sensitive
issue of national or ethnic identity at the very moment when irony on
a global scale has become charged terrain.
Finally, the category of gender has not been sufficiently studied
by historians of humour, particularly not for the twentieth century.
Other fields like literature studies have been far more innovative
here, though again they focus mostly on the periods up to the nine-
teenth century.40 Women who tried to gain a democratic share in
society have been constantly the butt of jokes that shifted the level
of discussion away from argument. At the same time, women’s pos-
sibilities of speaking up humorously have been tightly proscribed in
any society analysed so far, with lasting constraints remaining even
today.41 Still, there are many insights regarding the history of gender
and humour in the twentieth century, although one should be careful
not to prolong the problem of defining gender as meaning women
only. As gender roles changed markedly during the First World War,
due to the needs of war societies, media makers in the major Western
European states used joke books and caricatures to reassert tradi-
tional gender roles.42 Simultaneously, the second important meaning
of gender as a symbol for power relations played out in endless Ger-
man caricatures that feminized the opponents, trying to render them
ridiculous.43 For the Weimar Republic, we still need fully contextual-
ized studies about the great number of new female stars and literary
figures who showed not only their bodies, but also their sharp wit in
public,44 adding to the sense that gender roles in general were out of
control. During National Socialism, German satirical commentar-
ies rarely passed up the chance to demean Western democracies by
describing sexual and gender confusion as hallmarks of those soci-
eties.45 Staudte’s Herrenpartie (1964) made fun of the self-important
German postwar masculinity of men who revealed their true charac-
ter as willing and greedy Nazis when they found themselves in a tight
spot. This particular sarcasm might well have spurred the film’s im-
mediate rejection.
32 Peter Jelavich

encores.19 Perhaps the best index of the success of Jewish humour dur-
ing the Great War was the fact that large numbers of moviegoers, both
Jewish and gentile, were flocking to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, which
in many ways were a visual equivalent to the skits of the Herrnfeld
brothers.20 Lubitsch had gained fame in January 1914 with Die Firma
heiratet (The Firm Gets Married), in which he played a character that
he would repeat many times over the next few years: namely, a rather
lazy young man from an Eastern European Jewish town who moves to
a big city (usually Berlin) and succeeds in the garment trade through a
combination of charm, chutzpah, and benign dishonesty. The charac-
ter was an elaboration of a popular comic Jewish figure, known as ‘der
kleine Moritz’: ‘little Moritz’ was an impudent, unconstrained, and
uncontrollable boy, in short, a consummate smart aleck.
Perhaps the best of Lubitsch’s ethnic-comedy films is Schuhpalast
Pinkus (Pinkus’s Shoe Emporium, 1916). There Lubitsch appears as
Sally Pinkus, and we follow his life from his schoolboy days through
his apprenticeship in shoe stores, until he ends up as the owner of a
fashionable shoe salon as well as the husband of a glamorous danc-
er. Despite the surge of anti-Semitism in 1916, the year of the Juden-
zählung, Lubitsch pulled no punches about his own Jewishness or his
use of Jewish stereotypes. This was a rather daring thing to do, and it
might have had a subversive intent. In the middle of the war, German
culture was suffused with images of militarism and masculinity: most
films and plays glorified men who were brave, noble, muscular, and
blond – and such men, in such shows, invariably ‘got the girl’ in the
end. Lubitsch completely inverted that paradigm, first and foremost
by emphasizing his stereotypical Jewishness: not only is the milieu
Jewish, but the camera often fixes on Lubitsch’s short stature, dark fea-
tures, and wholly non-Teutonic physiognomy. Reversals of ‘noble’ ide-
als also pervade Schuhpalast Pinkus: rather than being a model pupil,
Sally cheats; being a weakling, he has to fake his prowess in gym; he
dissembles to get a job or make a sale – but in the end, it is he who
‘gets the girl.’ Lubitsch employed Jewish comic stereotypes to under-
mine mass-marketed images of Teutonic masculinity. Not surprising-
ly, a generation later, in the midst of the Third Reich, a film historian
expressed his dismay: ‘Today [1935] it seems incomprehensible that
movie audiences, during the hard war years, cheered an actor who al-
ways played with a brashness so alien to us.’21
While the Nazis retrospectively deplored the popular success of Lu-
bitsch’s ‘brashness,’ some Jewish observers expressed very different
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 33

concerns: they were troubled by the fact that in films like Schuhpalast
Pinkus, he employed what might have been considered anti-Semitic
stereotypes for humorous purposes. That Lubitsch was aware of such
objections is attested by his defensive reply in 1916 to an interviewer
who asked him about his preference for ‘films set in a Jewish milieu.’
Lubitsch responded ‘in an excited manner’ that ‘it has often been said
that films set in a Jewish milieu are considered offensive. That’s a com-
pletely unbelievable standpoint. Should it ever be the case that such a
film incurs disapproval, then it is solely due to a type of performance
that either does not correspond to the essence of Jewish humour, in
which case the actor should steer clear of such roles; or it is excessively
exaggerated, but that would harm any type of artistic performance and
destroy its effect. Wherever it appears, Jewish humour is sympathetic
and artistic, and it plays such a great role everywhere that it would be
silly to forgo it on the screen.’22 Lubitsch provided cinematic versions
of the humorous and sympathetic characters of Jewish popular the-
atre, which needed to be seen especially at the height of a nationalist
war, when anti-Semitic voices were becoming ever more strident.
Lubitsch’s intent might have been admirable, but were his onscreen
characterizations strategically wise? That question was posed ever
more urgently over the course of the 1920s, as anti-Semitic agitation
increased and burst forth in events like the so-called Scheunenviertel-
pogrom in November 1923: Jews were attacked and their shops sacked
in a Berlin neighbourhood largely populated by impoverished immi-
grants from Eastern Europe.23 Simultaneously, however, many Jews,
especially those of the middle classes, considered themselves safer
than ever, now that Germany was a democratic republic. Such con-
trasting perceptions led to a sustained debate within Germany’s Jew-
ish community regarding the extent to which they could feel secure.
This debate was especially acute within the ranks of the Centralver-
ein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of
German Citizens of Jewish Faith). This was a decidedly non-Zionist
association of Jews who, as their name implied, considered Germany
their homeland. Inasmuch as the goal of being accepted simultane-
ously as Jews and as Germans remained elusive, the group engaged
in numerous self-defence projects, which involved monitoring and (if
possible) conducting legal proceedings against anti-Semitic agitators.
From the perspective of many Centalverein members, Jewish enter-
tainers were a galling phenomenon, since their jokes upheld stereo-
types of difference between German Jews and gentiles – stereotypes
34 Peter Jelavich

that seemed to belong to the canon of anti-Semitism as well. The Cen-

tralverein routinely monitored depictions of Jews (by Jews and gen-
tiles alike) in the arts and media. That scrutiny became more acute
after November 1925, when the CV-Zeitung, the weekly newspaper
of the association, published an article that complained of the jokes
heard on cabaret stages and published in humour magazines and joke
books. It is interesting to note what the author, Alfred Wiener, did not
find offensive. He began by asserting that Jews should not be overly
sensitive to slights; he even said that they should not take umbrage at
those people misinformed by ‘centuries-long, but one-sided experi-
ence’ who use the words ‘Jew’ and ‘merchant’ (Händler) interchange-
ably, as long as it is done in a neutral, non-offensive manner. He
claimed that ‘no one’ would argue that Jews should be excluded from
ridicule, since the Jew was ‘a character of our times’ (ein Typ unserer
Zeit) as much as the lieutenants or students caricatured in the hu-
mour magazines. Indeed, the author went on to defend a whole range
of Jewish comic stereotypes: only cringing cowards (Duckmäuser), he
claimed, would complain about jokes over ‘Jewish commercial agility,
the cunning of Little Moritz or the occasional parvenu-like behavior
of Herr Neureich.’24
So if Wiener was not upset by clichés of Jews as sharp dealers, sassy
boys, and uncultured nouveaux-riches, what did bother him? He
proceeded to lambaste an unnamed Berlin cabaret for performing a
skit, set in the home of a Viennese-Jewish businessman, in which the
young daughter enjoys the lascivious advances of various suitors. The
critic protested vehemently against this depiction of a ‘morally cor-
rupt’ (moralisch-verlumpte) family, in which ‘such Schweinereien in
Jewish trappings are passed off as characteristics of a Jewish home.’
He was especially galled that ‘Jewish artists and Jewish cabaret own-
ers’ performed the work before a public, ‘in part Jewish,’ that laughed
uproariously. The author proceeded to note that this was just one ex-
ample of several objectionable performances and that he (and by im-
plication the Centralverein) expected such works to disappear from
the repertory: ‘If this warning does not suffice, then we will press our
standpoint more emphatically.’
This ‘warning’ evidently went unheeded, and after collecting evi-
dence against cabarets for several months, the Centralverein did
indeed hit back. On the evening of 22 April 1926, it held two simulta-
neous protest meetings against Jewish entertainers. A total of some
1,200 citizens attended the two different venues, and several hundred
14 Martina Kessel

mechanism of a more deep-rooted inclusion and exclusion. The es-

say coincides with Jelavich’s findings by showing how non-censored
anti-Semitic jokes excluded Jewish Germans both from the imagined
community of cheerful soldiers and from a community at home that
defined itself through its suffering and the right to mock the govern-
ment’s failures.
The articles by Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger explore the un-
canny legacy of this fusion of cheerfulness and exclusion that marked
all media during National Socialism. Radio was one of the most im-
portant new media at the time, its impact going beyond the number
of radio sets as often whole families or groups of friends listened to-
gether. Its political potential had already been apparent during the
Weimar Republic, and Goebbels was keen to use it. National Social-
ist radio politics picked up exclusionary practices fast and on various
levels, combining them with the presentation of a cheerful Volksge-
meinschaft on air, as Monika Pater argues. Like Winokur, she touches
on the implicitly suppressive character of the absence of ethnicity.
After excluding ‘undesirables’ in the workforce, in broadcast content
and in the audience, German radio makers proceeded to structure lis-
teners’ time with humorous broadcasts for every part of the day. The
wireless was a technology that could, through its very character as a
modern mass media, structure people’s daily and weekly experiences.
Pater compares this impact with similar structural effects of the BBC,
pointing to the problem that modern media may work identically in
any political system. However, the radio as an instrument to structure
one’s day was only accepted, Pater argues, when the open ideology of
the early years gave way to cheerfully familiar, seemingly non-political
variety shows.
The German population’s dislike of aggressive humour and its prefer-
ence for harmonious representations of society that simply eschewed
the regime’s real character are also underlined by Patrick Merziger in
his essay about satire before and after 1933. Here again, absence be-
came conspicuous when the audience rejected National Socialist
culture makers’ attempts to continue the sarcastic strategies that had
been successful during the late Weimar Republic. Violent caricatures
in publications like Der Stürmer pinpointed anti-Semitism as this soci-
ety’s integrating disposition. But satire about inner and outer enemies
also perpetuated their existence, while a large part of the audience,
Merziger argues, preferred not to be reminded of them and opted for
the supposedly harmonious version of so-called German humour,
36 Peter Jelavich

Such concerns were expressed in increasingly explicit terms over the

ensuing months, as the Centralverein took direct aim at specific stages
and performers. In December 1926 the CV-Zeitung cited at length an
article (entitled ‘Every Jew His Own Anti-Semite!’) that had appeared
in the left-liberal Weltbühne, which attacked the self-styled ‘Professor’
Wiesenthal, a comedian from Vienna performing on Berlin’s cabaret
stages. His Jargon-laced monologues seemed ‘to transform all of the
racists’ libels, slurs and obscenities […] into funny punch-lines and
songs, always at the expense of the “Yid” [der ‘Jud’]: his craftiness, his
urge to haggle, his craven nature and his cowardice. All that was miss-
ing to complete the repertory was a happy song about ritual murder.’28
A year later, the CV-Zeitung criticized the performances of Willy Prager
and Paul O’Montis, two stalwarts of Berlin’s cabarets (recall that Prag-
er’s Jewish quips had been a hit during the First World War). The ob-
server asserted that gentile members of the audience smiled lamely at
most numbers, but they clapped loudly when they heard jokes about
Jews: ‘many Christian members of the audience seemed to enjoy the
fact that the caricatures of Jewish nature, Jewish morals, and Jewish
behaviour depicted in the racist yellow press [in der völkischen Hetz-
presse] were now spotlighted “true to life” in front of their very eyes.’29
A month later, the CV-Zeitung published the letter of a businessman
who travelled several times a year to Berlin, but who stopped going to
cabarets ‘because I am always enraged when I see how the Christian
public is amused by Jewish jokes, i.e. at our expense.’30
Such contentions must of course be read with caution: how was it
possible to assess accurately the religious background (Christian or
Jewish) of audience members, let alone the meaning of their laughter
or applause? But regardless of the evidence, it is clear that between
1925 and 1927, the criticism of Jewish comedians escalated to the point
where they were accused of aiding the cause of radical anti-Semitism.
To what extent were these charges justified? Since a response to that
question depends on assessments of taste, the role of humour, and
the danger posed by anti-Semitism at that time – a danger that is, of
course, magnified by historical hindsight – it is difficult to answer.
Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct, however speculatively, the
concerns voiced by the critics of professional Jewish humorists. Two
of the most controversial topics that might have played into the hands
of the anti-Semites were Jewish obsession with moneymaking (often
through less than honest means) and sexual impropriety (especially
adultery). To be sure, one could say that the bulk of jokes of any peo-
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 37

ple, including those of majority cultures, deal with sexual misconduct

as well as human foibles such as avarice and dishonesty. But it also is
hard to dismiss the concerns of Jewish self-defence groups, particu-
larly within the context of Germany in the 1920s, where there was a
growing rightwing-racist (völkisch) movement that accused Jews of
being two things in particular: financial despoilers of the German na-
tion and sexual predators upon gentile women. Needless to say, there
was a tremendous gulf between the comedic and the racist discours-
es: Jewish tellers of jokes, including ones dealing with financial and
sexual improprieties, stood far afield from an ideology that accused
Jews of systematic larceny and trafficking of women. The problem is
that the two discourses might not have seemed so distant to many
gentiles. That was clearly the case with völkisch anti-Semites: we have
seen some of the critics’ fears that some self-deprecatory jokes could
be used as ‘evidence’ of anti-Semitic stereotypes, inasmuch as Jews
themselves ‘admitted’ the faults of which they were accused. But there
was also the danger that the prevalence of such jokes could influence
gentiles who, though not völkisch, were unsympathetic or even indif-
ferent toward Jews. In October 1931 the CV-Zeitung noted with alarm
that Germania – the flagship newspaper of the (Catholic) Center Party,
which ‘cannot be suspected of anti-Semitism,’ according to the Cen-
tralverein – contended that the latest revue by Friedrich Hollaender
might make ‘a biased goy somewhat anti-Semitic.’31 Recall Freud’s
gloss on the German phrase ‘die Lacher auf seine Seite ziehen’ (to pull
the laughers over to your side): jokes have a strong potential to sway
opinion.
Another complex of concerns voiced by the Centralverein revolved
around the potential of Jewish jokes to be divisive, to foster conflicts
within the Jewish community as well as between Jews and gentiles.
The prevalence of jokes against Eastern European Jews, which made
fun of their supposed lack of culture and hygiene, caused great dis-
may. Indeed, many of the apparently self-deprecatory jokes among
Jews were not self-deprecatory in a strict sense: in the German con-
text, they were told by socially and culturally assimilated Jews against
the unassimilated, still Yiddish-speaking Jews from the East.32 The
editorial accompanying the report on the protest meetings of April
1926 was particularly incensed at comedians who ‘make jokes about
the cultural differences between Eastern and Western Jews.’ It even
referred fondly to the defunct Herrnfeld Theater (Donat had died in
1916): whatever their faults, the Herrnfelds had never depicted Jews as
38 Peter Jelavich

‘scoundrels’ (Lumpen).33 At the same time, the Centralverein worried

that Jewish jokes could deepen the gulf between Jews and gentiles.
Here the concern was not limited to reinforcement of anti-Semitic
stereotypes; it also involved the potential of so-called ‘goyim jokes,’
which made fun of gentiles, to alienate the Christian public. As noted
above, Freud believed that the strength of Jewish humour resided in
the fact that it included both self-deprecatory and self-congratulatory
jokes, and the latter often took the form of tales about Jewish superi-
ority to gentiles. Under normal conditions, most gentiles would (and
do) find such jokes funny. But in an era of mounting anti-Semitism,
‘goyim jokes’ provided ammunition for segregating Jews and gentiles,
since (it was argued) the Jews perceived themselves as a people apart,
and their denigration of ‘goyim’ invited German Christians to recipro-
cate with like invective.
This issue was raised in an article that appeared in the CV-Zeitung
in December 1927, which cited a letter written by a concerned citizen
to a cabaret director. After criticizing ‘cabaret performers who, though
themselves Jewish, have no feel for the necessary tact and thus abet the
anti-Semites’ distorted picture of Jews,’ the letter noted: ‘These people
apparently do not realize, for example, the role that the concept “goy”
plays in anti-Semitic agitation, and they do not know what efforts it
has taken to counter the racists’ attacks against the “goy” concept [die
völkischen Angriffe gegen den Begriff ‘Goi’].’ The letter concluded by
contending that ‘all attempts at self-defence are again and again frus-
trated by this type of humor.’34 There might have been some validity
to this concern. For example, in an article reporting on the Centralv-
erein’s protest meetings of April 1926, the Tägliche Rundschau, an ul-
traconservative newspaper, concurred that Jewish entertainers should
stop making fun of Jews; but it proceeded to complain that ‘we others’
were offended when those same humorists joked about ‘the national
and religious attitudes and institutions of Christians and Germans
[Christen und Germanen].’35 The report implied that the Centralverein
deplored jokes at the expense of Jews but had no objections to Jews
telling jokes against gentiles. That was, of course, a canard, but it re-
flected a widespread belief in anti-Semitic circles that ‘goyish’ gentiles
were victims of Jewish discrimination.
In its criticism of Jewish humorists’ jokes about Jews as well as gen-
tiles, the Tägliche Rundschau contended: ‘according to our observa-
tions, the conferencier Robitschek currently holds the record in both
areas.’ Kurt Robitschek directed the ‘Kabarett der Komiker’ (Cabaret
 Introduction 17

notes

1 This also applies to the interesting collection by Jan Bremmer and Her-
mann Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity
to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). I would like to thank
Levke Harders, Ruth Federspiel, and especially two anonymous readers
for the University of Toronto Press for their helpful comments.
2 Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann, ‘Death and Twentieth-
Century Germany,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place
of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Paul Betts et al. (New
York: Berghahn, 2008), 1.
3 Hans-Peter Mathis, Napoleon I. im Spiegel der Karikatur: Ein Sammlung-
skatalog des Napoleon-Museums Arenenberg mit 435 Karikaturen über
Napoleon I. (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1998); Thilo König et al., ‘Die Stecher von
London: Englische politische Karikatur unter dem Einfluß der franzö-
sischen Revolution,’ in ‘Nervöse Auffangorgane des inneren und äußeren
Lebens.’ Karikaturen, ed. Klaus Herding and Gunter Ott (Gießen: Anabas
Verlag, 1980), 58–86.
4 Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladdera-
datsch & Simplicissimus 1890–1914 (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1984), 14–47.
5 Ursula Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin: Von der Märzrevolution bis zu Bismarcks
Entlassung. Illustrierte politische Witzblätter einer Metropole 1848–1890
(Cologne: ILV, 1991), 127–9, 177f.; Reinhard Hippen, Das Kabarett der
spitzen Feder: Streitzeitschriften (Zurich: pendo-Verlag, 1986), 46.
6 Patrick Merziger, ‘Die Ermächtigung des Publikums im Nationalsozialis-
mus? Leserbeschwerden und NS-Propaganda in den Unterhaltungsme-
dien – die Satirezeitschrift “Die Brennessel,”’ SOWI 34 (2005): 26–39.
7 For the time around 1800, see especially the essays in Sprachen des
Ernstes – Sprachen der Ironie, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2000). Regarding Schiller, see also: Peter von Matt, ‘Lachen
in der Literatur. Eine Überlegung zur Frage, warum Schillers “Glocke”
so ernst ist,’ in Peter von Matt, Das Schicksal der Phantasie: Studien zur
deutschen Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1994), 91–101; Arthur Moeller van
den Bruck, Lachende Deutsche (Minden: Bruns, 1910).
8 Jefferson S. Chase, Inciting Laughter: The Development of ‘Jewish Humor’
in 19th Century German Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000).
9 Michael Geyer, ‘The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in
Twentieth-Century Germany,’ German Studies Review 15 (1992): 75–110.
10 Martina Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death? “German Humour” in the Two
40 Peter Jelavich

tions of jokes, both published in 1924, one year before the beginning
of the Centralverein protests. Jüdische Miniaturen (Jewish Miniatures)
was edited by Paul Nikolaus, who performed comic monologues at
the Kadeko. Die einsame Träne: Das Buch der guten Witze (The Solitary
Teardrop: The Book of Good Jokes) was edited by Robitschek and Paul
Morgan, another regular entertainer at that venue; indeed, the two
had co-written the Quo vadis? parody. Morgan and Robitschek pref-
aced their jokebook by stating that ‘the predominant type of humor
in this collection […] is Jewish.’ They proceeded to note (rather defen-
sively, like Lubitsch in his interview of 1916): ‘There always will be a few
people up in arms, people who perceive derision of the [Jewish] na-
tion and religion in these harmless jokes.’42 Likewise, in the epilogue
to the second edition of his collection, Nikolaus asserted that the first
edition had ‘met with the silly reproach [den albernen Vorwurf] of be-
ing anti-Semitic from certain quarters which, in the interim, have re-
alized that anti-Semitism is stoked by completely different people.’43
But were these jokes actually ‘harmless,’ and was it ‘silly’ to call
them anti-Semitic? Many of the jokes in the two collections belonged
to a standard repertory of Jewish quips: indeed, almost all of the jokes
that Freud analysed in his book of 1905 were reprinted in these later
anthologies as well. But it does appear that many of the jokes were
skewed in a direction that made the members of the Centralverein
understandably concerned. A significant percentage of jokes in both
anthologies are misogynist: that is, they are jokes about Jewish hus-
bands who wish that their wives were dead, or who celebrate when
their wives die; furthermore, Jewish women are assumed to be ugly.
(The converse does not hold true: there are no jokes about wives wish-
ing that their husbands were dead, nor are there quips wherein beau-
tiful Jewish women play a role.) Such misogynist jokes total 16 out of
136 (12 per cent) in Nikolaus’s anthology, and 23 out of 303 (8 per cent)
in that of Morgan and Robitschek.44 Another significant category deals
with adultery and other forms of sexual misconduct: 7 per cent in
Nikolaus’s work, 6 per cent in the other one. There are also numerous
jokes about the supposed Jewish obsession with business and money-
making, many of which are rather benign, though others tend to imply
Jewish avarice and stinginess; a few of them deal with crime, cheating,
theft, and insurance fraud. The stinginess jokes constitute 6 per cent
of Nikolaus’s anthology and 3 per cent of the other work; the crime and
fraud jokes total 10 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. There also are
a number of jokes about the uncleanliness of Eastern European Jews
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 41

(7 per cent and 2 per cent). And there are a mere handful of jokes that
used the word ‘goy’: Nikolaus has a total of 3, Morgan and Robitschek
only 4, thus not nearly as many as the Tägliche Rundschau implied. An
equally small number of jokes against non-Jews are aimed specifically
against anti-Semites.
In sum, if we look at the joke books through the eyes of an imag-
ined member of the Centralverein – one whom Robitschek would
have considered overly fussy, indeed sensitive to a maddening degree
– then we can conclude that some 42 per cent of the jokes in Nikolaus’s
volume are problematic, and 23 per cent in that of Robitschek and
Morgan. Beyond the printed text, both volumes contain a number of
visual caricatures – drawn by Paul Simmel, a very popular cartoonist
– that employ standard stereotypes of Jewish physiognomies (see figs.
1.1–1.3). Although the images display everyday emotions with which
one can sympathize – feelings like puzzlement, annoyance, or embar-
rassment, in contrast to, say, the lecherous stares or rapacious sneers
of cartoon Jews in Nazi publications – the seemingly insouciant use of
stereotypical visual markers of Jewishness might well have distressed
some contemporary Jewish readers.45 It is thus apparent that critics
of Robitschek, Morgan, Nikolaus, and their colleagues had reasons
for concern: many of their jokes did, in fact, focus on Jewish obses-
sion with money, or on misogyny and sexual improprieties. In less
threatening times, the jokes told by Nikolaus, Robitschek, and Morgan
would have blended in to the larger landscape of humour, as they had
during the Imperial era. But by the 1920s, times were no longer normal
for German Jews (if they ever had been), and the tendencies of some
of those jokes came perilously close to anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish
rapacity, both financial and sexual. In that context, Jewish jokes were
no longer funny to many Jews.
Since this evidence is rather damning, one must ask: what could be
said in defence of the comedians? An obvious response would be that
self-deprecatory humour was only one facet of their repertories. In-
deed, some of their numbers were highly sympathetic to their fellow
Jews, but even these works were sometimes criticized by the Central-
verein. Just as we shake our heads today at many of the jokes hostile
to women or Eastern European Jews, most of us would probably be
baffled by the strong opposition shown to ‘Kaddisch,’ a song scripted
by Robitschek and performed by Paul O’Montis, one of the singers
specifically attacked by the Centralverein. The moving work, which
describes a Jewish widow’s grief at the loss of her husband as a soldier
42 Peter Jelavich

1.1 Anti-Semitism: In the zoo a parrot squawks ‘Yid yid!’ David Blum replies:
‘You should talk: with a nose like that!’ From Paul Nikolaus, Jüdische Minia-
turen, with illustrations by Paul Simmel (Hannover: Paul Steegemann Verlag,
1924), 94–5.
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 43

1.2 Gross: Two men pass by a manicure salon. ‘Check out the shiksel!’ ‘Don’t
get near her! She gave me pubic lice and before that she cut off my finger-
nails, so I can’t scratch myself.’ From Paul Nikolaus, Jüdische Miniaturen, with
illustrations by Paul Simmel (Hannover: Paul Steegemann Verlag, 1924), 68–9.
44 Peter Jelavich

1.3 The Epitaph: A man sees a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery with the in-
scription: here lies moritz kortischoner, a successful merchant and an
honest man. He sighs and comments: ‘Terrible! Such a small grave and three
people buried there!’ From Kurt Robitschek and Paul Morgan, Die einsame
Träne: Das Buch der guten Witze, with illustrations by Paul Simmel (Berlin:
Drei Masken Verlag, 1924), 17, 19.
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 45

during the Great War, was obviously a response to the canard that Jews
shirked their patriotic duty.46 But the song was highly controversial,
most likely because some people took umbrage at the reference to
such a solemn prayer in the profane context of a cabaret. Robitschek
responded to that objection in his missive to the Centralverein: ‘Just
let cabarets perform songs and numbers that deal with serious – even
religious – themes concerning Jews. The much-contested song “Kad-
disch” belongs there.’47 Indeed, it is quite possible that protests came
from people who knew only the title, but not the song itself. Accord-
ing to an account of the Centralverein’s meeting at which Robitschek
personally appeared, ‘when he admitted to being the author of a song
that had been disparaged by Centralverein members, the confession
caused a storm of indignation. But in the end Robitschek explained
that the content of the poem was a glorification of German Jews, and
he thereby won over the assembly.’48
The relative rarity of such serious and sympathetic numbers, how-
ever, only underscored that self-deprecatory jokes were the norm for
Jewish comedians. Probably the strongest defence that could be made
for such jokes concerned freedom of speech – the standpoint voiced
by Robitschek when he told the Centralverein: ‘no petty censorship!
Wit and satire have to be allowed.’ That view echoed a crucial issue:
now that Germany was a democracy, should its citizens not practise
one of its basic premises, namely freedom of expression? Not to do
so, to engage in pre-emptive self-censorship, would concede ground
to the forces of intolerance. By making jokes about themselves, Jews
were not only exercising a precious right but also demonstrating that
they felt securely at home in the institutions of the new republic. The
telling of such jokes was a sign of strength; to refrain from doing so
out of fear would be a sign of weakness, or even defeat. And this view
was tied to another one, the point made by Nikolaus when he wrote
that ‘anti-Semitism is stoked by completely different people.’ Accord-
ing to this argument, anti-Semitic jokes are not a cause, and not even
an accomplice, of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites will hate Jews regard-
less of whether or not Jews tell jokes about themselves; by refraining
from telling such jokes, Jews will not make any dent in anti-Semitism.
That viewpoint was undoubtedly correct: it need hardly be said that
the opinions and the success of the Nazis were in no way influenced
by Jewish entertainers’ self-deprecatory humour.
Once the Nazis came to power, Jewish entertainers were particularly
at risk, given their great public visibility. Robitschek and Hollaender
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 23

ways known). Cognitively, jokes are hard to grasp; and practically,

they are hard to control. Jokes are possible because of the instability
of language – words, syntax, and what passes for logic – and the am-
biguity of human situations. The former provides the form, the latter
the content of most jokes, and the results can be explosive. One can
attempt to control the outcome of jokes, but like explosions, they can
get out of hand. In his study of jokes – a study that is based primar-
ily on Jewish jokes – Sigmund Freud focused on what he called Ten-
denzwitze: that is, jokes with an ulterior aim or a purpose, as opposed
to jokes told purely to savour the art of joking. According to Freud,
‘tendentious jokes’ are aimed at people or things that compel us to
exercise renunciation and repression, such as a political authority, a
moral imperative, social institutions like marriage, or even reason and
logical thought. Freud claimed that ‘tendentious jokes’ ultimately deal
with the most basic human drives that are subject to repression: sex
and aggression. By telling the joke, we release some of those repressed
drives, as do those who laugh with us. Jokes are enjoyable because
they are liberating.
As with everything else in Freud, the enjoyment of jokes is over-de-
termined. On the one hand, we can laugh at the technique of a joke, its
ability to play on the instability of language through puns and hom-
onyms, or by taking metaphors too literally. On the other hand, we can
enjoy the breaking of taboos: the belittling of an authority figure, the
profanation of a sacred value, the allusion to a whole range of sexual
practices that just are not mentioned in polite society. By playing on
the instability and ambiguity of language on the one hand, and the
ambivalence of sex and aggression on the other, jokes lead us onto a
terrain where their meaning is ultimately hard to ascertain. As Freud
noted: ‘in the case of a tendentious joke, we are not able by our feel-
ings to determine which part of our pleasure derives from its tech-
nique, and which from its standpoint. Thus, strictly speaking, we do
not know what we are laughing at.’1
Let us pause to consider the implications of this statement. Just be-
cause you laugh at a joke does not necessarily imply that you agree
with its assumptions: think of the times that you have laughed (per-
haps with a bad conscience) at a joke that was racist or xenophobic or
misogynist. You might have laughed simply because the joke was ex-
ceedingly well constructed around a pun or a metaphor or an absurd
situation. Or, following Freud, you might have laughed because you
know that you should not be racist or xenophobic or misogynist, but
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 47

ish entertainers, along with millions of their people. But the historical
singularity of the ‘final solution’ does not mean that the controversies
surrounding Jewish entertainers before 1933 were likewise unique.
Self-deprecatory humour among any ethnic minority, at any time,
will seem problematic to a greater or lesser number of observers, de-
pending on their assessment of the dangers faced by the community
in question. It is highly unlikely that such jokes generate or increase
the aggressively hostile feelings of racists: such people will hate the
minorities no matter what they say about themselves. But such jokes
might well have a tendency to reflect and sustain divisions and preju-
dices within the ethnic communities themselves. And even in the best
of conditions, the mass media’s conflation of a minority’s image with
comedy might be an ambivalent development: in the United States,
for example, it is not just Jews, but also African Americans and His-
panics who might be regarded increasingly as ‘people of the joke.’ Be-
ing viewed with humour is certainly better than being viewed with
hatred, but it too can be demeaning, in less overt ways.
An awareness of such issues does not, however, force us to con-
clude that self-deprecatory humour should cease, since it can play
many positive roles, such as mediating conflicts within a community
or fostering favourable sentiments among other groups. Naturally, it
should not be the only mode of self-presentation: serious (and, yes,
often humourless) self-defence groups like the Centralverein and to-
day’s equivalents are at least as necessary. But just as humour is an
ineradicable aspect of human nature, jokes – however problematic –
will invariably have a place in minorities’ constant negotiations with
dominant cultures.

notes

1 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1963), 102.
2 Ibid., 105.
3 Ibid., 103.
4 Ibid., 179.
5 For varying perspectives on the subject of Jewish humour and self-
deprecatory jokes, which have informed my comments in the following
paragraphs, see Dan Ben-Amos, ‘The “Myth” of Jewish Humor,’ Western
Folklore 32 (1973): 112–31; Elliott Oring, ‘The People of the Joke: On the
Conceptualization of a Jewish Humor,’ Western Folklore 42 (1983): 261–7;
48 Peter Jelavich

Avner Ziv, ‘Psycho-social Aspects of Jewish Humor in Israel and in the

Diaspora,’ in Jewish Humor, ed. Ziv (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Pub-
lishers, 1998), 47–71.
6 Freud, Jokes, 111–12.
7 For an account of Reinhardt’s cabaret, see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 62–84.
8 Max Reinhardt, Schall und Rauch (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1901),
79.
9 Ibid., 129.
10 The protest is mentioned in a police report of 21 March 1902, in Landes-
archiv Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep. 30 Berlin C, Pol. Präs. Tit. 74, Th 804, f. 245. The
archived script of the scene is entitled ‘Reb Hersch Veilchenbaum. Impro-
visirte Scene,’ ibid., Th 814, f. 120–3. Reicher’s make-up is described in ‘Das
“Kleine Theater,”’ Berliner Börsen-Courier, 22 February 1902.
11 On the notion that Jews were one ‘tribe’ (Stamm) out of several that com-
posed the German nation, see Michael Brenner, ‘Religion, Nation oder
Stamm: zum Wandel der Selbtsdefinition unter deutschen Juden,’ in Na-
tion und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt
and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2001),
587–601; Till van Rahden, ‘Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Com-
munity between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850 to 1933,’ in German
History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Rose-
man (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 27–48.
12 On the Herrnfelds’ theatre, see Peter Sprengel, Populäres jüdisches Theat-
er in Berlin von 1877 bis 1933 (Berlin: Haude and Spener, 1997), 62–98; Mar-
line Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 125–97.
13 ‘Die antisemitischen Gebrüder Herrnfeld,’ Jüdische Rundschau, 28 August
1908, 346–7; reprinted from Die Standarte.
14 Freud, Jokes, 49.
15 Oring, ‘The People of the Joke,’ 261.
16 See Werner Angress, ‘The German Army’s “Judenzählung” of 1916: Genesis
– Consequences – Significance,’ Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978):
117–37.
17 Ernst Lissauer, ‘Kriegspredigt,’ Der kleine Blaue, 8 December 1914. For
Lissauer’s conflicted attitudes to his Germanness and Jewishness, which
were severely strained during the war, see Elisabeth Albanis, ‘Ostracised
for Loyalty: Ernst Lissauer’s Propaganda Writing and Its Reception,’ Leo
Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 195–224. For an account of Jewish per-
formers and entertainers during the war, see Martin Baumeister, Kriegs-
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 49

theater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultur 1914–1918 (Essen: Klartext,

2005), 98-106.
18 Anonymous letter of 14 January 1915, concerning Rudolf Nelson’s cabaret
Sanssouci, in Landesarchiv Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep. 30, Berlin C Pol. Präs. Tit.
74, Th 1514, f. 1–2.
19 Police report of 19 April 1905, on the Metropolkabarett, in Landesarchiv
Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep. 30, Berlin C Pol. Präs. Tit. 74, Th 2693, f. 129–132r.
20 For the relationship between the Herrnfelds and Lubitsch, see Irene
Stratenwerth, ‘Vorspiel auf dem Theater: Vom Possenspiel der Brüder
Herrnfeld zu den Lubitsch-Komödien im Kino,’ in Pioniere in Celluloid:
Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, ed. Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon
(Berlin: Henschel, 2004), 147–65.
21 Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30–1, citing Oskar Kalbus,
Vom Wesen deutscher Filmkunst (1935).
22 Julius Urgiss, ‘Künstlerprofile: Ernst Lubitsch,’ Der Kinematograph, 30
August 1916.
23 See David Clay Large, ‘“Out with the Ostjuden”: The Scheunenviertel
Riots in Berlin, November 1923,’ in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic
Riots in Modern German History, ed. Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Berg-
mann, and Helmut Walser Smith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2002), 123–40.
24 Alfred Wiener, ‘Kabaretts, Witzbücher, heitere Wochenblätter und die
“jüdische Witwe,”’ CV-Zeitung, 13 November 1925. The ‘cabaret campaign’
of the Centralverein has been discussed in Hannelore Riss, Ansätze zu
einer Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Berlin 1889–1936 (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 161–74.
25 ‘Gegen die Auswüchse des Kabaretts,’ Vossische Zeitung, 23 April 1926.
26 ‘Gegen die Verzerrung des jüdischen Wesens,’ CV-Zeitung, 30 April 1926.
27 Emil Faktor, ‘Das Mauscheln,’ Berliner Börsen-Courier, 23 April 1926.
28 Siegmund Feldmann, ‘Jeder Jude sein eigner Antisemit!,’ Die Weltbühne
22/50 (14 December 1926): 936, cited in ‘Eine letzte Mahnung! Immer noch
Würdelosigkeit in Berliner Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung, 31 December 1926.
29 Artur Schweriner, ‘Kabaretts und Film: Rückfälle ins Unwürdige in Ber-
liner Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung, 9 December 1927.
30 ‘Das Echo unseres Kampfes gegen würdelose Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung,
6 January 1928.
31 ‘Weg mit dem “Spuk” im “Tingel-Tangel,”’ in CV-Zeitung, 2 October 1931.
32 Dan Ben-Amos goes so far as to argue that no Jewish jokes are, strictly
speaking, self-deprecatory, since they make fun of Jewish characters from
26 Peter Jelavich

Various theories have been advanced to explain the perceived im-

portance of jokes – and self-deprecatory jokes in particular – among
Jews. To be sure, from biblical times through the early modern era,
joke-telling has not been a major part of Jewish tradition (despite hu-
morous passages in the Talmud and other texts). Many, if not most
jokes in the standard repertory of Jewish humour probably date to
the nineteenth century, and to Central and Eastern Europe. That be-
ing the case, analysts of the genesis of modern Jewish humour can
point to a number of possible causal factors. Some were endogenous
to the Jewish community: traditional ideas and values were being
challenged from within, most notably by the Haskalah, the Jewish
enlightenment, which called into question major tenets of the Bible,
the Talmud, and other spiritual texts – and this, in turn, challenged a
number of precepts of everyday life. Other causal factors were exog-
enous, and concerned relations of Jews – as an ethnic, religious, and
linguistic minority – to their surrounding gentile communities. Jews
in Eastern Europe routinely had command of three languages: Yiddish
for everyday life, Hebrew for ritual purposes, and the local vernacular
for communication with the outside world. Sometimes the language
of officialdom (say, German or Russian) was different from the local
vernacular (for example, Polish or Ukrainian). Having to cope with
three or four tongues obviously provided excellent training for learn-
ing the complexities and fallacies of language, especially if users of the
other languages were trying to trip you up. And that was because – and
here we finally get to the most obvious point – the surrounding com-
munities almost always felt varying degrees of antipathy to the Jews in
their midst.
This was a complex situation, and jokes were one means of engaging
it. It is obvious that Jews would make fun of their oppressors, and that
the others would make jokes about Jews. But why would Jews make
fun of themselves? Here endogenous factors played a major role: jokes
were one means of negotiating the major clashes over values, family
structure, and gender roles brought about by internal challenges to
traditional Jewish beliefs and ways of living. When members of eth-
nic groups make jokes about themselves among themselves, they are
doing a number of things: sometimes self-regulation, sometimes self-
criticism – and in cases where differences are irreconcilable, jokes can
be a way of laughing off the irritation. That is especially important
in groups that were legally or informally ghettoized: in other words,
situations where potentially contentious individuals could not simply
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 51

48 ‘Jargon im Kabarett. Sturmszenen in einer jüdischen Versammlung,’ Neue

Berliner Zeitung – Das 12 Uhr Blatt, 23 April 1926.
49 Leo Strauss, ‘Theresienstädter Fragen,’ in Und die Musik spielt dazu:
Chansons und Satiren aus dem KZ Theresienstadt, ed. Ulrike Migdal
(Munich: Piper, 1986), 72. For a discussion of cabaret performances in the
Terezín camp, see Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 273–82.
50 ‘Aus den Theresienstädter Conférencen von Leo Strauss,’ typescript in the
archives of Pamatnik Terezín, Herrmann collection, no. 4092/1.
51 Manfred Greiffenhagen, ‘Die Ochsen,’ in Migdal, ed., Und die Musik, 106.
2

Creole Cartoons
MARK WINOKUR

The thesis of this paper is simple; it pushes the standard critical as-
sertion that animation ‘serves to question and challenge the received
knowledges which govern the physical laws and normative socio cul-
tural orthodoxies of the “real world”’ in asserting that the ‘challenge’
includes specific ‘received knowledges’ about race and ethnicity.1 Ani-
mation technology enables an uncanny fluidity of identity whose po-
tential for racial (and, though not the subject of this paper, gender)
play is seized upon by some early animators. Succeeding technologi-
cal innovations in animation result in different kinds of racial repre-
sentation, all of which nevertheless appear as a kind of Creolization,
or racial ambiguity. From the inception of American animation to the
films of Richard Linklater, many cartoon figures are racially ambigu-
ous, or Creole. Animation technology affords a space for racial play in
which the status and race/ethnicity of the character and the intention
of the technology are often undecidable.
When critics attend to the cartoon narratives and simple visuals, or
to the biographies of the filmmakers, as the most significant ‘condi-
tions of production,’ their standard assertion about black-inspired
characters like Warner Brothers’ Bosko is that they are simply racist
representations – a sort of minstrel blackface – offered up by white
ethnics in order to become white themselves. As the dominant line
of criticism about filmic cross-race representation, the blackface the-
sis suggests that the attempt by one race/ethnicity to imitate another
simply reinforces the power differential between the races. This is
the thesis of works as diverse as Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions and
Michael Rogin’s Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hol-
lywood Melting Pot.2 The most brilliant and complex articulation of
 Creole Cartoons 53

this argument, contained in the latter text, suggests that white ethnics
– especially new-immigrant Jews in Hollywood – presented the Jew in
blackface in order finally to reinforce a sense of the Jew’s whiteness,
thereby guaranteeing his acceptance into a previously anti-Semitic
American culture.3 If the Jew plays (and so satirizes and parodies)
black, he can’t be black; rather, he (and, implicitly, other white, new-
immigrant ethnics) demonstrates his own whiteness by his ability to
remove his black face. The Jew thus profits from his whiteness at the
expense of African America. Blackface becomes a fin-de-siècle strat-
egy for white ethnics to overcome American nativism.
Such accusations about the white appropriation of black images are
true enough as far as they go. It is of course important to find those
nodal moments in which the past determines the problems and in-
justices of the present. However, the inference – that the only or even
primary relationship between white and black ethnicity at the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was one of
representational exploitation of African America – seems to me a vast
historical and representational simplification, first, because, while
such arguments assume that the Irish, Russian, and Jewish immi-
grants might have countered nativist oppression by donning black-
face, the emphasis is on the white ethnic ‘having overcome’ (white
ethnics have always already overcome nativism) rather than on the
moment of oppression. Second, this position tends to ignore the fact
that blackface is not the only model for the merging of racial pres-
entation. (It is not even, in its most complex iteration, the whole of
Rogin’s argument.) We gloss over the actual difficulties of the white
ethnic, as documented by, for example, The Octopus, The Jungle, and
fin-de-siècle urban muckraking. While I will only explore one alter-
native to blackface, namely animation Creolism, other non-blackface
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture entertain-
ments about racial interactions include ‘the congresses’ and parades
of nations by P.T. Barnum; Wild West Shows; and plays and films ex-
plicitly about racial mixing: Birth of a Nation, Within Our Gates, and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.4 Third, and perhaps most important, totalizing ar-
guments tend to treat racism as a static phenomenon rather than as
one inflected by changing populations, politics, ideologies, and, for
the purposes of this paper, technologies.
So, let me suggest that, while American animation perpetuates Afri-
can-American racial stereotypes, it is also from the beginning playing
with other ethnic stereotypes as well, some overt, others not. Abie the
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 29

or socially unwise to toy in public with stereotypes of Jewishness. In

any case, Reinhardt seems to have learned his lesson: he promptly
pulled the number from his cabaret, and he no longer dealt humor-
ously with Jewish characters in subsequent performances. Indeed, as
he matured into a major director of serious drama, he sponsored plays
that portrayed Jews in an earnest and sympathetic manner – a relative
novelty on Central European stages.
In general, though, it seems that such protests against Jewish hu-
mour were rare in the late Imperial era, before the outbreak of the First
World War. There were apparently a number of reasons why the telling
of Jewish jokes, and the portrayal on stage of humorous Jewish charac-
ters, was not deemed excessively problematic at that time. One reason
had to do with the increasing security that many Jews felt in late Impe-
rial German society. The attempts by the preacher Adolf Stöcker and
others to mount a sustained anti-Semitic campaign in the late 1870s
seemed to have foundered by the mid-1890s. More importantly, Jew-
ish jokes were acceptable because they belonged to a larger context
of entertainment in which a variety of Germanic groups caricatured
themselves: not just Jews, but also Bavarians, Swabians, Rhineland-
ers, Saxons, Prussians, and Austrians. In such a context, there would
have been an obvious benefit for Jews to be part of the lineup, since
it implied that despite their differences, they were as much a part of
Germany’s national mix as any of the other groups marked by distinc-
tive dialects and customs.11
That attitude found its purest expression in the performances of the
Gebrüder Herrnfeld Theater, an extremely popular institution in late
Imperial Berlin devoted to ethnic comedies written and performed by
two Jewish brothers. In all of their self-scripted plays, Donat Herrnfeld
played a Jew and his brother Anton took on a Christian role: usually a
Bohemian or Czech, but sometimes a Bavarian or a Berliner. The the-
atre was known as the prime example in Berlin of what was called Jar-
gontheater (jargon theatre), since Donat spoke an artificial dialect that
was a conventional marker of Jewishness on stage: basically German,
it was liberally peppered with well-known Yiddish and Hebrew words,
and employed a modified syntax that was supposed to sound Yiddish.
Indeed, the genre was often, though erroneously, referred to as ‘Yid-
dish theatre.’ The implied message of these skits was unequivocally
pluralist. The Herrnfelds made benign fun of Bohemians, Bavarians,
Berliners, Saxons, and Jews as well, but they also dramatized how, in
the end, these groups could coexist happily and appreciate their dif-
 Creole Cartoons 55

constant in definition across cultures is a multi-tiered, self-contradic-

tory ambiguity: ‘Creole’ suggests immigration in a previous genera-
tion that, in the Creole population’s difference from the surrounding
population, is itself never completed. The attention called to even the
native-born Creole’s status as native still and always calls attention to
the Creole’s immigrant parentage. The term foregrounds a dynamic
only implicit in the notion of hyphenated Americanism, but explicit in
such terms as ‘Nisei’ and ‘Sansei,’ which define the particular relation
of the native-born generations to the immigrant generation: the pres-
ence of the old country/continent in the new, the frisson of atavism in
modernity. In the Americas, the Creole is always both at home and not
at home, here and abroad.
So, putting aside the notion of blackface in order to explore other
spectacles of race, I would like to think about Creolism as, for a mo-
ment, Homoousian, a merging of black and ethnic white identity in
a manner that, at least for a moment, destabilizes our sense of what
these terms mean. Ideally, Creolism leaves its surveyor in a height-
ened state that Keats, in discussing humour and wit, calls ‘negative
capability,’ loosely speaking, the willingness to remain suspended in
indeterminacy and ambiguity.9
Is this Creole play still racist in the sense that hierarchy never com-
pletely disappears, and that the black and other racial images are in
the end exploited? Of course it is. Still, it affords a variety of represen-
tations not available to the dramas of either D.W. Griffith or Oscar
Micheaux. It makes a difference that many of these animations are
authorized or made by ethnic filmmakers: the Jewish Warner Broth-
ers and Fleischer Brothers especially. American animation is often a
paradoxically uncanny pastoral in which for a while the participants
pretend that the usual rules are suspended, even though the audience
perfectly understands that it will be returned to its hierarchical, pow-
er-determining space.
In contrast to most general discussions of American animation, I
shall discuss the Disney company only by way of opposition, and only
because it is critically ubiquitous, and then only very reluctantly. I am
trying to find an alternative genealogy for a medium mostly discussed
through a single figure: Walt Disney. For example, the controversy over
whether Walt Disney was or was not overtly racist and anti-Semitic
seems to me irrelevant in the face of his largest stylistic contribution
to American culture: a normative white America. The increasing real-
ism in Disney’s films, as his main claim to innovation and invention,
56 Mark Winokur

simply militates toward an unambiguous representation of a centre-

versus-periphery America. When measured against the uncanny rep-
resentations by other studios, the absence of overt ethnicity in the Walt
Disney-era films is not benign: it is self-evidently suppressive and re-
pressive. The attempts in the last two decades by the Disney Company
to correct these failings are admirable but constitute essentially the
pursuit of the same agenda, the normalizing of America, by different
means. They are not a part of the early story of animation in which
I am interested. A different story – an alternative genealogy – might
notice that the Disney studio did not invent any of the important early
animation technologies: cel animation, rotoscoping, rotographing,
cartoon sound synchronization, held drawings, cycles, repeats, or the
entire panoply of animation techniques. Several were invented at the
Bray and the Fleischer studios, or even earlier. The first sound cartoon
was not Steamboat Willie (1928) but Max Fleischer’s ‘Song Cartunes,’
developed with Lee De Forest from 1924, and resulting in the 1926 My
Old Kentucky Home. The first colour cartoon was not Disney’s Flow-
ers and Trees (1932) or The Three Little Pigs (1933), but Ted Eshbaugh’s
two-strip Technicolor Goofy Goat Antics (1931).10 If you discount Dis-
ney’s stretch for a greater degree of realist illusionism, his contribu-
tion to animation is actually quite minimal. This striving for realism
is the striving for a master narrative, hence the emphasis on standard
fairy tales and stories which is much more pronounced at Disney than
at any other animation studio. It is also more explicitly ideological
than anything else. Disney is more famous than other early anima-
tors not because he is inventive, but because he is able to impose this
narrative whiteness on American culture in the live-action forms of
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Hearings,
Mouseketeer television, and Disneyland and its variants. As if laud-
ing Disney, Michael Barrier, a Disney devotee, correctly asserts about
other filmmakers that their success lay elsewhere than in the excel-
lence with which other cartoonists portrayed a naturalistic, linear,
three-dimensional vision of the world.11
In contrast, the decision by other studios to play with ethnic mark-
ers ultimately guaranteed the ascendancy of the Disney version: ‘It
was exactly this inability to lose all trace of ethnicity and vulgarity
which prevented the Fleischer cartoons from becoming as popular as
Disney’s.’12 In the United States, ‘vulgar’ always connotes race as well
as class; it is also always code for non-white. Because I am trying to
create a different animation lineage than the ‘Disney version’ most
 Creole Cartoons 57

often represented in discussions of race, I should observe that I am

avoiding the overt and simplified representations of ethnicity such as
the Chuck Jones Inki series, or Warner Brothers’ Clean Pastures and
Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (both 1937).13 While even these films are racially
more complex than we usually acknowledge (in the latter film, the
very white Little Eva begins as nasty and temperamental, a version of
the woman slave-owner in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), their
images of race and ethnicity seem more static than the examples I
would like to discuss.14
Finally, because Disney has been so much read as to have been fet-
ishized, I would instead like to concentrate on relatively ‘minor’ fig-
ures as exemplars whose racism is at the very least overt, manifest,
and interesting: Winsor McCay, Pat Sullivan, and Max Fleischer, all of
whom play with this Homoousian and ambiguous Creole animation.

Example 1: Winsor McCay and Fluid Animation

The earliest European animation was done in France and England by

Émile Cohl (French), and Arthur Cooper and W.R. Booth (both Brit-
ish). While Cohl’s very fluid animation represents ethnicity once – the
Chinese figure in The Hasher’s Delirium (1910) – the two British film-
makers do not (at least overtly) display ethnicity at all. Britain’s earli-
est animations may be typified by Booth’s The ? Motorist (1906), which
is about a British couple who, while eccentric, appear conventionally
Anglo-Saxon.15
In contrast, one of the most famous names in the early history of
U.S. film immediately implicates the early history of animation in
the politics of race and ethnicity in a manner that suggests a Cre-
ole suspension of conviction about racial distinction. James Stuart
Blackton is responsible not only for the earliest American animation,
but for the two first examples of animation as ethnicity, specifically
Irish, or Irish-American: The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humor-
ous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). Before Blackton worked for Thomas
Edison and with Winsor McCay, he starred in a vaudeville act called
‘Lightning Sketches’ in which he drew various comic figures – prin-
cipally ethnic stereotypes – very quickly. Blackton’s film of Lightning
Sketches (1907) ends with a play on Cohen and coon: two racist stere-
otypes superimposed on each other. As another interesting figure,
Edwin S. Porter – Edison’s technical film adviser – is also responsi-
ble for ethnicity in animation in Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902).16 All of
32 Peter Jelavich

encores.19 Perhaps the best index of the success of Jewish humour dur-
ing the Great War was the fact that large numbers of moviegoers, both
Jewish and gentile, were flocking to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, which
in many ways were a visual equivalent to the skits of the Herrnfeld
brothers.20 Lubitsch had gained fame in January 1914 with Die Firma
heiratet (The Firm Gets Married), in which he played a character that
he would repeat many times over the next few years: namely, a rather
lazy young man from an Eastern European Jewish town who moves to
a big city (usually Berlin) and succeeds in the garment trade through a
combination of charm, chutzpah, and benign dishonesty. The charac-
ter was an elaboration of a popular comic Jewish figure, known as ‘der
kleine Moritz’: ‘little Moritz’ was an impudent, unconstrained, and
uncontrollable boy, in short, a consummate smart aleck.
Perhaps the best of Lubitsch’s ethnic-comedy films is Schuhpalast
Pinkus (Pinkus’s Shoe Emporium, 1916). There Lubitsch appears as
Sally Pinkus, and we follow his life from his schoolboy days through
his apprenticeship in shoe stores, until he ends up as the owner of a
fashionable shoe salon as well as the husband of a glamorous danc-
er. Despite the surge of anti-Semitism in 1916, the year of the Juden-
zählung, Lubitsch pulled no punches about his own Jewishness or his
use of Jewish stereotypes. This was a rather daring thing to do, and it
might have had a subversive intent. In the middle of the war, German
culture was suffused with images of militarism and masculinity: most
films and plays glorified men who were brave, noble, muscular, and
blond – and such men, in such shows, invariably ‘got the girl’ in the
end. Lubitsch completely inverted that paradigm, first and foremost
by emphasizing his stereotypical Jewishness: not only is the milieu
Jewish, but the camera often fixes on Lubitsch’s short stature, dark fea-
tures, and wholly non-Teutonic physiognomy. Reversals of ‘noble’ ide-
als also pervade Schuhpalast Pinkus: rather than being a model pupil,
Sally cheats; being a weakling, he has to fake his prowess in gym; he
dissembles to get a job or make a sale – but in the end, it is he who
‘gets the girl.’ Lubitsch employed Jewish comic stereotypes to under-
mine mass-marketed images of Teutonic masculinity. Not surprising-
ly, a generation later, in the midst of the Third Reich, a film historian
expressed his dismay: ‘Today [1935] it seems incomprehensible that
movie audiences, during the hard war years, cheered an actor who al-
ways played with a brashness so alien to us.’21
While the Nazis retrospectively deplored the popular success of Lu-
bitsch’s ‘brashness,’ some Jewish observers expressed very different
 Creole Cartoons 59

2.1 Frame capture from Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902).

2.2 Frame capture from The Enchanted Drawing (1900).

2.3 Frame capture from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906).

60 Mark Winokur

2.4 Detail from Thomas Nast, ‘The Champion of the Fenians,’ Harper’s
Weekly, 21 October 1876.

2.5 Detail from Winsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Wonderland,’ New York
Herald, 16 December 1906.
 Creole Cartoons 61

Little Nemo (1911) gets reproduced over and over, both commercial-
ly, and illegally, on international peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. I
think that part of the contemporary attraction for this film has to do
with the variant racism it presents, and a curious Schadenfreude it pro-
vokes. It is a cartoon vision of gentleman-colonialism, with the frame
story exercising a hegemonic control over the cartoon characters. In
the live-action frame story, four gentlemen clad in evening dress play
cards at their club. One man – McCay – agrees to make four thousand
drawings that will animate one month from the date of the meeting.
This origin story/frame narrative presumes knowledge of a standard
narrative device: the ‘gentleman’s bet.’ (Such a bet – for dinner – is ac-
tually made in McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur [1914] when Winsor McCay
bets George McManus a dinner for the party that he can make the Di-
nosaurus [sic] live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons.)18 The bet
echoes the negotiation that catapults Phileas Fogg from a whist game
at the Reform Club into an orbit around the world in eighty days, in a
novel that simultaneously satirizes and celebrates the difference be-
tween the cultured Western Europeans and the various orientalized
cultures that Fogg and his valet encounter.19 The literary gentleman’s
bet of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost always
has something to do with race, time, and/or masculinity (‘honour’).20
McCay’s realistic frame story, then, is already referring us back to a
fantasy that, except perhaps for 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (whose
Nemo travels through his own dreamscape), is the most orientalizing
of all Verne’s novels.21 Though in both texts gentlemen are satirized – in
one, Fogg is the tourist who circumnavigates the globe gazing only at
his watch, while in the other, John Bunny’s facial expressions and bulk
undercut the seriousness of the proceedings – both sets of gentlemen
are made the objects of our identification. They are the eyes through
which we are going to see the toons, colonials, and fuzzy-wuzzies. The
controlling gaze is, inevitably, masculine and Anglo-American. The
animated characters created by McCay later in the film are exagger-
ated versions of blackness, Anglo whiteness, and ethnic whiteness.
After some intervening comic business in which the heroically indi-
vidualistic nature of McCay’s animation process is foregrounded, Lit-
tle Nemo’s narrative cuts to one month later. If the opening sequence
suggests Phileas Fogg and the imperial gaze, the last sequence – the
animated portion – is about the racial spectacle created by that gaze.
We are introduced to three figures: Little Nemo himself, flanked by the
Imp and Flip. While at first glance Nemo and the Imp appear easily
62 Mark Winokur

2.6 H. Strickland Constable, ‘Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of

View,’ 1899.

dismissed as a racial type and a racial stereotype, Flip is Creole but not
fluid. The first cartoon image to appear in the animation sequence, he
is an Irishman in a Pagliacci-style commedia outfit. In one sense he is
a double threat: two versions of the Catholic immigrant. Further, the
clown outfit is also reminiscent of pajamas, a late nineteenth-century
import from India, and quite in keeping with European orientaliz-
ing.22 Unlike the Blackton figures, however, he does not move fluidly
from one type to the next.
However, even more significant than his position as a double-bar-
relled Catholic and a Hindu is Flip’s status as a mixed-race or Creole
figure: he stands ambiguously between the Imp and Nemo. On the
one hand his skin is dark. On the other hand it is green. On the one
hand his face is contoured like the classic and cliché Irishman. On
the other, the lips are exaggerated in size in the same manner as min-
strel blackface comic. It might be apropos to point out here that in
the pseudo-anthropology of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, the Irishman was explicitly represented as a sort of missing link
between the black and the white races, as for example in the Harper’s
cartoon shown in figure 2.6.23
McCay’s creolization of Flip as a black Irishman (itself a racially am-
biguous term once used in the Irish-American community) is racist in
 Creole Cartoons 63

2.7 Frame capture from Little Nemo (1911).

at least two ways: first because it assumes that what makes Flip comic
is his resemblance to both the comic Irishman and the comic minstrel
black man. More importantly, however, that comedy retains a sense of
anthropological hierarchy: Nemo is most human; Flip second, and the
Imp, who, in the comic strips is barely verbal, third and last.
The cartoon showcases a difference in the graphics that make up,
on the one side, the Imp and Flip, and, on the other, Nemo. Nemo is
an art nouveau figure, while Flip and the Imp are in fact cartoon exag-
gerations. But the most striking visual difference between Nemo and
the other characters occurs as a momentary optical trick, an anamor-
phic squeezing of the Imp and Flip controlled by Nemo as if by a magi-
cian. As the comedy in the Blackton films depends on an imbrication
of special effect and racial stereotyping, so the most ‘alive’ moment of
the McCay film occurs as a special optical effect in which Nemo con-
trols our view of the racial others.
64 Mark Winokur

Example 2: The Hurd-Bray Process and Ethnic Structure in Cel

Animation, or the Chinkaninny Jewbhoy

A billion children, white and yellow and black – a billion adults – will
mourn the passing of Pat – and the Cat.24

McCay’s draftsmanship and material conditions of production were

not adopted by the animation industry, though McCay’s fantasizing of
those conditions as idiosyncratically spontaneous and individualistic
would be repeated again and again by later animators, in a manner
that would become very familiar to Hollywood in succeeding decades,
even in other film genres.25 In reality, animation became dependent
in part on the creativity and competent administration of an assem-
bly-line process, the most important and standardized component of
which is probably the cel.26 The purpose of cel animation is to create a
single generic background that will mesh with the foreground move-
ments of the characters, thereby saving the time and labour of redraw-
ing the background for each animation illustration. Simply put, the
background must dimensionalize the illustration without wasting la-
bour. This is the economy of figure and ground. Animated Creolism
as I am defining it will move from an identification of several ethnici-
ties in one character to a more fundamental collapse of figure and
ground, which becomes a collapse of ‘home and not at home, here
and abroad.’
Invented and first deployed in the 1910s and 1920s, cel animation
arose when academic representation theory – the beginnings of Eu-
ropean structuralism – was beginning to understand art as a tension
between opposing elements, as the artist playing against the limita-
tions of the medium, and as different aspects of the medium playing
against each other. This was the time of Russian formalism, Rudolph
Arnheim, Fernand de Saussure, and Sergei Eisenstein.27 The inven-
tion of cel animation was structurally congruent with this particular
way of understanding art, perhaps because the animation medium
and formal theorists were each, in different ways, responding to the
exigencies of the assembly line. As practised in the United States, cel
animation embodies the idea of tension between foreground and
background, between the goal of an illusionist’s naturalism, and the
industrial need to simplify for the sake of mass reproduction. One
extreme of this tension is the work of Winsor McCay: individual and
complete drawings made by the artist in which almost as much atten-
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 39

of Comedians, also known as ‘Kadeko’) in Berlin, which was the most

successful and (with its 950 seats) the largest of the cabarets of the
Weimar era.36 He did indeed infuriate the political right. Already at the
opening of his venture in December 1924, he presented Quo vadis? a
mock-operetta that was one of the earliest parodies of the Nazi move-
ment: its portrayal of Nero made light of Hitler, and it included a
swastika-bedecked character named ‘Gojus.’ In 1928 an anti-Semitic
newspaper complained about Robitschek’s ‘stale jokes about Hugen-
berg, Hitler, [and] Mussolini.’37 But Robitschek’s relations with Jewish
groups, especially the Centralverein, were very strained as well. In fact,
he was summoned to one of the protest meetings of April 1926, along
with Kurt Gerron, a famous cabaret singer, and the director of another
cabaret, the Charlott-Casino.38 Addressing the assembly, Robitschek
attempted to defend his use of Jewish humour, and he spelled out his
standpoint in a subsequent missive to the CV-Zeitung. He agreed that
jokes and skits that offended religious sensibilities had no place in
cabaret, but he also pleaded for indulgence. Noting that cabaret was
an evolving art form, which in the recent past had been characterized
by nudity, chauvinism, and ‘stupid clowning,’ Robitschek asserted that
attempts to improve and innovate it would inevitably lead to trans-
gressing some bounds. ‘But – for God’s sake – no petty censorship! Wit
and satire have to be allowed, even if here and there an individual gets
badly hurt. There are no norms to determine where permissible satire
ends and tastelessness begins. They need to be discussed on a case-
by-case basis. So: let’s first discuss, and then act!’39
In the ensuing months, such discussions seem to have led nowhere.
The CV-Zeitung kept up its criticism of Robitschek and some of the
humorists that appeared on his stage. Finally, in December 1927 Ro-
bitschek sent a letter to Artur Schweriner, the legal adviser of the Cen-
tralverein, which was so insulting that Schweriner filed libel charges
against Robitschek.40 Since the Centralverein was known for repeat-
edly taking anti-Semitic agitators to court on grounds of libel and def-
amation, the move may have made a symbolic equation of Robitschek
with the Jews’ greatest enemies. The case was ended a month later by
a gentlemen’s agreement, when Robitschek issued a public apology
and claimed that he had not intended to insult Schweriner.41
Did Robitschek deserve such harsh criticism? It is hard to answer
that question, since we do not have a complete record of all of the
jokes he told on stage. But some indication of his own repertory and
that of other comedians at his cabaret can be gleaned from two collec-
66 Mark Winokur

2.8 Frame capture from Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923).

of the conception of both the ground and the machinery; it refers to

the graphic line needed to draw both fore- and background, base and
superstructure. Like the introduction of other effects by Blackton and
McCay, the introduction of cel animation enables a reconception of
the body or space around the racial and ethnic other. Cel technology
reconceives the line used to draw both the landscape and the objects
in the landscape. In other words, there exists a structuralist tension in
the Felix films between, on the one hand, the normative narrative and
pictorial representations of racial and ethnic stereotypes and, on the
other hand, the interrogation of these stereotypes by the technology
that enables them through a denial of the kinds of binaries that, like
foreground and background, are themselves grounding stereotypes,
or stereotypes of grounding. This technique in which Felix gives up a
portion of himself as when his tail becomes a Chaplinesque cane in
Felix in Hollywood (1923) (figure 2.9) in order to interact with a foreign
background is, even beyond the wise-guy attitude that marks him
 Creole Cartoons 67

2.9 Frame capture from Felix in Hollywood (1923).

as an immigrant arriviste, an attempt to negotiate a relationship be-

tween ethnic white immigrant America and other signs of alienness.30
(Both Felix creators were children of immigrants: Pat Sullivan was the
son of Irish and Australian immigrants, Otto Messmer of German im-
migrants.)31
Cel economy results in several typical ‘golden-era’ structural figures
besides Felix. Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Bosko, Bimbo, and Flip the
Frog are different versions of the Creole cartoon character in which
ethnicity is ambiguous in part because of a constant negotiation with
the character’s background cel. While looking whiter all the time, the
next generation of major-studio cartoon characters – Bugs Bunny or
Tom and Jerry – have these Creole characteristics grafted onto them
as well.
Cel animation does not mean the disappearance of the earlier, Ho-
moousian combining of several ethnicities in one character. However,
in the era of cel animation, the meaning of these ethnic superimpo-
sitions changes. On the one hand, these characters are (as Henry T.
68 Mark Winokur

Sampson reminds us) racist visions of blackness: they are all childish,
libidinous, destructive, easily frightened, carefree, all-singing, and all-
dancing.32 They are often associated with a simple, rural, sometimes
idyllic southern (Steamboat Willie) tradition. Their graphics are some-
times overtly suggestive of blackface: Warner Brothers’ Bosko has
greasepaint-style thick lips, and (like blackface performers) Mickey
wears white gloves. In the middle-late Jim Crow era – the 1920s to the
1950s – organizations like the NAACP made the overt representation
of blackface minstrelsy unacceptable. As a consequence of this po-
litical action, cartoons preserved the minstrel representation, often
in an almost pristine form. With its representation of a carefully nos-
talgized, naturalized, and hierarchicalized southern steamboat, and
its celebration of sound as simply music, Steamboat Willie is a terrific
example of this minstrel preservation.
But on the other hand, these characters are not simply ‘toms, coons,
mulattoes, mammies and bucks,’ not simply blackface minstrel char-
acters.33 The perpetuation of a complex version of blackface becomes
even more pronounced with the introduction of a new technology
into the animation industry: sound. Perhaps one of the best examples
of the presence of an alternative tradition is Bosko, one of the earli-
est talking cartoon stars, whose early blackface denotations are most
visible (figure 2.10). He is a Warner Brothers creation, produced by the
same studio that produced The Jazz Singer (1927).34 His early accent
is often noticeably black and southern: the Warner cartoon tagline –
’That’s All, Folks’ – was at first pronounced by Bosko ‘Dat’s All Folks.’
But, from his first film, a demo called Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929)
in which Bosko carries on a sort of minstrel conversation with his cre-
ator, Rudolf Ising, there is something peculiar in the racial valence in
the otherwise standard minstrel structure of Interlocutor-Mr. Bones.35
On the one hand, this new character is treated in an extraordinarily
condescending fashion by the live cartoonist/Ising/Interlocutor. This
is Hollywood reflexivity and self-referentiality at its most reactionary.
But, while Bosko is continuously black, he also demonstrates in a self-
consciously blackface manner – for example by imitating Al Jolson’s
performance of ‘Sonny Boy’ – a self-referentiality that suggests that
Bosko is not a racist presentation of blackness but a racist re-presen-
tation. Further, this blackface character then performs a broad imi-
tation of a Jewish dancer (smashing down his hat and face, dancing
oddly like a Russian Cossack, and singing one word: ‘yoi’), and an Irish
hoofer whistling ‘Sidewalks of New York,’ an old tune about urban
 Creole Cartoons 69

2.10 Frame capture from Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929).

plurality used by Alfred E. Smith in his 1924 presidential campaign. In

other words, the blackface Bosko is from the beginning inflected by
white-ethnic characteristics that are also drawn – in 1929, not in 1899
– in a condescending manner. That is to say that, even after the time
when white ethnics were supposed to have successfully assimilated,
leapfrogging African Americans, they were still the objects of xeno-
phobic parody. Bosko’s Creolism – his ability to contain multitudes of
ethnic types – represents a variety of racial impostures.
Further, Bosko’s minstrel accent is not evenly sustained throughout
the run of the cartoons. In later films, Bosko and Honey (Bosko’s love
interest) both speak a kind of accent-neutral English, in voices less
identifiable by race than by age. Like many such early comic figures
their voices are often high-pitched and slow, like children reciting les-
sons. The Tin Pan Alley–style tunes ally them with white urban eth-
nics. Later, Bugs Bunny’s accent – Brooklynese with all its attendant
idioms (‘Hey, bud’) – will be even more suggestive of white ethnicity.
70 Mark Winokur

These characters are in short racially ambiguous over time as both

black and white stereotypes.
In his brief but comprehensive introduction to the history of black
figures in American animation, Sampson points to Sammy Johnsin as
the first black star of a cartoon series, citing Warner Brothers’ Bosko
as the second, and the first of the sound era.36 Sammy is recognizably
black to his contemporary reviewers (Moving Picture World, 1916: ‘Ani-
mated funny pictures … showing the adventures of a small pickanin-
ny’).37 About the inauguration of the Bosko series, however, Sampson
asserts something very odd for an otherwise refreshingly polemical
writer: ‘reviewers were at first unsure of the ethnic or racial identity of
Bosko and Honey or whether they were human.’38 (This despite the
fact that Hugh Harman registered him as ‘Negro’ with the patent of-
fice.)39 And, indeed, the reviewers he cites do not refer to the charac-
ters in typically racial terms as pickaninnies or mulattoes. In moving
from white cartoonist to ‘Negro’ cartoon figure to Jewish to Irish, to
linguistically unidentifiable, Bosko moves from a simple racist repre-
sentation of one race to a more ambiguously racialized/racist Creole
representation.
Bosko vacillates between white ethnic, pickaninny, and white.
Sometimes Bosko’s and Honey’s hair is nappy; sometimes it is not.
Sometimes Bosko and Honey speak with an exaggerated southern ac-
cent (‘Don’t crah, Bosko; Ah still loves ya’); at other times their accents
are less identifiably regional. Most interesting, Bosko’s southern voice
is articulated in a normal tenor range (The Talk-Ink Kid and Sinkin’
in the Bathtub [1930]), while the accent-neutral voice is articulated in
the childish falsetto we also associate with Mickey Mouse. That is to
say that, while both voices are associated with a kind of childishness,
one voice is racially inflected while the other – the falsetto – is like
the Beach Boys’ voices, unconsciously but suggestively queer. Some-
times Bosko’s movements are identifiably Chaplinesque, as when,
arms glued to his sides, his hands nervously and simultaneously tap
his thighs. (See for example the end of Big Man of the North [1931].)
Occasionally Bosko and/or a character in a Bosko film has an identifi-
ably Jewish accent, as in ‘The Booze Hangs High,’ in which Bosko and
a cow dance the hora, while the background music is done in the mi-
nor key and instrumentation of a klezmer band. Generally speaking,
the songs, which are always a conspicuous feature of the early Bosko
features and not as standardized as in the later Warner Brothers car-
toons, are sometimes reminiscent of minstrelsy and sometimes not.
 Creole Cartoons 71

The very first released cartoon – Sinkin’ in the Bathtub – contains the
songs ‘Singing in the Bathtub,’ ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ (written by
Joe Burke, an Irish accordionist), and ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’
(lyrics credited to Jaan Kenbrovin, the Scandinavian pseudonym for
three writers), hardly tunes associated with minstrelsy. The title song
is not only not associated with minstrelsy, it is introduced in a Warner
production Show of Shows (1929) by Winnie Lightner, a white, light-
comedy Broadway comedienne. The same is true for another 1931
Bosko feature, Ups ’N Downs, which features the Warner tune (origi-
nally Broadway) ‘Don’t Hold Everything’ (from Hold Everything, 1930).

Example 3: Fleischer’s Rotoscope and the Racial Surreal

Media criticism frequently uses Sigmund Freud’s 1935 work, ‘A Note

upon the Mystic Writing Pad,’ one of his many metaphors for the rela-
tionship between consciousness and memory.40 A child’s toy, the pad
is a dual-layer writing tablet, the top layer of which is a sheet of clear
celluloid, the bottom layer of which is a gray sheet of paper which re-
ceives a visible impression when the celluloid is written on by a sty-
lus. When the celluloid paper is raised and separated from the gray
bottom layer, the writing on the bottom layer disappears, except for
a barely visible indentation – a trace. Freud’s point is that, while we
believe consciousness and memory to be archival and total, they are
in fact like the traces left on the writing pad: discontinuous, barely vis-
ible, and ambiguous. It is difficult to believe that, with its end descrip-
tion of the mind as a sort of editing machine – an apparatus that gains
impressions that are repeatedly interrupted and replaced by subse-
quent perceptions in order to attain the illusion of a sense of continu-
ous time – ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ was not influenced
by the idea of cinema, which also uses celluloid to leave a trace of the
(chemical) pressure exerted on it. Today, the mystic writing pad is fur-
ther useful as a metaphor to describe our relationship to film, which
is an aging technology whose representations are often the only pho-
tographic traces of otherwise dead worlds – like, for example, fin-de-
siècle urban life or the movements of dead actors – the memories of
which otherwise decay with the speed of contemporary technological
development.41
Rotoscoping – an animation technique invented by Max and David
Fleischer – works in some respects like the mystic writing pad. Roto-
scoping traces over a series of frames from a live-action film sequence
72 Mark Winokur

in order to create an animation duplicate, giving the viewer an eerie

sense that the animated sequence is both photographically real and
phantasmic, interpreting the original photograph in the process of ef-
facing it. In one sense, rotoscoping works in the opposite direction of
the mystic writing pad; while the pad’s initial impression is made by
the writer over a blank sheet of paper, rotoscoping is more literally a
tracing over a pre-existent image. In this regard, however – in the sense
that it is more truly as much tracing as a trace and so a further remove
from the thing-in-itself than even the mystic writing pad – it is an even
more exemplary representation of the existence/non-existence of the
trace than the writing pad itself.
The ambiguity of the rotoscoped figure – photographed/drawn,
existent/non-existent, real/unreal – may also be described as alive/
not alive, which is to say uncanny. For Freud, ‘an uncanny effect is of-
ten and easily produced when the distinction between imagination
and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto re-
garded as imaginary appears before us in reality.’42 Robert Spadoni
has already spoken of the way in which a different early film technol-
ogy – sound – was also uncanny; early audiences experienced sound
as if the figures onscreen were ghosts, traces of the living in a way
that silent cinema was not.43 In part because of its infrequency be-
fore the era of digital animation (the technique was for the most part
cost-prohibitive), rotoscoping can be similarly distinguished from the
rest of animation. Rotoscoped Fleischer characters contain most of
the dynamics Freud describes as uncanny: doubling, haunting, and
anatomizing (‘[d]ismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at
the wrist … feet which dance by themselves … all these have some-
thing peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last
instance, they prove capable of independent activity’).44 The English
translation of ‘das Unheimliche’ describes the uncanny as an atavistic
belief whose cognate is intimately related to cartooning: ‘Our analysis
of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic con-
ception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea that the
world was peopled with the spirits of human beings.’45 For Freud, the
uncanny ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive;
or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.’46
Rotoscoping is the breathing of life into (animating, anima) the simu-
lacrum of life. The tension between alive and not alive is intensified by
the fact that the Fleischers’ earliest rotoscoped figure, Koko the Clown,
is a parody of humanity animated by cinematography. While our cul-
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 45

during the Great War, was obviously a response to the canard that Jews
shirked their patriotic duty.46 But the song was highly controversial,
most likely because some people took umbrage at the reference to
such a solemn prayer in the profane context of a cabaret. Robitschek
responded to that objection in his missive to the Centralverein: ‘Just
let cabarets perform songs and numbers that deal with serious – even
religious – themes concerning Jews. The much-contested song “Kad-
disch” belongs there.’47 Indeed, it is quite possible that protests came
from people who knew only the title, but not the song itself. Accord-
ing to an account of the Centralverein’s meeting at which Robitschek
personally appeared, ‘when he admitted to being the author of a song
that had been disparaged by Centralverein members, the confession
caused a storm of indignation. But in the end Robitschek explained
that the content of the poem was a glorification of German Jews, and
he thereby won over the assembly.’48
The relative rarity of such serious and sympathetic numbers, how-
ever, only underscored that self-deprecatory jokes were the norm for
Jewish comedians. Probably the strongest defence that could be made
for such jokes concerned freedom of speech – the standpoint voiced
by Robitschek when he told the Centralverein: ‘no petty censorship!
Wit and satire have to be allowed.’ That view echoed a crucial issue:
now that Germany was a democracy, should its citizens not practise
one of its basic premises, namely freedom of expression? Not to do
so, to engage in pre-emptive self-censorship, would concede ground
to the forces of intolerance. By making jokes about themselves, Jews
were not only exercising a precious right but also demonstrating that
they felt securely at home in the institutions of the new republic. The
telling of such jokes was a sign of strength; to refrain from doing so
out of fear would be a sign of weakness, or even defeat. And this view
was tied to another one, the point made by Nikolaus when he wrote
that ‘anti-Semitism is stoked by completely different people.’ Accord-
ing to this argument, anti-Semitic jokes are not a cause, and not even
an accomplice, of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites will hate Jews regard-
less of whether or not Jews tell jokes about themselves; by refraining
from telling such jokes, Jews will not make any dent in anti-Semitism.
That viewpoint was undoubtedly correct: it need hardly be said that
the opinions and the success of the Nazis were in no way influenced
by Jewish entertainers’ self-deprecatory humour.
Once the Nazis came to power, Jewish entertainers were particularly
at risk, given their great public visibility. Robitschek and Hollaender
74 Mark Winokur

and technology. In an article on nineteenth-century whiteface, James

P. Byrne asserts that ‘whiteface and blackface were not only associated
in theatricality; in a more profound sense, they both replicated similar
stereotypes based on racist readings of black physiognomy.’50 Byrne
further argues that these categories were fungible: ‘This temporal as-
sociation of Irish and black minstrel shows would lead to a syncretism
and even suffusion of stereotypical tropes between both styles, and
for a brief period, although driven by different ideologies, these two
theatrical styles would become almost synonymous, allowing actors
to move easily between representations of the staged Irishman and
the staged Negro, the Paddy and the Darkie, the Irish whiteface and
the blackface.’51
As if to emphasize the Creole tendency of rotoscoping to render race
visually ambiguous, Fleischer makes several films in which he traces
the movements of two of the leading black figures of the day: Cab Cal-
loway and Louis Armstrong. The more visibly racist tracing occurs
in the Armstrong film. However, the only way to see an early Louis
Armstrong perform the 1931 Sam Theard song ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re
Dead You Rascal You’ is to watch the 1932 Fleischer cartoon I’ll Be Glad
When You’re Dead You Rascal You.52 These rather remarkable films are
also some of the earliest cinematic recordings of very famous and now
very standard jazz tunes and artists. In other words, these cartoons are
foundational moments both in the recording of African American jazz
and in rotoscope technology. During these moments, the Fleischers
reconceive traditional racist portrayals as Creole representation.
However, this rather complex racialized modernism is not often
discussed because the cartoons are, of course, also self-evidently rac-
ist. The live-action head of Louis Armstrong in I’ll Be Glad is replaced
(rather than actually rotoscoped) by an animated demon’s head pur-
suing Betty Boop, presumably with the intent to rape, maim, kill, boil,
eat, and commit other jungle savageries. While they are introduced
as visual figure/ground games like those in the Felix films, the film’s
‘jungle bunny’ cannibals are visibly stereotypical. Betty Boop’s Brook-
lyn accent is by contrast celebratory of white, new-immigrant ethnic-
ity. However, the lyrics of Armstrong’s version of ‘I’ll Be Glad’ are his
own; he changes Theard’s original lyrics to include such lines as: ‘You
bought my wife a bottle of Coca Cola,/So you could play on her Vic-
trola.’ The line is a self-conscious reference to recording technology,
and jibes with the rest of the self-conscious reflexivity of the Fleischer
film.
 Creole Cartoons 75

While there are strong similarities between I’ll Be Glad and the three
Fleischer films starring Cab Calloway, the actual rotoscoping in the
three Fleischer–Cab Calloway collaborations – Minnie the Moocher,
The Old Man of the Mountain, and Snow White (figures 2.11–2.13) – pro-
vides even more interesting racial ambiguity.53 The narrative structure
of the first in the series – Minnie the Moocher – opens as I’ll Be Glad
does: the star directs his band in a live sequence, after which the ani-
mated sequences are shown.
But the move from the non-rotoscoped Armstrong to the roto-
scoped Calloway is a movement away from stereotype and toward am-
biguity. The figures in the Armstrong-Fleischer film are visibly racial
and racist: the menacing head of an aborigine turns into Armstrong’s
head; the band’s drummer becomes the cannibal cook stirring a pot.
In contrast, the rotoscoped figures in the Calloway-Fleischer films are
not quite so stereotypical. The cannibals are replaced by a ghostly
walrus and the ‘old [white] man of the mountain,’ both based on Cal-
loway’s own performance. As the rotoscoping of Calloway is moving
away from racial stereotyping, it is attributing the movements and
sounds of jazz to Calloway. For example, in Minnie the Moocher, roto-
scoped over Calloway is a sort of white ghost figure with the face and
tusks of a walrus. Like the Armstrong animation figure, he is menac-
ing; unlike the Armstrong figure he has comic dialogue. In an aside
Minnie/Betty asks the threatening figure: ‘Whatcha gonna do, man,’
to which the ghost-walrus answers: ‘I’m gonna do the best I can.’ This
moment is layered in ways that are almost impossible to enumerate.
On the one hand, the moment is racist because, like Birth of a Na-
tion, it associates blackness with a satirized superstitiousness. On the
other hand, unlike Birth – in which African Americans are scared and
superstitious – the Calloway figure is the (white) ghost. On the one
hand, the film is racist because, making Calloway a ghost, it is typing
a black figure as monstrous. On the other hand, the uncanny mon-
strousness is itself undercut by the paratextual fame of the jazz music
and by the self-conscious comic dialogue. The racist monstrousness
is further undercut by the vision of Calloway himself at the beginning,
visibly co-inventing modern recorded jazz. On the one hand, Minnie
the Moocher might be seen as a kind of minstrelsy. On the other hand,
it is hard to define simply as minstrelsy a performance and performer
that are seen as foundational moments in the history of jazz. Fur-
ther, it is an odd sort of minstrelsy in which the black player is visibly
white.
76 Mark Winokur

2.11 Cab Calloway frame capture from Minnie the Moocher (1932).

2.12 Ghost walrus frame capture from Minnie the Moocher (1932).

2.13 Frame capture from The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).
 Creole Cartoons 77

Fleischer rotoscoping tends to ‘unhome’ the animated character,

creating tension between the medium of animation and the move-
ments of realistic photography; then, between the rotoscoped figure
and the hand-drawn cel; and, finally, between the rotoscoped charac-
ter and photographed background and characters. (Fleischer charac-
ters almost never appear in a rotoscoped environment.) Rotoscoping
becomes a technical innovation tied to a racialized feeling of rootless-
ness that, while operating within a racist studio system, is itself an
experiment in deforming the traces of ethnicity and race as a way of
playing with those traces.
The significance of finding Creolism in early animation technol-
ogy is in part that one may talk about its perseverance throughout the
history of American animation. Thus, for example, the evolution of
Disney rotoscoping suggests an anti-minor sensibility; it establishes
a kitschy vision of whiteness as an ideal norm to be adopted by white-
flight suburbanites and their children. In contrast, rotoscoping that
follows Fleischer will tend to be absorbed with ethnic representation
as play, in films as obvious as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and
its analogies between Toontown and Coontown, and as subtle as the
character coloration in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and A
Scanner Darkly (2006).54 In its successive attempts to reimagine im-
migration, race, and ethnicity, much American animation posits a
complicated relationship between alterity and emerging cinematic
technologies that is not simply racist, but is rather a series of attempts
at strategies of ethnic amelioration, synthesis, inclusion, exclusion,
and containment. And, while this technological imbrication is most
visible in low-comedy animation precisely because comic film genres
tend to evade the kind of scrutiny that high-profile dramatic films at-
tract, it gets reduplicated in other specialized film technologies that
rarely get discussed in terms of race: modelling, optical effects, or ear-
ly sound and colour experiments.
My largest conclusion, which I would suggest only tentatively here,
and for which the notion of Creole animation has been a sort of stalk-
ing horse, is that race and ethnicity are imbricated, not just in theme,
character, and narration, but in the technologies of film representa-
tion. The conditions of production help to shape not just the narrative
but also the medium that shapes the narrative and, in turn, the condi-
tions of production. For a variety of reasons, the pre-Hollywood and
early Hollywood film industries were deeply invested in discourses
about race. The transmutation of that discourse into film involved the
78 Mark Winokur

invention of thousands of technologies and devices – from the Movi-

ola to the boom microphone to the rotoscope – all of whose creations
did not simply reflect the inevitable course of Enlightenment science,
but at least in part reflected contemporaneous discourses about race,
gender, class, and nation. If science is a discourse, then so is technol-
ogy; if material culture is discursive, then so are the machines that
produce that culture. If the medium is the message, then so is the
hardware.

notes

1 Paul Wells, Animation and America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2002), 5.
2 Ethnic Notions, directed by Marlon Riggs (Berkeley, CA: California News-
reel, 1987); Michael Rogin, Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in
the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
3 In order to avoid confusion with recent immigration, I should explain
that ‘new immigration’ refers to the large group of immigrants who came
to America between about 1880 and 1920.
4 Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith (1915); Within Our Gates, di-
rected by Oscar Micheaux (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920);
and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, productions in 1903, 1910, 1913, 1914, 1918, and 1927.
5 Teresa Zackodnik, ‘Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts,
and Racial Identity,’ American Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2001): 424.
6 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
7 Jacques Henry and Carl Bankston, ‘Propositions for a Structuralist Analy-
sis of Creolism,’ Current Anthropology 39, no. 4 (1998): 563.
8 Ibid., 559.
9 John Keats, The Life and Writing of John Keats, ed. Lord Houghton (Lon-
don: Edward Moxon, 1867), 75.
10 Steamboat Willie (1928), Flowers and Trees (1932), and The Three Little Pigs
(1933), all directed by Walt Disney (Walt Disney Productions); My Old Ken-
tucky Home, directed by Dave Fleischer (Out of the Inkwell Films, 1926);
Goofy Goat Antics, directed by Ted Eshbaugh (Van Beuren Studios, 1931).
11 For example: ‘For [Tex] Avery’s purposes, the quality of the animation was
close to irrelevant.’ Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Ani-
mation in Its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 351.
12 Amelia S. Holberg, ‘Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star,’ American Jewish His-
tory 87, no. 4 (1999): 307.
13 Clean Pastures, directed by Fritz Freleng (Leon Schlesinger Studios, 1937);
 Creole Cartoons 79

and Uncle Tom’s Bungalow, directed by Tex Avery (Leon Schlesinger Stu-
dios, 1937).
14 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself: With
Related Documents (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009).
15 The Hasher’s Delirium/Le songe d’un garçon de café, directed by Émile
Cohl (France, 1910). For typical examples of early British animation see
Matches: An Appeal, directed by Arthur Cooper (UK, 1899); The Enchanted
Toymaker, directed by Arthur Cooper (UK, 1904); The Hand of the Artist,
directed by Walter R. Booth (UK, 1906); and The ? Motorist, directed by
Walter R. Booth (UK, 1906).
16 The Enchanted Drawing, directed by J. Stuart Blackton (Edison Manufac-
turing Company, 1900); Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (Vitagraph Com-
pany of America, 1906); Lightning Sketches, directed by J. Stuart Blackton
(Vitagraph Company of America, 1907); and Fun in a Bakery Shop, direct-
ed by Edwin S. Porter (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1902).
17 Little Nemo premiered in cartoon strips in 1905. Robert C. Harvey, The Art
of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 1994), 21. The animation of Little Nemo first appeared as Winsor
McCay The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics,
Photographed by the Vitagraph Co of America, directed by Winsor McCay
and J. Stuart Blackton (Vitagraph Company of America, 1911), on Land-
marks of Early Film, vol. 1 (DVD, Image Entertainment, 1997).
18 Gertie the Dinosaur, directed by Winsor McCay (Fox Film Corporation,
1914).
19 Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, trans. William Butcher
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; originally published as Le tour du
monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1873).
20 The ‘gentleman’s bet’ is a variant of the more overtly political ‘gentleman’s
agreement.’ See for example the 1947 Laura Z. Hobson novel Gentleman’s
Agreement or the 1907 immigration agreement between Japan and the
United States.
21 Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: Completely Restored
and Annotated, trans. Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (An-
napolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1993; originally published as Vingt
mille lieues sous les mers, 1869).
22 Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial
Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, His-
torical, Geographical and Discursive (London: John Murray, 1903), 748.
23 Cited in George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 146.
 Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin 51

48 ‘Jargon im Kabarett. Sturmszenen in einer jüdischen Versammlung,’ Neue

Berliner Zeitung – Das 12 Uhr Blatt, 23 April 1926.
49 Leo Strauss, ‘Theresienstädter Fragen,’ in Und die Musik spielt dazu:
Chansons und Satiren aus dem KZ Theresienstadt, ed. Ulrike Migdal
(Munich: Piper, 1986), 72. For a discussion of cabaret performances in the
Terezín camp, see Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 273–82.
50 ‘Aus den Theresienstädter Conférencen von Leo Strauss,’ typescript in the
archives of Pamatnik Terezín, Herrmann collection, no. 4092/1.
51 Manfred Greiffenhagen, ‘Die Ochsen,’ in Migdal, ed., Und die Musik, 106.
 Creole Cartoons 81

41 The exception to this notion of the cinema as photographic trace would

be such avant-garde non-representational filmmakers as Stan Brakhage,
who is nevertheless interested in a different kind of trace on the celluloid
itself.
42 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny,”’ trans. James Strachey, Standard Edi-
tion, vol. 17 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1955), 244.
43 Robert Spadoni, ‘The Uncanny Body of Early Sound Film,’ The Velvet
Light Trap 51 (2003): 4–16.
44 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny,”’ 244.
45 Ibid., 240.
46 Ibid., 226 (italics mine).
47 For a typical example of the rhetoric of the polygon, see Preston Blair,
Cartoon Animation (Osceola, WI: Walter Foster, 1994).
48 ‘Those whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in
fact, and these may be termed indices or signs.’ Charles S. Peirce, Col-
lected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1 (Boston: Harvard University
Press, 1965), 558.
49 As were Africans and Jews. See, for example, Sander Gilman, ‘Dangerous
Liaisons,’ Transition 64 (1994): 45: ‘The difference of the Jew was in the
flesh, stamped in the nose and the color of their skin. Jews bore the sign
of the black, “the African character of the Jew, his muzzle-shaped mouth
and face removing him from certain other races,” as the British scientist
Robert Knox noted at mid-nineteenth century.’
50 James P. Byrne, ‘The Genesis of Whiteface in Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
can Popular Culture,’ MELUS 29, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 134.
51 Ibid., 138.
52 I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, directed by Dave Fleischer
(Fleischer Studios, 1932).
53 Minnie the Moocher (1932), The Old Man of the Mountain, and Snow White
(both 1933), directed by Dave Fleischer (Fleischer Studios).
54 Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Amblin Enter-
tainment, 1988); Waking Life, directed by Richard Linklater (Fox Search-
light Pictures, 2001); and A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater
(Warner Independent Pictures, 2006).
3

Talking War, Debating Unity: Order,

Conflict, and Exclusion in ‘German
Humour’ in the First World War

MARTINA KESSEL

The production of humour was a vast industry in Germany during the

First World War. Joke collections, satirical journals, and funny post-
cards were best-sellers in contemporary popular culture. Furthermore,
a lot of them projected a particular brand of ‘German humour’ as one
of those cultural traits that supposedly set German culture apart from
Western civilization, associating it with harmony, truth, and German
‘Gemüt’ (i.e. soul and ‘true’ feeling). If mentioned at all by historians,
humour in war times has so far been mostly understood as subver-
sive or affirmative. But the sheer amount of humorous products, their
ubiquitous and repetitive presence, and the never-ending debates
between producers, censors, and consumers about the permissible
suggest that their meaning goes beyond being just entertainment or
an outlet for frustration. In this essay, humour is understood as an im-
portant means of communication, not only during the war but also
about its impact, that tried to make sense of rapid social changes and
helped to articulate fears, hope, and anger.1
Addressed to both soldiers and civilians, humour in the First World
War circled around the dimensions of order, conflict, and exclusion.
First of all, this article argues that humour presented as ‘German’
served as a prescriptive narrative of order during the First World War.
Drawing on a tradition that reached back into the nineteenth centu-
ry, humour producers used it to express both the sense of national
unity and the willingness to fight. Projecting an ordered society, joke
collections and humorous postcards also functioned as narrative and
visual devices to articulate how criticism could be voiced. Secondly,
however, conflicts between censorship authorities and producers
about the content and the boundaries of what could be said and in
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 83

what form never stopped during the war, centring on the question
of what exactly constituted permissible humour. Especially after 1916
when the debate about war aims erupted again, and acrimoniously
so, ironical postcards criticizing the authorities’ shortcomings at
the home front could never be controlled, and their sarcasm splin-
tered the facade of national unity. Still, their irony mostly addressed a
temporary political problem only, in the sense of a government that
did not deliver on its promises any more. At the same time, humour
transported and reinforced a more deep-seated exclusive tendency
that could be understood as glue to a people’s community coming
apart. Uncannily, and with lasting effect, jokes throughout the war
carried an anti-Semitic undercurrent that bolstered an exclusive defi-
nition of national unity.

Given the semantic history of the notion of German humour in the

nineteenth century, its career after 1914 becomes less surprising. Since
around 1800, the arena of the supposedly non-serious, as one could
call it, was heavily debated. While Friedrich Schlegel espoused a
sense of irony as the necessary self-reflectivity needed by the modern
subject, writers like Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte de-
veloped the concept of a particular German seriousness that could be
clad as non-alienating cheerfulness and contrasted with supposedly
non-German satire.2 During the nineteenth century, German intel-
lectuals increasingly cast satire as ‘zersetzend,’ a term whose English
translation as ‘subversive’ does not really catch its harsh meaning,
rather implying something that radically and completely decompos-
es social order and stability. In contrast, they projected a humorous
narrative as a story that supposedly also pointed out a flaw in society,
just like satire, but did not end on that note. Rather, German humour
supposedly finished with a conciliatory smile that united everybody
involved. To put it pointedly: A story or a joke in their eyes only then
qualified as humorous when the protagonists in the story and/or the
protagonists telling the story ended by harmoniously accepting Ger-
man society as it was, underwriting at the same time their own place
within that particular social order. Accordingly, the philosophical and
aesthetic discourse of the nineteenth century translated the notion
of German humour into the cheerful acceptance of the given society
with all its flaws, a commentary on the world that supposedly only
pointed lovingly to the shortcomings of mankind in general,3 instead
of criticizing politics and society.
54 Mark Winokur

Agent is Jewish; Happy Hooligan is (at least etymologically) Irish; The

Katzenjammer Kids are German; Krazy Kat is German and/or Jewish;
Bugs Bunny is Brooklyn – itself code for several, if ambiguous, ethnic
identities; and so on. Further, American animation uses the novelties
of its technology to play with ethnic categories in ways that, while of-
ten racist, are also attempts to represent ethnic and racial diversity by
playing with the various ethnic categories in the cartoon line.
Thinking beyond the notion of blackface as the single or even pri-
mary trope for interethnic representation, Teresa Zackodnik discusses
the instability of mulatto identity that characterizes much recent criti-
cism and history: ‘the “margins” of race become bodily manifest in the
figure of the mulatto, such that this figure is repeatedly called to func-
tion as a racial borderland that delimits both whiteness and black-
ness.’5 Rethinking the notion that the coloured body is an object of
contestation, I would like to consider the Creole rather than the mu-
latto or any other term connoting racial or ethnic ambiguity because,
while critically less examined, the ‘Creole’ is much more linguistically
ambiguous than ‘mulatto,’ much more a product of self-ascription,
and so more interestingly flexible. The term, for example, can be a
source of pride rather than simply guilt and shame. Though of some-
what later coinage (its various meanings evolved in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries) the word ‘Creole’ is originally Portuguese.
It comes to English as a French corruption of the Spanish corruption
of the Portuguese ‘crioulo,’ which is itself from the Latin ‘creare,’ ‘to
beget.’6
The current meanings of ‘Creole’ are even more confusing than its
derivation. It means both blacks born in the Americas, Caribbean,
or West Indies, and whites born in the new world rather than in Eu-
rope. To Louisiana whites, for example, it has meant racially white;
to Louisiana blacks it has implied miscegenation.7 It can also mean
‘French-speaking blacks in the southwestern region of Louisiana,’ but
also ‘a person of racially mixed heritage’ or a scion of the former white
elite.8 In other words, while Creolism is always defined by race, the
Creole may be black, white, or mixed race. Depending on context, be-
ing ‘pure’ Creole may mean having either completely black or com-
pletely white ancestry. Without referring for a moment to the perfectly
legitimate question of who initiates these meanings – white or black
culture – and the relevance of that question to the question of racism
in representation, I would like simply to assert at this point that Cre-
olism offers a space for ambiguity in racial representation. The only
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 85

catastrophic nationalism that defined war as the source for inner and
outer unity.7
The entertainment sector with cabaret, satirical journals, and cari-
cature rapidly expanded in Imperial Germany, in cities like Berlin of-
ten with Jewish artists at the forefront of metropolitan entertainment.8
Still, the fight about what constituted acceptable humour continued,
with the implication that this decision was political by necessity, and
often with an anti-Semitic bent.9 Conservative authors like Arthur
Moeller van den Bruck projected the paternalistic and nationalistic
version of humour in his anthology of ‘great texts’ Lachende Deutsche
(Laughing Germans) in 1910.10 Therefore, in 1914, the notion could be
picked up as a well-established cultural narrative that served perfectly
both to illustrate and to call for the imagined people’s community. At
the same time, it always had to contend with various forms of wit-
ty entertainment. The rise of popular culture in Germany had met
with strong resistance from the middle classes, for whom it mirrored
the decline of culture in general.11 To be sure, other forms of popu-
lar entertainment were by no means automatically more democratic
than paternalistic German humour, and most satirical journals had
vouched for a strong foreign policy all along. Still, the humour scene
was broad and varied, it transported conflicting political meanings,
and authorities during the war were continuously confronted with the
question of how to deal with witty criticism. Beyond the immediate
question of whether the seriousness of war allowed for amusement,
answered affirmatively if the amusement honoured the war,12 the use
of joke collections to project German unity and to bolster public mo-
rale involved upgrading the status of funny entertainment in the cul-
tural hierarchy. And exactly because humour figured so prominently
among the means of communications, it proved almost impossible to
control.

The First World War engendered a veritable media explosion. More

people than ever before started to write themselves: letters to and
from the front, trench journals, war literature, or the approximately 3
million affirmative war poems produced during the first eight months
of the war alone.13 Humorous entertainment figured as an extremely
important element within this market. All satirical journals supported
the war effort, even the social democratic Der wahre Jakob.14 More im-
portantly, perhaps, none of these journals openly backed away from
their support until the end of the war.15 The publisher of the journal
86 Martina Kessel

Die lustigen Blätter started the series Tornister-Humor (Humour for

the Knapsack) that regularly issued joke books until 1919. Humorous
postcards became a huge market phenomenon, in addition to count-
less caricatures denigrating the enemies and urging the Germans to
hold out.16 Many famous journalists, intellectuals, and artists joined
in the ‘humour and war’ business. In 1915, for example, Thomas Theo-
dor Heine, Eduard Thöny, und Ludwig Thoma, well-known members
of the Simplicissimus, the Munich flagship among satiricial journals,
published their infamous Gott strafe England (God punish England)17
and then continued to produce material for the Foreign Office, to be
distributed as propaganda abroad.18
Such products clearly matched reading habits, as most soldiers
preferred light entertainment. In front libraries, humour books were
the category lent out most often, while Goethe and Schiller remained
on the shelves.19 Furthermore, these libraries often did not suffice
to answer the wishes of German soldiers, and reading material sent
from home had to fill the gap. Here again, humorous texts were the
favourite among soldiers.20 Finally, among the billions of postcards
sold, humorous motifs topped the list. Preprinted cards with humor-
ous scripts or pictures were the means of communication most often
used by soldiers,21 who often lacked the time, energy, or words to de-
scribe their experiences. Buying habits did not necessarily tell about
people’s attitudes toward the war. They could have to do with the
availability of particular cards, thus with a market phenomenon. But
the motifs’ availability until defeat in turn pointed to their continuing
marketing value. And they also told about the form a lot of commu-
nication about the war took. Accordingly, when social groups like the
Organization of South German Catholic Workers Associations tried to
engage the population for the war, they trusted the effectiveness of
humorous entertainment more than serious exhortation. In 1918, the
organization supported the production of a film comedy urging the
public to sign war bonds. The choice indicated the preference for light
entertainment in general and reflected, still after four years of war, the
population’s mobilization beyond the structures of military and civil-
ian authorities.22
Media humour could acquire manifold meanings.23 It definitely
helped people to cope and to relieve the strains of war through diver-
sion.24 But it also asserted the possibility of order in a tumbling world.
Not surprisingly, joke books touched only in a veiled manner on expe-
riences like fear, pain, and death, while explicitly picking up the many
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 87

secondary deprivations people suffered in terms of weather, food, or

other commodities. More striking were the extremely traditional and
conventional aesthetics. When printed jokes mentioned the concrete
fighting at all, they were framed in a nineteenth-century mode, just
like film comedies during the war. But conventional aesthetics should
not be cast aside with the thesis that the First World War saw the birth
of modern, ironic culture.25 Jay Winter’s argument that modern cul-
ture only helped to articulate the alienation the war engendered while
people turned to traditional cultural forms in order to find comfort in
times of grieving26 can also be applied here. At the same time, these
products must be understood as a part of popular light entertainment
that was on a secular rise, also because it answered specific needs.
Umberto Eco convincingly argued that products like serial fiction of-
fered repetitive, quasi a-historical plots whose sheer predictability an-
swered psychic needs in a society of vast changes.27 In times of war,
exactly the jokes’ conventionality could help to envision normalcy.
Recalling experiences from peace times, as they often did, they pro-
jected the continuity of a bygone world that would come back if the
war was won. At the same time, by picking up over and over again
the same experiences of deprivation, they offered ways of how to talk
about the unspeakable.28 Finally, many jokes were repetitive, but far
from diminishing their importance, this repetitiveness could help
those who lacked words or imagination to participate in the everyday
communication about the war.29
It is difficult to distinguish forms of humour that called for national-
istic drive or assured social order from caricatures or jokes that carried
potentially conflicting meanings. A lot of authors, however, and cer-
tainly those who projected their work explicitly as German humour,
left no doubt regarding their intention. Dozens of joke books like The
Joke-Sergeant (Der Witze-Feldwebel) or At Home Again (Wieder bei
Muttern), published in the series Humour for the Knapsack, depict-
ed dutiful Germans at the front and at home, finding inner strength
through affirmative humour and thus proving their superiority over
their enemies.30 This series in particular conveyed the class bias of a
lot of humour production. It portrayed soldiers as jovial infantrymen,
maybe not overly intelligent, but street-wise, good-natured, and ready
to give their lives for their country with a smile on their face. Though
at times querulous, such a humorous soldier and his equally working-
class wife never questioned his position in the army but affirmed the
cohesion of his group.
 Creole Cartoons 57

often represented in discussions of race, I should observe that I am

avoiding the overt and simplified representations of ethnicity such as
the Chuck Jones Inki series, or Warner Brothers’ Clean Pastures and
Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (both 1937).13 While even these films are racially
more complex than we usually acknowledge (in the latter film, the
very white Little Eva begins as nasty and temperamental, a version of
the woman slave-owner in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), their
images of race and ethnicity seem more static than the examples I
would like to discuss.14
Finally, because Disney has been so much read as to have been fet-
ishized, I would instead like to concentrate on relatively ‘minor’ fig-
ures as exemplars whose racism is at the very least overt, manifest,
and interesting: Winsor McCay, Pat Sullivan, and Max Fleischer, all of
whom play with this Homoousian and ambiguous Creole animation.

Example 1: Winsor McCay and Fluid Animation

The earliest European animation was done in France and England by

Émile Cohl (French), and Arthur Cooper and W.R. Booth (both Brit-
ish). While Cohl’s very fluid animation represents ethnicity once – the
Chinese figure in The Hasher’s Delirium (1910) – the two British film-
makers do not (at least overtly) display ethnicity at all. Britain’s earli-
est animations may be typified by Booth’s The ? Motorist (1906), which
is about a British couple who, while eccentric, appear conventionally
Anglo-Saxon.15
In contrast, one of the most famous names in the early history of
U.S. film immediately implicates the early history of animation in
the politics of race and ethnicity in a manner that suggests a Cre-
ole suspension of conviction about racial distinction. James Stuart
Blackton is responsible not only for the earliest American animation,
but for the two first examples of animation as ethnicity, specifically
Irish, or Irish-American: The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humor-
ous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). Before Blackton worked for Thomas
Edison and with Winsor McCay, he starred in a vaudeville act called
‘Lightning Sketches’ in which he drew various comic figures – prin-
cipally ethnic stereotypes – very quickly. Blackton’s film of Lightning
Sketches (1907) ends with a play on Cohen and coon: two racist stere-
otypes superimposed on each other. As another interesting figure,
Edwin S. Porter – Edison’s technical film adviser – is also responsi-
ble for ethnicity in animation in Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902).16 All of
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 89

of popular culture, understood as propaganda only in the sense of be-

ing an arena organized by producers and consumers alike who in turn
negotiated identity and belonging,36 was so successful because it reso-
nated with forms of entertainment and communication in the Ger-
man lifestyle. A well-known ritual among soldiers were the so-called
Bierzeitungen (literally: beer journals), comic newspapers they drew
up themselves to celebrate for example the end of their training, just
like pupils did at the end of school. Such journals recalled in humor-
ous rhymes specific incidents or made harmless fun of various mem-
bers of the group. The authors’ artistic engagement served more than
one function. It could entertain on a particular occasion, mark an im-
portant rite of passage, or pay tribute to a particular holiday such as
Christmas. Furthermore, and perhaps most important, it confirmed
the group’s identity and solidarity, both by emphasizing that its par-
ticular military task was central to the war effort and by proclaiming
almost invariably on the first page that everybody who was made fun
of had to take it in good stride – in fact, had to act in good, humor-
ous fashion. One journal included a poem in nine verses, addressed
to a fictitious comrade stationed in Turkey who was beset by all the
problems an ordinary soldier could encounter. The verses pinpointed
the depressing experiences with slow bureaucracy, lack of supplies,
unexpected attacks, and insufficient equipment, ending invariably in
the punch line that he should still do his duty humorously, even if a
bullet should find him: ‘Die with humour, that’s your duty, and don’t
grieve.’37
As long as soldiers did not question the war in general, humour
could even deal with conflicts within the army quite openly. After 1916,
the rifts in a nationalized and yet ever more segmented war society
grew sharply. Due to the impossible demands of the Third High Com-
mand in terms of production, frictions arose between front and home
front that fuelled the stab-in-the-back-legend, that is, the notion that
civilian society back home had let down the soldiers at the front.38
While civilians were mostly concerned with the lack of supplies, sol-
diers reacted bitterly to one of the most grieving problems of the Ger-
man army, namely the sharp differences in terms of food, leave, and
danger that existed between ranks and soldiers.39 The power of hu-
mour as a means of communication became apparent when soldiers
ironically attacked those behind the lines who in their eyes shirked
their duty. A poem included in a letter home graphically described the
Etappenschweine (swine behind the lines), as the men in the commu-
90 Martina Kessel

nication zones were called in anger. The first two verses highlighted
the fat life and corrupted morale of men in the rear, insinuating that
they slept with French women and thus typically drawing on the sym-
bolic power of presenting gender and sexuality as degrading a particu-
lar position. Then the amateur poet attacked the other men for being
cowards:

Wer packt beim geringsten Geschieße den Koffer

Wer zittert vor einem Durchbruch von Joffre,
wer schwindelt die tollsten Latrinengerüchte,
und macht unsere frohe Stimmung zunichte,
durch Schwarzseherei und Gegreine?
Das sind die Etappenschweine!40

(Who packs his things when the first bullet rings

Who fears a breakthrough by Joffre,
who creates the worst rumours
and destroys our cheerful attitude
by pessimism and whining?
Those swine behind the lines!)

The author concludes by emphasizing that he and his comrades in

the trenches would not want to exchange a single one of their ‘proud
memories’ for the ‘stupid life’ in the rear – because only such ‘proud
memories’ promised the nation’s love and fidelity. Again, such a poem
would be tolerated despite its aggressiveness because it expressed
the soldiers’ fighting spirit. It even answered the demand of those
officious trench journals that had tried to influence soldiers’ conver-
sations with people at home, urging them to counter armchair politi-
cians with ‘the humour of the first front line.’41 Soldiers’ experiences of
comradeship often did not correspond to its official celebration. But
some of them proudly asserted their courage in similar form as pub-
lished humour, even if in grimmer form.
Thus, when the rosy picture of cheerful soldiers, so prominent in
the early war years, was criticized, the proponents of German humour
could easily placate their critics. Early reviews had charged that hu-
mour publications were too optimistic and one-sided, demanding
that later editions would have to add more sombre notes in order
to tell the ‘objective truth’ about the war.42 Such criticism, however,
also affirmed humour’s communicative role. Humour producers in
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 91

turn pointed to its semantic tradition and its symbolic meaning of

superiority compared with Allied ways of dealing with war. In their
eyes, the German form of humour had all along been the only truth-
ful representation of the war. As a reviewer in the Berliner Tageblatt
in 1916 argued in the classical binary way, the French would never at-
tain the serious depth of German ‘soul [Gemüt] and humour.’ German
soldiers, so he assured his audience, would neither hate nor brag but
simply do their duty and still have time for a hearty laugh.43 Not sur-
prisingly, German authors aggressively discredited the French funny
trench journals, which often asserted the same, as culturally inferior.44
At the same time, after 1916, they pointed more often to the serious
origins of German laughter. In 1916 Paul Oskar Höcker, the Berlin play-
wright who as editor of the official front journal Liller Kriegszeitung
was a major player in war humour, explained the connection between
the serious and the comical. He urged soldiers to keep laughing de-
spite the war’s tragedies because it would harden them against others
and themselves.45 In his famous essay on laughter published before
the war, Henri Bergson had pointed out that laughter could prevent
compassion, or, to put it another way, that laughing about others only
worked when compassion was silenced.46 In this war, German intel-
lectuals insisted on a laughter that could help to stifle soldiers’ realiza-
tion of the similar plight on all sides.
Truly controlling soldiers’ laughter, however, was quite a different
story. On the one hand, by joking about their fate, soldiers re-interpret-
ed their surroundings in an optimistic vein. Joking thus helped them
to overcome fear. Those who could make fun of deadly danger were
perceived by others as having ‘grown up’ into real comrades, and they
were told: ‘Now you are big.’47 The poems in soldiers’ journals quot-
ed above projected such soldierly comradeship. On the other hand,
though, soldiers’ jokes quickly crossed the line to irony and satire. The
longer the war lasted, the more black humour transpired. Soldiers
transformed German patriotic songs into satirical parodies mocking
the war and its hardships. Minenwerfer (mortars) became Marmelad-
eneimer (jam buckets), referring to that ever-present replacement of
nourishing fat.48 It therefore came as no surprise that the Third High
Command under Hindenburg, who started the program of ‘Patriotic
Instruction’ in 1916–17, made sure that the often quite sarcastic trench
journals drawn up by soldiers themselves disappeared, leaving prima-
rily officious front journals such as the Liller Kriegszeitung staffed by
people like Höcker.49
92 Martina Kessel

Irony helped soldiers to vent frustration, but for censors to let that
pass, soldiers had to inflect it with the notion of duty. Duty was in-
deed one of those mental dispositions that made so many of them
hold out in this war,50 and whether listeners interpreted poems or
caricatures as humorous, satirical, or bitter, to fulfil one’s duty was
central for the formulation of acceptable humour. Authorities were
quick to confiscate any product whose irony might possibly implode
the notion of duty. Able cartoonists among the soldiers did so when
they commented ironically upon drill training. Soldiers often com-
plained about drill, which took up their time in the rear. Funny post-
cards showed soldiers doing forward bends and press-ups, carrying
the inscription that soldiers would get backbone (which in German
could also mean courage) only by such drill in time-controlled dis-
cipline: ‘Ein starkes Rückgrat kriegst du nur vom Armebeugen nach
der Uhr’ (A strong backbone you will get only by doing press-ups like
clock-work).51 They were immediately censored, leaving open the
question of how many had seen and interpreted them as a particular-
ly ridiculous feature of army life after the experiences in the trenches
(see figure 3.1).
But next to the fissures that soldiers’ irony let appear in the imag-
ined community of cheerful and dutiful soldiers, other jokes, openly
anti-Semitic, in yet quite a different way belied the image of an all-in-
clusive nation. Exactly because military duty featured so prominently
in these ubiqitous little narratives, jokes throughout the war made it
overly clear that some Germans could do their duty beyond call and
still be excluded, playing with traditional anti-Semitic prejudice with-
out fear of censorship. For sure, all the sharp divisions in German so-
ciety were debated in humour all the time. Especially after 1916, jokes
about farmers cheating the urban population, about affluent mem-
bers of the upper classes taking advantage of public services they did
not need, and about gender roles going topsy-turvy abounded. But
since the beginning of the war and ever more aggressively since 1915,
when conflicts in German society belied the obsessive talk about in-
ner unity, anti-Semitic jokes and caricatures projected an essentially
different difference, drawing on an imaginary that had all along tried
to keep Jewish and German history apart.
The racist vocabulary that degraded German Jews to national aliens
had been elaborated before the war,52 and connecting Jewish and for-
eign satire as cold and unfairly critical, thereby constructing ‘Jewish’
as always and intrinsically ‘foreign,’ had been a defining feature of the
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 93

3.1 Censored postcard from the First World War. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsar-
chiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv München, M Kr Bildsammlung, 97.
 Creole Cartoons 61

Little Nemo (1911) gets reproduced over and over, both commercial-
ly, and illegally, on international peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. I
think that part of the contemporary attraction for this film has to do
with the variant racism it presents, and a curious Schadenfreude it pro-
vokes. It is a cartoon vision of gentleman-colonialism, with the frame
story exercising a hegemonic control over the cartoon characters. In
the live-action frame story, four gentlemen clad in evening dress play
cards at their club. One man – McCay – agrees to make four thousand
drawings that will animate one month from the date of the meeting.
This origin story/frame narrative presumes knowledge of a standard
narrative device: the ‘gentleman’s bet.’ (Such a bet – for dinner – is ac-
tually made in McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur [1914] when Winsor McCay
bets George McManus a dinner for the party that he can make the Di-
nosaurus [sic] live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons.)18 The bet
echoes the negotiation that catapults Phileas Fogg from a whist game
at the Reform Club into an orbit around the world in eighty days, in a
novel that simultaneously satirizes and celebrates the difference be-
tween the cultured Western Europeans and the various orientalized
cultures that Fogg and his valet encounter.19 The literary gentleman’s
bet of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost always
has something to do with race, time, and/or masculinity (‘honour’).20
McCay’s realistic frame story, then, is already referring us back to a
fantasy that, except perhaps for 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (whose
Nemo travels through his own dreamscape), is the most orientalizing
of all Verne’s novels.21 Though in both texts gentlemen are satirized – in
one, Fogg is the tourist who circumnavigates the globe gazing only at
his watch, while in the other, John Bunny’s facial expressions and bulk
undercut the seriousness of the proceedings – both sets of gentlemen
are made the objects of our identification. They are the eyes through
which we are going to see the toons, colonials, and fuzzy-wuzzies. The
controlling gaze is, inevitably, masculine and Anglo-American. The
animated characters created by McCay later in the film are exagger-
ated versions of blackness, Anglo whiteness, and ethnic whiteness.
After some intervening comic business in which the heroically indi-
vidualistic nature of McCay’s animation process is foregrounded, Lit-
tle Nemo’s narrative cuts to one month later. If the opening sequence
suggests Phileas Fogg and the imperial gaze, the last sequence – the
animated portion – is about the racial spectacle created by that gaze.
We are introduced to three figures: Little Nemo himself, flanked by the
Imp and Flip. While at first glance Nemo and the Imp appear easily
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 95

And finally, such stories were associated with a different kind of

violence than all other differences in German society at this point.
They tied in with quasi-official publications, such as a collection of
letters from the front edited by Reinhold Zellmann in 1916. Entitled
Serious and Cheerful Episodes from the World War: A Collection of Let-
ters from the Front, the collection was supposed to bolster morale by
demonstrating soldiers’ good humour. Reprinted again in 1917, it did
not include letters by Jewish Germans but instead ‘true’ stories about
Eastern European Jews. In two comparatively long and rabidly anti-
Semitic letters, Adolf Stein, later one of Hugenberg’s spokesmen dur-
ing the Weimar Republic, depicted the occupation of Lodz, describing
with violent energy how Jewish shop owners supposedly had tried
to betray upright German soldiers. His aggressive style combined all
negative stereotypes about Jews, from dirt and lice to meanness and
corruption. But he also left no doubt about the brutality of the Ger-
man reaction, describing in detail how they used intimidation and
physical violence to rob the Jews’ possessions without paying at all.60

Regarding the home front, the discursive boundaries of permissible

humour seemed at first to be drawn wider than with regard to mili-
tary issues. At the same time, the authorities were unable to control
a discourse they themselves urged on. Funny postcards circulated
throughout the country, ranging in content from militaristic support
of the war to demands of peace. Of course, the latter was forbidden, but
all motives seem to have been produced throughout the war, and over
and over again all sorts of cards were confiscated, militaristic, pacifist,
or otherwise. Again, though, anti-Semitic jokes usually passed, in this
context bolstering the accusation of Jewish Germans as war profiteers.
The periodical Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter carried a typical
one-liner in 1916 with the caption ‘Fitting term,’ insinuating again that
German Jews not only did not suffer like everybody else during the
war but actually profited: ‘Look, how arrogant the family Meyersohn
is coming along there! – Indeed – quite a ‘Protzession’!’61 The play of
words only works in German, ‘Protz’ meaning to show off one’s money
tastelessly and ‘procession’ being changed to ‘Protzession.’ The nar-
rowing of the scope for Jewish entertainers making self-ironical fun of
‘Jewish-ness,’ which Peter Jelavich describes in this volume, was also
due to the effortless publication of jokes like these. While censors were
highly sensitive to the possible ambiguities of all sorts of caricatures
and jokes, they accepted an anti-Semitic clarity, which in this case ex-
96 Martina Kessel

cluded Jewish Germans from the community of those who suffered at

home.
This undercurrent of exclusion through humour, proclaiming Jew-
ish non-suffering, was important because the most prominent hu-
mour topics for the home front were the population’s suffering and the
government’s failure to satisfy people’s needs. In the later war years, a
typical postcard announcing ‘The death of our last loaf of bread’ cir-
culated repeatedly in various versions. Designed like a typical obitu-
ary notice, one of them read:

Only this way: Deeply distressed and very hungry we sadly announce
that our last loaf of bread, only 5 days old, has been eaten this morning.
The bereaved family asks for twice 500 gr bread ration cards. (We also
accept ‘war rolls,’ even if they are black, as usual.) The bereaved family:
Father Georg Hunger. Mother: Marie Hunger, b. Starved. Aunts: Nanny
Skinniness and Kuni Lack-of-Flour. Uncle: Lack-of-Meat.62

The postcard was produced by the publishing house of Christian

Stahl in Munich. Postcards posed the problem for censors that they
could be reprinted indefinitely as long as the original plates existed.
After several warnings had failed, the Munich censors confiscated the
whole set of plates and formats in January 1918 in order to stop the
reprinting.63 Not surprisingly, a stylistically identical postcard passed
with flying colours, an obituary notice for Italy and the Italian-Ger-
man coalition, published by Dammerhuber in Munich after Italy de-
clared war.64
Censors had already in 1916 received notice that food shortages
must not be made fun of, and Karl Valentin was ordered off stage for
six weeks because he had compared the living conditions of average
people with the comfortable life of the Bavarian king.65 The obituary
notice’s sarcasm was too close for comfort as it did not end on an af-
firmative, jovial note. At a time when hunger was an everyday expe-
rience and strikes loomed large, such comments threatened to whip
up protests. Still, publishers simply continued to publish such cards,
which sold well. Stahl, for one, was quite accustomed to dealing with
censorship authorities. In October 1917, another postcard printed by
his firm was sent to Alsace. The inscription also satirized the failure
of the rationing politics, recommending that the starving population
should fry the meat card with the butter card in an oven heated with
the coal card. The opulent meal should be rounded off by tipping the
 Creole Cartoons 63

2.7 Frame capture from Little Nemo (1911).

at least two ways: first because it assumes that what makes Flip comic
is his resemblance to both the comic Irishman and the comic minstrel
black man. More importantly, however, that comedy retains a sense of
anthropological hierarchy: Nemo is most human; Flip second, and the
Imp, who, in the comic strips is barely verbal, third and last.
The cartoon showcases a difference in the graphics that make up,
on the one side, the Imp and Flip, and, on the other, Nemo. Nemo is
an art nouveau figure, while Flip and the Imp are in fact cartoon exag-
gerations. But the most striking visual difference between Nemo and
the other characters occurs as a momentary optical trick, an anamor-
phic squeezing of the Imp and Flip controlled by Nemo as if by a magi-
cian. As the comedy in the Blackton films depends on an imbrication
of special effect and racial stereotyping, so the most ‘alive’ moment of
the McCay film occurs as a special optical effect in which Nemo con-
trols our view of the racial others.
98 Martina Kessel

ly!’73 Although very few might have transferred the butcher image to
the front at this point when the Hindenburg myth had deeply taken
hold, still the joke could satirise the government’s (broken) promises
in general, point out that the military were not able to guarantee the
food supply, or indicate how much the rationing politics, fuelling the
black market, only served the needs of the rich. Next to this picture
joke, another drawing with a 30-line-verse criticized that numerous
signs posted at a house offered eggs, but only the tiniest, almost invis-
ible and written in pencil, told the truth, namely: ‘Eggs sold out!’74
While local authorities obviously had to tolerate greater derision
regarding the situation at the home front,75 printed matter also tried
to convey communicative rules for such criticism. For example, it
could be important how newspapers arranged humorous commen-
taries, meaning literally that it might make a difference what kind of
jokes were printed together on a page. Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-
Blätter, another typical journal made up of jokes and humorous sto-
ries, in 1916 carried the picture joke of a French soldier who pulled a
wheelbarrow with some trash and explained to an officer that this
garbage was all the Germans had left over from a whole French com-
pany. On the same page, a verse entitled After Heine reformulated one
of Heine’s most famous poems, ‘Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten’
(I don’t know what it could mean). Heine’s poem, picking up a bal-
lad by Clemens Brentano from 1801, described the Loreley, a mythical
female figure above the Rhine who lured skippers with her beautiful
voice closer to the banks only to have them destroyed by the treacher-
ous waters. The poem became immensely popular in German culture,
and it was often parodied. This particular parody described how all
the shops used to be full in former days and now were all empty, due
to the High Command’s fixing of prices.76 In effect, it could imply how
the population had been lured by the hollow promises of a govern-
ment unable or unwilling to deliver. Heine definitely did not belong to
the pantheon of affirmative German humour but was an icon of sat-
ire’s critical tradition. But the verse had the same character as a dozen
others that appeared in Humour in the Knapsack, and they were obvi-
ously acceptable as long as they appeared with stories that celebrated
the superiority and endurance of the German soldiers. In turn, such a
combination also suggested that civilians might complain as long as
they held out just like soldiers.
The debates about the permissible also occurred among the author-
ities themselves, who repeatedly disagreed about what they should let
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 99

pass. Postcards complaining about shortages or the hoarding prob-

lem kept censors busy because producers could always hope to be
lucky. The Kriegspresseamt in Berlin, for example, argued in 1916 that a
lot of cards commented in a ‘harmless way’ on the shortages, and that
while such cards should not be reprinted, it would be economically
too harsh on the firms to confiscate those that were ready to be sold.77
In other cases, as with Stahl’s ration card inscription, the censors came
too late, after the cards had already been advertised in shop windows,
sold, and sent. In other instances, publishers shrewdly passed on the
responsibility to the population, by pointing to consumers whom they
could not control. When the Bavarian military authorities in August
1916 criticized the printing firm Andelfinger and Company for a card
with the inscription ‘Abstinence is fun,’ the publisher promised not to
print the text any more. In the same letter, however, he argued that he
could not be held responsible when buyers imprinted his harmless
cards with all sorts of text.78 Finally, the authorities sometimes flatly
admitted to being unable to control people’s emotions and simply
hoped that some thorny issue would be outlived by events. Particu-
larly after 1916, the war society bristled with informal communication,
circulating wild scenarios regarding the food situation. For example, in
1917 the rumour circulated that 30,000 rotten eggs had been buried on
the Marsfeld in Munich.79 The Munich publisher Silberstein promptly
issued a postcard with a sarcastic poem about the Marsfeld scandal,
ending with the suggestion that the responsible person should hang.
While the Munich police wanted to confiscate all copies already cir-
culating, war minister von Hellingrath stopped them with the realistic
assessment that, given the unusually high number of cards already
sold, it would be either impossible or simply useless.80
Postcards in a sense travelled on their own. They could be and were
produced by individuals, and they could be amended by hand. They
carried an even wider range of opinions than printed jokes, including
forbidden demands for peace or sarcastic commentaries about the
emptiness of official peace talk. It is important to emphasize, however,
that cards rejecting the war in clearly political terms were the excep-
tion. Also, postcards criticizing the bad living conditions were by no
means the only variant. Without being able to quantify, it can still be
said that censors confiscated at least as many patriotic and militaristic
postcards as products that dealt critically with the deprivations. The
reasons for confiscation were manifold, either because the cards con-
tinued to denigrate the Allies and thereby also belittled the German
 Creole Cartoons 65

tion is paid to the ground as to the figure. The other extreme comes
later: Hanna-Barbera’s factory-produced limited animation.
Somewhere in between these two extremes, the Felix cartoons of the
1920s play out in racial terms the tension between figure and ground
raised by cel technology. The most popular of all pre-Disney anima-
tion, the Felix cartoons routinely collapse the tension between back-
ground and foreground in films that show Felix in foreign lands and
with different races. The transformative comedy that characterizes
Felix’s highlighted moments often does three things simultaneously: it
collapses foreground and background; it suggests that such collapses
are doubly eccentric in an already-eccentric world; and it connects
this aesthetic to race and ethnicity by suggesting that our notion of
racial otherness as the ground against which whiteness plays itself out
is part of the way Americans experience the world in the twentieth
century.
A typical moment occurs in Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923), in which
Felix finds himself in Egypt being chased by the ancient locals.28
He runs through a monumentally still landscape of pyramids until
he reaches the Sphinx. Pouring pepper into his nose, Felix gets the
Sphinx to sneeze, the force of which sends his pursuers tumbling.
(See figure 2.8.) Until Felix notices the Sphinx, it is simply another
part of a generically, sketchily, and typically picturesque foreign back-
ground cel. Felix’s action foregrounds it for us, making this exotic
background familiar, accessible, and exploitable. This kind of trans-
formation of the landscape was developing at about the same time in
live-action comedy film – in Charles Chaplin’s films, for example. Like
the Felix cartoons, live-action comedies like Modern Times (1936), in
which the background is foregrounded, are about foreignness, new
immigration, and the immigration of African America from the rural
south to industrial northern cities; the comic transformations refer
back to the way in which blacks and white immigrants have to en-
counter a newly industrialized landscape.29 Such transformative
comedy informs those most famous moments in Felix when he de-
taches his tail, using it for something other than a simple prehensile
appendage.
But while Chaplin and other slapstick comedians typically trans-
form the stuff of the high industrial machine in this individual
fashion – one device at a time – the moment from Felix Gets Broad-
casted reflexively refers, not exactly to either the machinery or even
the ground on which that machinery is based, but to the possibility
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 101

used humour to define war against inner and outer enemies as the
source for unity.

notes

1 Martina Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death? “German Humor” in the Two

World Wars,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of
the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Paul Betts, Alon Confino,
and Dirk Schumann (New York: Routledge, 2008), 197–218. For a similar
approach, see Jan Rüger, ‘Laughter and War in Berlin,’ History Workshop
Journal 67 (2009): 23–43.
2 Karl Heinz Bohrer, ed., Sprachen der Ironie – Sprachen des Ernstes (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Hermann Bausinger, ‘Lachkultur,’ in Vom
Lachen: Einem Phänomen auf der Spur, ed. Thomas Vogel (Tübingen:
Attempto-Verlag, 1992), 9–23.
3 Bernd-Jürgen Warneken, ‘Der sozialkritische Witz als Forschungspro-
blem,’ Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 74 (1978): 20–39.
4 Ursula E. Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin: Von der Märzrevolution bis zu Bis-
marcks Entlassung. Illustrierte politische Witzblätter einer Metropole
1848–1890 (Cologne: Informationspresse Leske, 1991); Peter Jelavich, Berlin
Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Martin Baumeister,
Kriegstheater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultur 1914–1918 (Essen: Klar-
text, 2005).
5 Jefferson S. Chase, Inciting Laughter: The Development of ‘Jewish Humor’
in Nineteenth Century German Culture ( Berlin, New York: de Gruyter,
2000).
6 For their aggressive character, see Reinhard Hippen, Das Kabarett der
spitzen Feder (Zurich: Pendo Verlag, 1986), 48. The connection between
war and humour did not start only then, but it intensified markedly.
7 Martina Kessel, ‘Gelächter, Männlichkeit und soziale Ordnung. “Deut-
scher Humor” und Krieg 1870–1918,’ in Kulturgeschichte: Fragestellungen,
Konzepte, Annäherungen, ed. Christina Lutter et al. (Wien: Studienverlag,
2004), 97–116, here 102–7. For an impressive analysis of German war cul-
ture, see Michael Geyer, ‘The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in
Twentieth-Century Germany,’ German Studies Review 15 (1992): 75–110.
8 Peter Jelavich, ‘Performing High and Low: Jews in Modern Theater, Caba-
ret, Revue, and Film,’ in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890–
1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
208–35.
9 Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin, 189.
102 Martina Kessel

10 Artur Moeller van den Bruck, Lachende Deutsche: Vom Humoristisch-

Heroischen, Grünwald und Rembrandt, Sachs und Grimmelshausen, Jean
Paul und Hoffmann, Böcklin und Liliencron, lachende Ewigkeit (Minden:
Bruns, 1910).
11 Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkuultur
1850–1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997).
12 Baumeister, Kriegstheater, esp. 67ff.
13 Thomas Taterka, ‘“Der deutsche Krieg im Deutschen Gedicht.” Die deut-
sche Weltkriegslyrik und ihr treuer Begleiter Julius Bab,’ Krieg und Lite-
ratur 5 (1999): 5–20; Siegfried Quandt and Horst Schichtel, eds., Der Erste
Weltkrieg als Kommunikationsereignis (Gießen: Justus-Liebig-Universität,
1993); Nicolas Beaupré, ‘Frontliteratur des Ersten Weltkrieges. Entstehung
eines literarischen Phänomens im Kontext des Krieges (Deutschland,
Frankreich, 1914–1920),’ Krieg und Literatur 9 (2003): 69–84.
14 Eberhard Demm, ‘Propaganda and Caricature in the First World War,’
Journal of Contemporary History 28 (1993): 163–92, esp. 167ff.; Niels Weise,
Der ‘lustige’ Krieg: Propaganda in deutschen Witzblättern 1914–1918 (Rah-
den: Marie Leidorf Verlag, 2004). Weise still advances a traditional notion
of propaganda as an exclusively top-down affair.
15 In France, the Canard Enchaîné could establish itself after 1915 as a criti-
cal voice toward the war, see Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics
of Humor: The Canard Enchaîné and World War I (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002).
16 A collection of German and Allied caricatures in Eberhard Demm, ed.,
Der Erste Weltkrieg in der Karikatur (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1988).
17 Gott strafe England: Kampfschrift in Bild und Wort (Munich: Simplicis-
simus, 1915).
18 Weise, Der ‘lustige’ Krieg, 85.
19 Wolfgang Natter, Literature at War 1914–1940: Representing the ‘Time of
Greatness’ in Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 154–5.
20 Joachim S. Heise, ‘“Ein Gruß den Unsrigen!” Betriebliche Kriegszeitschrif-
ten deutscher Unternehmen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Forschungsstand, neue
Positionen, Bibliographie,’ Krieg und Literatur 2 (1996): 93–123, here 95.
21 Sigrid Metken, ‘“Ich hab’ diese Karte im Schützengraben geschrieben …”
Bildpostkarten im Ersten Weltkrieg,’ in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit:
Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Rainer Rother (Berlin: Ars Nicolai,
1994), 137–48, here 140. Some firms even established an outlet in the oc-
cupied territories in France. For this point and statistics, see Otto May,
‘Postkarten als Träger von Mentalität und Propaganda,’ in Bildungs – und
kulturgeschichtliche Bildforschung, ed. Rudolf Keck (Baltmannsweiler:
 Creole Cartoons 67

2.9 Frame capture from Felix in Hollywood (1923).

as an immigrant arriviste, an attempt to negotiate a relationship be-

tween ethnic white immigrant America and other signs of alienness.30
(Both Felix creators were children of immigrants: Pat Sullivan was the
son of Irish and Australian immigrants, Otto Messmer of German im-
migrants.)31
Cel economy results in several typical ‘golden-era’ structural figures
besides Felix. Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Bosko, Bimbo, and Flip the
Frog are different versions of the Creole cartoon character in which
ethnicity is ambiguous in part because of a constant negotiation with
the character’s background cel. While looking whiter all the time, the
next generation of major-studio cartoon characters – Bugs Bunny or
Tom and Jerry – have these Creole characteristics grafted onto them
as well.
Cel animation does not mean the disappearance of the earlier, Ho-
moousian combining of several ethnicities in one character. However,
in the era of cel animation, the meaning of these ethnic superimpo-
sitions changes. On the one hand, these characters are (as Henry T.
104 Martina Kessel

33 For further examples, see Kessel, ‘Gewalt schreiben,’ 237–8.

34 Christoph Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten. Desertion und Deserteure im deut-
schen und britischen Heer 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1996); Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Verweigerungsformen von Frontsoldaten in
der deutschen Armee 1914–1918,’ in Gewalt im Krieg: Ausübung, Erfahrung
und Verweigerung von Gewalt in Kriegen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Andreas
Gestrich (Münster: Lit, 1996), 99–122.
35 Der gemütliche Sachse 20, no. 6 (1915): n.p. (p. 14).
36 Scott Spector, ‘Was the Third Reich Movie-Made? Interdisciplinarity and
the Refraiming of “Ideology,”’American Historical Review 106 (2001):
460–84.
37 Bundesarchiv, Militärarchiv Freiburg, MSG 2/1918, poem: ‘Gräme dich
nicht in der Türkei,’ apparently from 1917.
38 Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration: Das Trau-
ma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf:
Droste, 2003), 71.
39 Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918, 2nd
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 130–65; Barth, Dolch-
stoßlegenden, 67. For the growing differences among politicians and intel-
lectuals, see also Steffen Bründel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat: Die
‘Ideen von 1914’ und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2003). On the shifting balance of power at the
home front: Volker Ullrich, ‘Kriegsalltag. Zur inneren Revolutionierung
der Wilhelminischen Gesellschaft,’ in Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung,
Wahrnehmung, Analyse, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (Munich: Piper, 1994),
603–21; Wilhelm Deist, ‘The German Army, the Authoritarian Nation-State
and Total War,’ in State, Society and Mobilisation in Europe during the
First World War, ed. John Horne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 164.
40 Bundesarchiv, Militärarchiv Freiburg, MSG 2/930, poem in a letter from
the front, First World War (1 H 46/2).
41 Bernd Ulrich, Die Augenzeugen. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs – und
Nachkriegszeit 1914–1933 (Essen: Klartext, 1997), 66.
42 Ibid., 118.
43 Review of Heinrich Zille, Vadding in Frankreich (Berlin: Lustige Blätter,
1915), in Berliner Tageblatt, reprinted on the last page of Heinrich Zille,
Vadding in Ost und West (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, 1916).
44 For French trench journals see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War
1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the
First World War (repr., Oxford: Berg, 1995). For German criticism of French
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 105

journals: Unser Kronprinz. W(itzige) T(ornister=)B(erichte) von Ihm und

seiner Armee, ed. Alfred Brie (= Tornister-Humor, vol. 13) (Berlin: Lustige
Blätter, n.d. [1915]), 60–2.
45 Das lustige Buechel der Liller Kriegszeitung (Lille: Verlag der Liller Kriegs-
zeitung, May 1916), 5.
46 Henri Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Alcan,
1900).
47 Alex Watson, ‘Self-deception and Survival: Mental Coping Strategies at
the Western Front, 1914–18,’ Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006):
247–68, here 254, and Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Col-
lapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008). Watson emphasizes the similarities between Brit-
ish and German ways of coping.
48 Watson, ‘Self-deception,’ 254.
49 Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Sol-
daten und ihre Deutung 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2003).
50 Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegser-
lebnis – Kriegserfahrung 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998).
51 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M Kr Bild-
sammlung, 97.
52 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Re-
ligion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 209.
53 With further literature: Andrea Hopp, ‘Zur Medialisierung des an-
tisemitischen Stereotyps im Kaiserreich,’ in Antisemitische Geschichts-
bilder, ed. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Sieg (Essen: Klartext, 2009),
23–37.
54 Simplicissimus 21, no. 9 (5 May 1916): 107.
55 Simplicissimus 20, no. 12 (22 June 1915): 143.
56 Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, ‘Terror in Germany 1918–19: Visual Commen-
taries on Rosa Luxemburg’s Assassination,’ in Women and Death 2: War-
like Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500,
ed. Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2009), 127–66.
57 On anti-Semitism during the war and the momentous meaning of the
Judenzählung, see Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und
Revolution 1916–1923 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971). See also Werner Bergmann
and Juliane Wetzel, ‘Antisemitismus im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg: Ein
Forschungsüberblick,‘ in Erster Weltkrieg. Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich:
 Creole Cartoons 69

2.10 Frame capture from Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929).

plurality used by Alfred E. Smith in his 1924 presidential campaign. In

other words, the blackface Bosko is from the beginning inflected by
white-ethnic characteristics that are also drawn – in 1929, not in 1899
– in a condescending manner. That is to say that, even after the time
when white ethnics were supposed to have successfully assimilated,
leapfrogging African Americans, they were still the objects of xeno-
phobic parody. Bosko’s Creolism – his ability to contain multitudes of
ethnic types – represents a variety of racial impostures.
Further, Bosko’s minstrel accent is not evenly sustained throughout
the run of the cartoons. In later films, Bosko and Honey (Bosko’s love
interest) both speak a kind of accent-neutral English, in voices less
identifiable by race than by age. Like many such early comic figures
their voices are often high-pitched and slow, like children reciting les-
sons. The Tin Pan Alley–style tunes ally them with white urban eth-
nics. Later, Bugs Bunny’s accent – Brooklynese with all its attendant
idioms (‘Hey, bud’) – will be even more suggestive of white ethnicity.
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 107

Humor, vol. 2) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1915]). See also Chickering,
Great War and Urban Life, 389; Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power,
Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
25–6.
73 ‘Alles da!’ in Uns kann keiner, 35.
74 ‘Sechs Schilder,’ in Uns kann keiner, 34.
75 Chickering, Great War and Urban Life, 390.
76 Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter, no. 97 (1916): 3. ‘Nach Heine: Ich
weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, geh ich durch die Straßen einmal,
die Läden der Schlachter, vor Zeiten so voll, sind plötzlich so kahl! Die
Schaufenster leer sich erweisen von allem was einst wir drin sah’n – Und
das hat mit seinen Höchstpreisen das Oberkommando getan!’
77 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13 345/1, Kriegs-
presseamt Oberzensurstelle Berlin, Nr. 12204 O.Z., 25.8.1916.
78 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13/345/1, C.
Andelfinger & Co. an das Kriegs-Ministerium, Munich, Armee-Abteilung
I, Pressereferat, 9.8.1916.
79 Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und
Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989),
243.
80 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13/345/1, Nr.
134438. A., Kriegsministerium an das K. Staatsministerium des Innern,
Munich, 26.8.1917.
81 Examples in Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich,
M Kr Bildsammlung.
4

Producing a Cheerful Public:

Light Radio Entertainment during
National Socialism

MONIKA PATER

Ah, what an age it is

When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!1

In this poem Bertolt Brecht describes how simple and harmless words
turn out treacherous or at least problematic in the Third Reich be-
cause they might signal silent assent or compliance with issues not
to be spoken about. The bulk of entertainment shows offered by Ger-
man broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s were made up of harmless
utterings and jokes. This paper will consider these seemingly apoliti-
cal radio programs, usually described as bright or cheerful in the radio
guides of the time. Cheerfulness, however, is not the prominent fea-
ture that comes to mind when thinking about radio during National
Socialism. These broadcasts and the overall schedule structure that
developed during the 1930s were part of an overall understanding
of propaganda voiced by Joseph Goebbels and Eugen Hadamovsky,
head of the national radio production (Reichssendeleiter), that gave
priority to diversion and entertainment. However, this understanding
of propaganda was met with unflinching resistance, for example by
Alfred Rosenberg, proponent of the idea of a ‘truly German’ aka ‘Ary-
an’ culture which was not to be tainted by popular mass culture. But
for several reasons – discussed below – the concept of entertainment
as the precondition for keeping listeners tuned in prevailed so that
entertainment programs, especially those offering music, expanded
gradually but steadily until they became the focal point of the war
schedule.2 Usually, this strategy was seen as successful as there was
a high support of the Nazi regime until the second half of the war.3
 Creole Cartoons 71

The very first released cartoon – Sinkin’ in the Bathtub – contains the
songs ‘Singing in the Bathtub,’ ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ (written by
Joe Burke, an Irish accordionist), and ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’
(lyrics credited to Jaan Kenbrovin, the Scandinavian pseudonym for
three writers), hardly tunes associated with minstrelsy. The title song
is not only not associated with minstrelsy, it is introduced in a Warner
production Show of Shows (1929) by Winnie Lightner, a white, light-
comedy Broadway comedienne. The same is true for another 1931
Bosko feature, Ups ’N Downs, which features the Warner tune (origi-
nally Broadway) ‘Don’t Hold Everything’ (from Hold Everything, 1930).

Example 3: Fleischer’s Rotoscope and the Racial Surreal

Media criticism frequently uses Sigmund Freud’s 1935 work, ‘A Note

upon the Mystic Writing Pad,’ one of his many metaphors for the rela-
tionship between consciousness and memory.40 A child’s toy, the pad
is a dual-layer writing tablet, the top layer of which is a sheet of clear
celluloid, the bottom layer of which is a gray sheet of paper which re-
ceives a visible impression when the celluloid is written on by a sty-
lus. When the celluloid paper is raised and separated from the gray
bottom layer, the writing on the bottom layer disappears, except for
a barely visible indentation – a trace. Freud’s point is that, while we
believe consciousness and memory to be archival and total, they are
in fact like the traces left on the writing pad: discontinuous, barely vis-
ible, and ambiguous. It is difficult to believe that, with its end descrip-
tion of the mind as a sort of editing machine – an apparatus that gains
impressions that are repeatedly interrupted and replaced by subse-
quent perceptions in order to attain the illusion of a sense of continu-
ous time – ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ was not influenced
by the idea of cinema, which also uses celluloid to leave a trace of the
(chemical) pressure exerted on it. Today, the mystic writing pad is fur-
ther useful as a metaphor to describe our relationship to film, which
is an aging technology whose representations are often the only pho-
tographic traces of otherwise dead worlds – like, for example, fin-de-
siècle urban life or the movements of dead actors – the memories of
which otherwise decay with the speed of contemporary technological
development.41
Rotoscoping – an animation technique invented by Max and David
Fleischer – works in some respects like the mystic writing pad. Roto-
scoping traces over a series of frames from a live-action film sequence
110 Monika Pater

gues in his recollections,10 it is necessary to consider them in relation

to each other to investigate how they were linked. How was the Ger-
man broadcasting audience of the 1930s redefined on the basis of the
racist concept of the Volksgemeinschaft to exclude ‘undesirables’ and
how did that redefinition influence the program? How did programs
designed to convey a particular mood contribute to the construction
of the ordinary, the everyday, and how did this in turn help to achieve
a consensus among those belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft?
The chapter first describes broadcast-related measures of exclusion,
considering workforce, broadcast content, and the audience. Second,
it discusses measures of inclusion by looking at the development of
the overall program structure with a focus on humorous shows and
light entertainment, in particular the popular radio show Merry Satur-
day Afternoon by the Reichssender Cologne. Seemingly apolitical and
insignificant, the program structure as well as the radio show are on
a functional level strikingly similar to the program offered by the BBC
in the 1930s. The developments in British broadcasting are used as a
frame of reference to be able to differentiate between ideologically
induced programs, specific to National Socialism, and output which
owes more to the characteristics of broadcasting, such as its cyclical
and serial character, daily occurrence, and sociability,11 non-specific
to the political system.
Light radio entertainment can be considered as popular culture
from above that wants to provide a sense of belonging to a clearly de-
fined part of the German population. In this paper, popular culture
is understood as an ambiguous term as it was imposed on audience
members who nevertheless used the media’s output to make sense
of their own experiences. Listeners felt entitled to broadcasts that re-
lated to some extent to their lives and accordingly rejected programs
which did not live up to these expectations. Those in charge of de-
veloping programs had to take these expectations into account. By
referring to the development of British broadcasting routines, this
chapter tries to assess to what extent conditions of listening actually
influenced the schedule. It suggests that radio entertainment and its
functions in German society of the 1930s can be better explained by
looking at the conditions defined by media technology. Looking at
how this technology was used and made sense of in a modern, indus-
trialized society appears more significant than discussing it mainly as
an essential part of the overarching propaganda efforts of National
Socialism.12
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 111

Listening to the radio competed with other, more established and

mundane, engagements of everyday life and was not yet a widespread
activity in the German pre-war society, but it still contributed to lis-
teners’ sense of leading a ‘normal life.’ Listening to the wireless inte-
grated ordinary citizens into the National Socialist society by allowing
them to settle into their familiar surroundings while others were fac-
ing terror. In view of the extraordinary experiences of these ‘others,’ it
is not surprising that light entertainment, be it film or radio, became
the focus of historiography rather late. Clearly, the terror needed ex-
plaining first.13

Mechanisms of Exclusion

The dismissal of employees from broadcasting stations started in

March 1933, after the Reichstag elections. People were discriminated
against on account of their ethnic and political ‘undesirability.’ There
are no reliable data regarding all broadcasting stations during that
time.14 However, the figures from the Cologne station suggest that
between 13 to 20 per cent of all employees were dismissed until the
summer of 1933. Top managerial positions as well as low-level assist-
ants and technicians were replaced by committed National Socialists,
thereby ensuring control of radio production within the first year.15
Not only party members profited from the dismissals, but also na-
tional-conservatives like Günter Eich took the opportunity to start a
career in broadcasting.16 By discussing individual fates, Daniela Mün-
kel shows that the range of the possible offences which could lead to
dismissal was constantly growing during the Third Reich. In the years
after 1933, broadcast employees continued to be discharged due to
non-conformist behaviour.17
The ascent of National Socialism also involved drastic changes in
the program structures. Constant modifications were accompanied
by transmissions of political speeches and party meetings, whereas
cultural or educational shows were reduced considerably.18 In hind-
sight, a Jewish worker described the effect of the continuous propa-
gandist barrage: it was a message that did not address him and he felt
that he did not belong any more.19 Such feelings probably intensified
in the following years. The more indirect consequences of the Nazi
takeover were also significant, leading to a decrease in cultural and
educational programs, which constituted a clear contrast to the Wei-
mar schedule.20
112 Monika Pater

Furthermore, with the intention of developing new forms of

‘völkische’ entertainment (i.e., from the German folk and culture) in
compliance with the people,21 listeners were asked to contribute to
the shows, for instance by submitting traditional folk songs, jokes, rid-
dles, or funny stories from their lives.22 This combination of letters,
riddles, and the chance of winning small prizes if the riddles were
solved correctly appealed very strongly to listeners, as the example of
the popular series Das interessiert auch Dich! (This will interest you
too!), broadcast by the Leipzig station, demonstrated. Part of this reg-
ular show was called ‘From the Listener: The Best Jokes of the Month.’
It also included riddles posted by listeners which rounded off each
transmission. The average number of listeners’ letters to this series
allegedly amounted to 10,000 per month.23 The benchmark used to
evaluate cultural products such as folk songs or jokes, for instance,
was marked by the attributes ‘arteigen’ (meaning here, racially ade-
quate) and ‘artfremd’ (not adequate).24 Hence, radio makers defined
what was to be considered typically German on the radio as well as in
other cultural spheres. As a consequence, they determined who be-
longed to ‘the people’ and who did not. Radio shows such as this one
excluded the discriminated in subtle ways. Dedicated opponents of
the system or those defined as racially or socially ‘undesirable’ were
probably less able to contribute merry events from their daily lives or
traditional songs due to the discriminating everyday circumstances
they were exposed to and/or were forced to live in. In turn, by con-
structing a particular cultural community this kind of series provided
those considered part of the Volksgemeinschaft with a feeling of be-
longing and identity.
However, this is a generic feature of media output and not specific
to National Socialism’s broadcasting. Morley describes similar mecha-
nisms of power in present-day programs: ‘By the very way (and to the
very extent that) a programme signals to members of some groups
that it is designed for them and functions as an effective invitation
to their participation in social life, it will necessarily signal to mem-
bers of other groups that it is not for them and indeed, that they are
not among the invitees to its particular forum of sociability.’25 Hence,
targeting an imagined audience with certain properties can in itself
result in the exclusion of others who do not share these properties or
cultural background. Yet, specific to NS Germany was the extent of ex-
clusion, and the mainly anti-Semitic criteria of exclusion.
Anti-Semitism was openly evident in the weekly transmitted series
74 Mark Winokur

and technology. In an article on nineteenth-century whiteface, James

P. Byrne asserts that ‘whiteface and blackface were not only associated
in theatricality; in a more profound sense, they both replicated similar
stereotypes based on racist readings of black physiognomy.’50 Byrne
further argues that these categories were fungible: ‘This temporal as-
sociation of Irish and black minstrel shows would lead to a syncretism
and even suffusion of stereotypical tropes between both styles, and
for a brief period, although driven by different ideologies, these two
theatrical styles would become almost synonymous, allowing actors
to move easily between representations of the staged Irishman and
the staged Negro, the Paddy and the Darkie, the Irish whiteface and
the blackface.’51
As if to emphasize the Creole tendency of rotoscoping to render race
visually ambiguous, Fleischer makes several films in which he traces
the movements of two of the leading black figures of the day: Cab Cal-
loway and Louis Armstrong. The more visibly racist tracing occurs
in the Armstrong film. However, the only way to see an early Louis
Armstrong perform the 1931 Sam Theard song ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re
Dead You Rascal You’ is to watch the 1932 Fleischer cartoon I’ll Be Glad
When You’re Dead You Rascal You.52 These rather remarkable films are
also some of the earliest cinematic recordings of very famous and now
very standard jazz tunes and artists. In other words, these cartoons are
foundational moments both in the recording of African American jazz
and in rotoscope technology. During these moments, the Fleischers
reconceive traditional racist portrayals as Creole representation.
However, this rather complex racialized modernism is not often
discussed because the cartoons are, of course, also self-evidently rac-
ist. The live-action head of Louis Armstrong in I’ll Be Glad is replaced
(rather than actually rotoscoped) by an animated demon’s head pur-
suing Betty Boop, presumably with the intent to rape, maim, kill, boil,
eat, and commit other jungle savageries. While they are introduced
as visual figure/ground games like those in the Felix films, the film’s
‘jungle bunny’ cannibals are visibly stereotypical. Betty Boop’s Brook-
lyn accent is by contrast celebratory of white, new-immigrant ethnic-
ity. However, the lyrics of Armstrong’s version of ‘I’ll Be Glad’ are his
own; he changes Theard’s original lyrics to include such lines as: ‘You
bought my wife a bottle of Coca Cola,/So you could play on her Vic-
trola.’ The line is a self-conscious reference to recording technology,
and jibes with the rest of the self-conscious reflexivity of the Fleischer
film.
114 Monika Pater

ment in other industrialized countries, the number of wireless sets

multiplied quickly during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1942, there existed a
radio set in approximately every second German household.32
In 1933–4, the overt propagandistic character of the program did not
motivate people to listen. Quickly, it became obvious that listeners
could not be forced to switch on the radio. However, as it was so im-
portant to keep people listening, Goebbels underlined the necessity
of entertaining a hard-working population via the wireless. From 1935
onward, radio stations introduced a number of new shows, embedded
in a discourse about spending leisure time with and through broad-
casting.33
However, one should be careful not to take this discourse too se-
riously as that might lead to reproducing NS views concerning the
success of their propaganda34 and to disregarding the agency of the
listeners. Although the aim was clearly defined as increasing the
performance and the commitment of the workforce (constructed
as male) and their wives, the daily schedule owed more to the con-
ditions of production and reception than to the propaganda aims of
the ministry of propaganda. Taking into account the circumstances of
listening, the Deutschlandsender (DS, German broadcasting station)
developed a program schedule including standardized formats based
on the tacit knowledge of daily routines. Thus, the wireless was now
being turned into a companion for the whole day. The recurring daily
schedule included first the early morning shows, to cheer people up
on their way to work, then the factory break shows and the Serenade
to the Housewife, followed by a lunch break show called Sundries from
2 until 3 (Allerlei von 2 bis 3), which offered music and almost no talk
during the time people were expected to hold their siestas. The time
slot from 3 to 5:30 p.m. addressed women and children, while the
daily show And Now Is Evening Leisure intended to offer ‘merry spir-
its and good entertainment at a time when the worker tiredly returns
from work.’ This series was primarily composed of music and variety
shows.35 Here, leisure time was presented as complementing work.
The program schedule was, moreover, deeply gendered, particu-
larly the notion of the male working day with its clearly marked be-
ginning and end, and the ceaseless work of the housewife organized
the schedule. Again, however, that was not specific to Germany. In
fact, in many industrialized countries, the emergence of the wireless
as a mass medium was connected to addressing housewives as radio
consumers, with special attention given to programs considered rel-
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 115

evant.36 But the specific ideological nature of the German schedule

became evident when the NS Frauenschaft in vain demanded pro-
grams for working women.37 This is the only example so far discovered
where the ideological aims (in this case the reproduction of traditional
gender roles) were more important than the attempt to reach out to a
specific group in the audience.
The program schedule, addressing a family audience, changed very
little between 1935 and 1939. Any deviation from the scheme was due
to exceptional political events such as the annexation of Austria in
1938.38 The structure’s relative stability indicated the development of
routines in production and reception. ‘“How to do broadcasting,” in
all respects, had to be discovered,’39 and the solution to the problem
of how best to fill the available air time was found more or less at the
same time in Germany and Britain. The answer was serial production
and fixed schedules.
The recurring and recursive daily structure was developed alongside
a weekly structure which also reflected the desire to organize a fixed
schedule. The names of the variety shows Blue Monday (broadcast
from Breslau)40 and Merry Saturday Afternoon from Cologne already
showed their function of entertaining and consoling their audience
on particular days of the week. The attribute ‘recursive’ points to the
feature of serial production as a means of ensuring predictability. The
format, and with it the presenter(s), the signature tunes, and stand-
ardized openings and closings, remained unaltered. At the same time,
applying a program format allowed for variations which were in turn
expected by the audience, and were also part of the promise to enter-
tain and please.41
This program structure encouraged the use of the wireless as a com-
panion throughout the whole day. It is difficult to say to what extent
this became daily practice in the 1930s. However, unpublished letters
from listeners stored in the archives of the Station Cologne (WDR)
indicate that the mentioned examples, offering music and carefree,
cheerful talk, were accepted quite well. The letters suggest that at least
the early morning shows with their time check announcements be-
came increasingly important to the daily routine of radio listeners:

Every morning my eldest leaves merrily for school; he tells me ‘Mami, the
radioman has said it’s time to go to school, therefore I have to go now.’
They like to listen to the jokes Mr Rauher makes. So, early in the morning
the wireless brings some cheerfulness into our home.42
116 Monika Pater

Another listener wrote:

Thank God we have got our old wireless back as in former years. Each
of us leaves the house early now to arrive in the office on time, and the
children are not late for school anymore. Our Mr Rauher sees to that.43

Apparently, the time check announcements became even more im-

portant during the war, as people were tired because of the nightly air
raids and needed a reminder of the exact time and the incentive of
cheerful music to get them going.44
Therefore, at least the early morning shows met the requirements of
some of their listeners and quickly became part of a daily routine. The
statement ‘Thank God we have got our old wireless back as in former
years’ also indicates that at least this particular listener had come to
expect this kind of service by 1934 and expressed his annoyance at a
perceived break in routines (probably referring to 1933). It appears
that the new medium became closely entwined with the everyday
routines of its audience. Moores refers to this as ‘dailiness,’ a concept
which points to the ‘ritual function and emotional significance [of re-
curring practices] in the day-to-day cultures’ of listeners.45 Indeed, the
early morning shows from Cologne helped listeners to structure their
everyday social surroundings, thereby providing them with a sense of
returning to somewhat more stable and safe circumstances.
However, as the second letter referred to above indicates, listeners
found it difficult to differentiate these kinds of shows from those of the
late 1920s and early 1930s. To appear compatible with the ideas of Na-
tional Socialism, these shows were therefore framed by National So-
cialist rhetoric and presented as following the spirit of ‘Aus dem Volk
für das Volk’ (From the people to the people) and were still in line with
the ideologically oriented broadcasts offered in the transitional period
from Weimar to National Socialism. The attempts to turn the wireless
into a companion concurred with the withdrawal to private space that
could be observed during the 1930s. Clearly, this process was partly
due to National Socialism’s efforts to integrate everybody at any time
into the national-ethnic community while commanding demonstra-
tions of loyalty in public spaces.

Variety Shows: Popular Culture ‘from Above’

Cheerful and entertaining programming, with variety shows as just

one example, was considered an important means to motivate the
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 117

audience to listen to the wireless.46 Radio variety shows consisted of

vaudeville acts, which were summarized under a broad general theme
to give the acts a common denominator, as well as musical acts, which
constituted about 60 per cent of each of these broadcasts. Variety
shows were also in line with the retreat to the private realm, which is
why they were able to contribute so well to the already growing con-
sensus and tacit acceptance of National Socialism in Germany. Yet, to
be successful in its ideological aim, radio programming had to offer its
listeners some kind of gratification. Such gratification may have been
in the form of the ‘continuity with a difference’ the shows offered,47 as
well as the integration of radio listening into daily or weekly routines.
In his discussion of the budget of the Ministry for Popular Enlight-
enment and Propaganda, Daniel Mühlenfeld has recently pointed out
that there was another strong incentive to offer an attractive program:
the broadcasting fees, which on average provided more than 90 per
cent of the ministry’s budget. Thus there were concrete economic mo-
tives to court the existing listeners and to attract new ones.48
Listeners chose specific shows to form part of their everyday life
and disregarded others. It is interesting to consider the relations that
existed between particular structural factors such as schedule and so-
ciability and the content of a specific show. The following refers to the
show Merry Saturday Afternoon broadcast by the Station Cologne. The
show was quite popular, and it is considered one of the first block-
busters of the time. It was the prototype of a variety show and a typi-
cal example of a seemingly apolitical entertainment program. At the
same time, it was clearly in line with the idea of a cheerful after-work
companion. Moreover, it was presented as derived ‘from the people.’
In the pre-war years, the politics of humour consisted of presenting
seemingly apolitical entertainment shows, which were openly draw-
ing on the successful formulas of vaudeville shows and cabarets. Thus,
the origins of radio variety shows lay in the music halls and stage vari-
eties which had provided entertainment for industrialized cities since
the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, stage variety, be it cho-
rus line, stand-up comedy, or even political cabaret, became popular
in all milieux.49 Hence, when developing radio entertainment, broad-
casters were able to draw on established popular forms of entertain-
ment. Consequently, one may assume that the succession of songs,
gags, and other acts was familiar to at least an urban audience, that
is, the majority of listeners. Similarly, Scannell and Cardiff trace the
development of entertainment formats in British broadcasting back
to music hall and stage variety.50 However, these urban forms of enter-
 Creole Cartoons 77

Fleischer rotoscoping tends to ‘unhome’ the animated character,

creating tension between the medium of animation and the move-
ments of realistic photography; then, between the rotoscoped figure
and the hand-drawn cel; and, finally, between the rotoscoped charac-
ter and photographed background and characters. (Fleischer charac-
ters almost never appear in a rotoscoped environment.) Rotoscoping
becomes a technical innovation tied to a racialized feeling of rootless-
ness that, while operating within a racist studio system, is itself an
experiment in deforming the traces of ethnicity and race as a way of
playing with those traces.
The significance of finding Creolism in early animation technol-
ogy is in part that one may talk about its perseverance throughout the
history of American animation. Thus, for example, the evolution of
Disney rotoscoping suggests an anti-minor sensibility; it establishes
a kitschy vision of whiteness as an ideal norm to be adopted by white-
flight suburbanites and their children. In contrast, rotoscoping that
follows Fleischer will tend to be absorbed with ethnic representation
as play, in films as obvious as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and
its analogies between Toontown and Coontown, and as subtle as the
character coloration in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and A
Scanner Darkly (2006).54 In its successive attempts to reimagine im-
migration, race, and ethnicity, much American animation posits a
complicated relationship between alterity and emerging cinematic
technologies that is not simply racist, but is rather a series of attempts
at strategies of ethnic amelioration, synthesis, inclusion, exclusion,
and containment. And, while this technological imbrication is most
visible in low-comedy animation precisely because comic film genres
tend to evade the kind of scrutiny that high-profile dramatic films at-
tract, it gets reduplicated in other specialized film technologies that
rarely get discussed in terms of race: modelling, optical effects, or ear-
ly sound and colour experiments.
My largest conclusion, which I would suggest only tentatively here,
and for which the notion of Creole animation has been a sort of stalk-
ing horse, is that race and ethnicity are imbricated, not just in theme,
character, and narration, but in the technologies of film representa-
tion. The conditions of production help to shape not just the narrative
but also the medium that shapes the narrative and, in turn, the condi-
tions of production. For a variety of reasons, the pre-Hollywood and
early Hollywood film industries were deeply invested in discourses
about race. The transmutation of that discourse into film involved the
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 119

In fact, the three ‘jolly fellows’ ‘from the midst of the national com-
munity’ were the show’s main attraction. They linked music per-
formances with funny dialogues and gags. They interacted with each
other and with audience members who watched the live show. They
made jokes on marriage and family life, and they introduced the per-
formers. Two of these three ‘jolly fellows’ represented regional stock
characters: Hans Salcher represented the typical man from Cologne,
a homey sort of guy, always cheerful and funny, and liking his drink.
Karl Wilhelmi, the second stereotypical character, was from north-
ern Germany, a rather slow man with dry humour, and always a little
stand-offish. The third ‘jolly fellow,’ Rudi Rauher, was portrayed as a
‘man of the world’ with the narrative function of balancing the other
two contrasting characters. As this contrast made the dialogues work,
Rudi Rauher told the majority of the jokes. As in numerous other short
gags and jokes, the private sphere and the little challenges of everyday
life were the primary topics of their conversations. These included,
for instance, Rudi’s receding brow, Hans’s fondness for beer, which
regularly landed him in trouble with his wife, and the boyish pranks
of Hermann, Hans’s son. With these timeless issues, derived from the
realm of family life and male friendship, the program aided listeners
in turning their backs on the wider, particularly political, world.56 In
constructing for example the typical man from the Rhine area, the
author of the show drew on stereotypes for personality, manner of
speech, and other characteristics, which were well known through-
out Germany, so that listeners knew what to expect. The local char-
acters were variations of the stock character ‘petty bourgeois’ with his
endearing weakness for living in humble surroundings. These stere-
otypes had already become popular in Germany in the nineteenth
century, continued to be successful in the 1920s, and were still popu-
lar in the era of the new media, radio and film.57 Conventional ele-
ments such as these characters asserted the audience’s relationship
with members of their own society and culture.58
The main act of the show, the ‘Laterna Magica,’ stood in contrast to
their talks. The ‘jolly fellows’ presented curious events from all over the
world. Although couched in an exotic outfit, these events also told sto-
ries of ordinary people, for instance, stories of pupils who came up with
innovative ways of cheating, or of a professor who transplanted animal
fur as a treatment for hair loss. Again, this applies to entertainment in
general. In the limited world which is represented, an acceptable and
reassuring social order exists. ‘Providing that order and reassurance is
what entertainers have always done for their audiences.’59
120 Monika Pater

To a large extent, the comical effects of the show probably derived

from the way these stories were told, particularly from the combina-
tion and repetition of jokes and proverbial catchphrases, as well as the
slow understanding of the Hamburgian. Scannell and Cardiff explain
the same mechanism working in British radio shows: ‘Like the private
jokes of a family, radio comedy built up its far-fetched associations,
while remaining rooted in the charm of the familiar. One resource that
could always be relied upon as a shared point of reference available to
all listeners was the culture of radio itself.’60 This probably applied to
German radio variety shows of the 1930s as well.
From 1937 onwards any reference to politics, the state, religion, the
police, or the army was forbidden.61 This of course limited the the-
matic scope further: the only topics left for sketch comedy were from
the private realm. Although the proportion of word-based entertain-
ment programs diminished during the war, sketch comedy seems to
have been broadcast all over Germany and the occupied territories.
Produced mainly by the propaganda troops,62 recordings of the short
comic scenes have survived that show the thematic scope: ‘The Blue
Letter,’ where a secretary takes a dictation which turns out to be a
marriage proposal and her dismissal by the head of the firm at the
same time (May 1944); or ‘Directions for Use’ (August 1944), in which a
couple-to-be operates along a gender-specific set of directions meant
to ensure ‘success,’ i.e., becoming engaged to each other. However, the
formulaic directions at first impede a happy ending.63 During the war,
when German everyday life was characterized by largely absent men
and an increasingly difficult life, the necessarily apolitical word-based
entertainment resorted to fabricating scenes of happiness that again
drew on an imagined social order that was stable and reassuring.
Most social activities recur daily and weekly. But there are other re-
curring routines throughout the year, usually tied to seasonal feasts
and activities. Like other variety shows, Merry Saturday Afternoon re-
ferred to the course of the year as well. In the early twentieth century,
summer became synonymous with ‘vacation time,’ and broadcasting
picked up on that notion. Reasons could be twofold. It was a typical
feature of NS Propaganda to picture characters who had little money
but were still able to go to Austria or even Italy for a holiday. But at
the same time, broadcast authors who were constantly on the lookout
for new material happily took up the topic of vacation. At any rate, in
the only remaining typescript of the show, from August 1938, the three
‘jolly fellows’ focus on the subject of vacation. The topic was almost
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 121

self-evidently represented at a time when, due to the efforts of the lei-

sure organization ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (literally strength through joy),
people knew that the average guy no longer had to stay at home for
the holiday. The process of linking summer and vacation left its marks.
Consequently, it was picked up on the radio, which in turn contrib-
uted to this process.
Presenting the petty bourgeois at large, the ‘jolly fellows’ would
climb the Austrian mountain Watzmann to play cards on its sum-
mit instead of admiring the view, or they would argue about who
might act as a Venetian gondolier, steering an uptight married couple
through the canals. The couple itself would not be interested in sight-
seeing; the wife would plan to write a postcard in order to show off in
front of the neighbours, and her husband would look for a pub serving
German beer.64 The butt of the joke was the petty bourgeois, with his
limited world-view, who was probably contrasted by contemporary
listeners with the ideal sightseer as represented by the advertisements
of ‘Strength through Joy.’ The audience always had the chance to com-
pare the scenes presented with their own experience.
It is likely that the familiarity of the show’s content and therefore
its sociable properties made it successful. According to Scannell, the
relationship between broadcasters and their audience is a social one
that ‘lacks any specific aim or purpose.’ He contends that this even
applies to content with persuasive intentions, arguing that the deci-
sion to listen constitutes ‘a social commitment in the communicative
form of every programme.’65 Although the institutional authority still
lies with those producing a program, thus setting a decisive frame for
the production of meaning, they are limited in their ability to control
the conditions of listening. As a consequence, radio talk needed to be
adapted to domestic settings of reception. It needed to address lis-
teners in a friendly and discursive style.66 The colloquial term ‘Goeb-
belsschnauze,’ coined in 1938 to depict the smaller version of the
Volksempfänger, the DKE (German Small Receiver), invoked the blare
of political speeches. However, this mode of address was not appreci-
ated by those who coined and used this term. In contrast, the present-
ers of Merry Saturday Afternoon were described as belonging to the
people: ‘From these three the people speak, and the people listen to
these three.’67
Trying to explain the popularity of the show, its author Theo Rausch
also drew on the bond with ‘the people’: ‘We are standing in your
midst, and what we are saying is what you would say in exactly the
80 Mark Winokur

24 Obituary for Pat Sullivan, co-creator of Felix the Cat, in Smith’s Weekly, 25
February 1933.
25 For example, in the musical, whose ‘myth of spontaneity’ has been fa-
mously recounted by Jane Feuer in ‘The Self-Reflective Musical and the
Myth of Entertainment,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 2, no. 3 (Au-
gust 1977): 313–26.
26 For information about the importance of animation unions, see, for ex-
ample, Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Un-
ions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2006).
27 See, for example, Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1957; originally published as Film als Kunst, 1932);
Fernand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris
(Chicago: Open Court, 1998; originally published as Cours de linguistique
générale, 1916); and Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory,
trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1969; essays written between 1928
and 1945).
28 Felix Gets Broadcasted, directed by Otto Messmer (Pat Sullivan Cartoons,
1923).
29 See Mark Winokur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity and 1930s
Hollywood Film Comedy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
30 Felix in Hollywood, directed by Otto Messmer (Pat Sullivan Cartoons,
1923).
31 On Sullivan’s origins see Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 29. On Messmer’s
origins see Douglas C. McGill, ‘Obituary: Otto Messmer Is Dead at 91; Cre-
ated “Felix the Cat” Films,’ New York Times, 29 October 1983, 32.
32 Henry T. Sampson, That’s Enough Folks: Black Images in Animated Car-
toons, 1900–1960 (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998).
33 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpre-
tive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Crossroad, 1988).
34 The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland (Warner Brothers, 1927).
35 Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, directed by Hugh Harman (Leon Schlesinger Stu-
dios, 1929).
36 Sampson, That’s Enough Folks, 3.
37 Ibid., 8.
38 Ibid., 12.
39 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 155.
40 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,’ trans. James Stra-
chey, Standard Edition, vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Insti-
tute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 227–32.
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 123

vidual wireless was a new experience for the majority of listeners in

the 1930s, and routines in listening to the programs and handling the
radio set had not yet been developed.72 The aim of attracting people
to the radio and of keeping those already listening tuned in led to the
development of a schedule structure that mirrored the characteristics
of modern mass media in its daily or serial character. This should be
recognized as the success of the medium itself rather than the success
of a perfect propaganda plan. Integrating the wireless into daily rou-
tines, those defined as belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft were able
to use it as a marker of an ordered social environment. The entertain-
ment programs, as well as the overall program schedule, supported
the withdrawal into the private, seemingly apolitical space of home
and family. It thereby contributed to the acquiescence and stability of
National Socialism. In doing so, the listeners as well as the producers
tacitly accepted the exclusion of those defined as not belonging, who
were not even seen as part of the audience. Constructing an audience
through shows demonstrates the subtle use everyday NS propaganda
put the radio to. The radio schedule was designed to integrate only
the racially and socially desirable into the Volksgemeinschaft. How-
ever, the significance of the wireless and its programs needs to be put
into perspective by a consideration of the increasing overall prosper-
ity through economic revival. Consequently, the experience of listen-
ing to the wireless merged with other experiences and added up to a
general sense of improvement.73

notes

1 Passage from the poem by Bertolt Brecht, ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (To
Posterity): ‘Was sind das für Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast
ein Verbrechen ist / Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten ein-
schließt!’ Translated by H.R. Hays. http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/8787-
Bertolt-Brecht-To-Posterity (accessed 15 September 2009). For the
German text see Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9 (Frankfurt/M.
1967), 722.
2 See Thymian Bussemer, ‘“Über Propaganda zu diskutieren, hat wenig
Zweck.” Zur Medien- und Propagandapolitik von Joseph Goebbels,’ in
Das Goebbels-Experiment, Propaganda und Politik, ed. Lutz Hachmeister
and Michael Kloft (Munich: DVA, 2005), 54; Konrad Dussel, ‘Radio Pro-
gramming, Ideology and Cultural Change: Fascism, Communism and
Liberal Democracy, 1920s–1950s,’ in Mass Media, Culture and Society in
3

Talking War, Debating Unity: Order,

Conflict, and Exclusion in ‘German
Humour’ in the First World War

MARTINA KESSEL

The production of humour was a vast industry in Germany during the

First World War. Joke collections, satirical journals, and funny post-
cards were best-sellers in contemporary popular culture. Furthermore,
a lot of them projected a particular brand of ‘German humour’ as one
of those cultural traits that supposedly set German culture apart from
Western civilization, associating it with harmony, truth, and German
‘Gemüt’ (i.e. soul and ‘true’ feeling). If mentioned at all by historians,
humour in war times has so far been mostly understood as subver-
sive or affirmative. But the sheer amount of humorous products, their
ubiquitous and repetitive presence, and the never-ending debates
between producers, censors, and consumers about the permissible
suggest that their meaning goes beyond being just entertainment or
an outlet for frustration. In this essay, humour is understood as an im-
portant means of communication, not only during the war but also
about its impact, that tried to make sense of rapid social changes and
helped to articulate fears, hope, and anger.1
Addressed to both soldiers and civilians, humour in the First World
War circled around the dimensions of order, conflict, and exclusion.
First of all, this article argues that humour presented as ‘German’
served as a prescriptive narrative of order during the First World War.
Drawing on a tradition that reached back into the nineteenth centu-
ry, humour producers used it to express both the sense of national
unity and the willingness to fight. Projecting an ordered society, joke
collections and humorous postcards also functioned as narrative and
visual devices to articulate how criticism could be voiced. Secondly,
however, conflicts between censorship authorities and producers
about the content and the boundaries of what could be said and in
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 125

in which audiences made sense of the new medium of radio in Britain,

see Shaun Moores, ‘“The Box on the Dresser”: Memories of Early Radio
and Everyday Life,’ in Media, Culture and Society 10 (1994): 23–40; for Ger-
many see Monika Pater and Uta C. Schmidt, ‘“Vom Kellerloch bis hoch
zur Mansard’ ist alles drin vernarrt” – Zur Veralltäglichung des Radios im
Deutschland der 1930er Jahre,’ in Medienalltag: Domestizierungsprozesse
alter und neuer Medien, ed. Jutta Röser (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozial-
wissenschaften, 2006), 103–16.
13 This is not to say there has been no analysis of entertainment programs.
See for example Nanny Drechsler, Die Funktion der Musik im deutschen
Rundfunk 1933–1945 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988), or Wolfram Wessels,
Hörspiele im Dritten Reich: Zur Institutionen-, Theorie- und Literaturge-
schichte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985).
14 There were ten regional stations (twelve from 1938), plus the national
Deutschlandsender, and the Kurzwellensender (KWS, shortwave transmit-
ter) broadcasting overseas. For an institutional history of German broad-
casting see Ansgar Diller, Rundfunkpolitik im Dritten Reich (Munich: dtv,
1980); for an overview of program development see Konrad Dussel, Hör-
funk in Deutschland: Politik, Programm, Publikum (1923–1960) (Potsdam:
Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2002).
15 Diller, Rundfunkpolitik, 222; Christa Nink, ‘Folgen nationalsozialistischer
Personalpolitik im Westdeutschen Rundfunk 1933. Biographische Noti-
zen – Ein Arbeitsbericht,’ Mitteilungen des Studienkreises Rundfunk und
Geschichte 19, no. 4 (1993): 176. See also Daniela Münkel, ‘Produktions-
sphäre,’ in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1: Radio im Nationalsozialismus
zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von
Saldern (Tübingen, edition discord, 1998), 51–6.
16 See Glenn R. Cuomo, Career at the Cost of Compromise: Günter Eich’s Life
and Work in the Years 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989).
17 Münkel, ‘Produktionssphäre,’ 59.
18 Ibid., 99; Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 186.
19 Andrew Bergerson, ‘Listening to the Radio in Hildesheim, 1923–53,’ Ger-
man Studies Review 24 (2001): 83–113.
20 Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 186.
21 Alfred Mai, ‘Wo ist die Unterhaltung?’ Schlesische Monatshefte 2, no. 2
(1935): 98–9.
22 Broadcasting memories of Gustav Kneip, written 15 January 1966, West-
German Broadcasting Station (WDR) Historical Archive 29,12x1. Employed
by the Westdeutsche Rundfunk AG (WERAG, West-German Broadcasting
Company) since 1927, Kneip was responsible for the newly established
126 Monika Pater

‘folk music’ programs in 1933. One of his tasks was the search for un-
known or forgotten folk songs. An appeal to listeners resulted in about
5,000 responses, which in turn led to the series Songs Posted by Listeners
(Lieder, die Hörer uns einsandten). Similar to the strategy of the Cologne
station, the Frankfurt station also placed considerable emphasis on folk
songs, as can be observed in its self-portrayal 1934. See ‘Der Reichssender
Frankfurt,’ Reichsrundfunk: Entwicklung, Aufbau, Bedeutung, compiled by
the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft 10 (1934): 65–6. Similarly, the Reichssen-
der Breslau asked its listeners to submit funny stories (‘lustige Begeben-
heiten’); see Mai, ‘Wo ist die Unterhaltung?’ 99, and Otto Paul Stehmann,
Geschichte und Bedeutung der Leipziger Sender: Ein Beitrag zur Publizistik
des Rundfunks (Dresden: Dittert, 1939), 81.
23 Stehmann, Leipziger Sender, 80.
24 Hertha Ohling, ‘Die Volkstumsarbeit des Reichssenders Köln: Volkskunde
und Volkstumsarbeit – eine “politische” Aufgabe unserer Zeit!’ Reichs-
rundfunk no. 1 (1941–2): 16.
25 David Morley, Home Territories, Media, Mobility and Identity (London:
Routledge, 2000), 111.
26 German Broadcasting Archive, Frankfurt am Main (DRA), Pressedienst
RS Köln no. 4 (January 1938): 2. In 1937, 3,060 listeners’ letters reached
the show; see Pressedienst RS Köln no. 31 (July 1938): 1. Motivated by the
necessity to prove ‘Aryan’ descent, and supported by this program, family
tree research became a widespread activity. The status of one’s own fam-
ily, and thereby of each family member, was thus enhanced. Seen in the
context of alienation and insecurity in a modern society, especially at the
end of the Weimar Republic, the proof of a continuous family tree might
have led to social placement and contributed to the creation of identity
and a sense of belonging. The fact that this show survived the re-orien-
tation from political to apolitical entertainment indicates that it received
some response.
27 DRA, ‘Zum 150. Male: Wir treiben Familienforschung’ (For the 150th time:
We do family research), broadcast 26 January 1938, 16:00–16–30, Pressedi-
enst RS Köln no. 4 (January 1938): 2; and ‘Am 1. März zum 200. Male’ (The
200th broadcast on 1 March), Pressedienst RS Köln no. 7 (February 1939):
11.
28 Being exempted from paying the broadcasting fee was one of the poli-
cies by which the NS state tried to encourage the purchase of a radio set;
therefore, the definition of the social groups who were able to take advan-
tage of this policy indicates the target audience. This audience included,
for example, war veterans as well as those with a low income, provided
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 127

they were not of Jewish faith. See Uta C. Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ in

Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1: Radio im Nationalsozialismus zwischen
Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern
(Tübingen: edition discord, 1998), 299.
29 See Bergerson, ‘Listening to the Radio in Hildesheim.’
30 See Michael Hensle, ‘Rundfunkverbrechen vor nationalsozialistischen
Sondergerichten. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der Urteilspraxis in
der Reichshauptstadt Berlin und der südbadischen Provinz‘ (PhD diss.,
TU Berlin, 2005), 47–50, http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2005/
1074/pdf/hensle_michael.pdf. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich
Security Main Office, RSHA) was formed in September 1939 through the
merger of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, i.e., Security Agency), the Sicherheits-
polizei (consisting of the Gestapo, Secret State Police, and the Criminal
Police). The RSHA was one of twelve subordinated departments in the SS
with the function of identifying and fighting ‘enemies of the Reich.’
31 Wessels, Hörspiele, 126–7.
32 Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 292; Chup Friemert, ‘Radiowelten. Objektge-
schichte und Hörformen,’ in Chiffren des Alltags: Erkundungen zur Ge-
schichte der industriellen Massenkultur, ed. Wolfgang Ruppert (Marburg:
Jonas, 1993), 77. In 1941, 16 million wireless sets were registered; cf. Reichel,
schöne Schein, 160. This is comparable to the increase in other industrial-
ized countries. However, the number of sets per 1,000 inhabitants was
lower than, for example, in Great Britain or Scandinavian countries; see
Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 223.
33 Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 143ff., 189–90.
34 See also Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 199; Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutsch-
land, 177.
35 DRA Pressedienst Deutschlandsender 1937, Mitteilungen Reichsrundfunk-
gesellschaft 1935.
36 This has been demonstrated by research into the implementation of the
wireless. For Britain see Moores, ‘Box on the Dresser’; for the U.S., Susan
Smulyan, ‘Radio Advertising to Women in Twenties America: A Latchkey
to Every Home,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13 (1993):
299–314; and for Germany, Uta C. Schmidt and Monika Pater, ‘“Adriennes
Hochantenne”: Geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte medialer Durchsetzungs-
prozesse am Beispiel des Rundfunks,’ Feministische Studien 15 (1997):
21–33, and Carsten Lenk, Die Erscheinung des Rundfunks: Vermittlungs-,
Aneignungs- und Nutzungsweisen eines neuen Mediums 1923 bis 1932
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 114–15.
37 Münkel, ‘Produktionssphäre,’ 113–14.
128 Monika Pater

38 Ibid.
39 Scannell, as cited in Moores, media/theory, 18.
40 Blue Monday was broadcast for the fiftieth time on 29 June 1936. Hence,
its first broadcast probably took place at the end of 1935. See Federal Ar-
chives Koblenz, R 79, no. 784, Pressedienst RS Breslau (June 1936) (now
archived in the Federal Archives Berlin).
41 Moores, Media/theory, 19.
42 ‘Der Älteste geht morgens so frisch und fröhlich zur Schule; dann sagt
er: Mutti, der Radiomann hat gesagt, es sei Zeit zur Schule, nun muß ich
gehen. Sie hören gerne, wenn Herr Rauher so allerhand Späße sagt. So
bringt uns der Rundfunk schon morgens Frohsinn ins Haus.’ WDR, His-
torical Archive, February 1934, unpubl. letter no. 70 to the director of the
RS Cologne, Glasmeier, as cited by Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 342.
43 ‘Gott sei Dank haben wir wieder unser altes Radio wie früher. Jeder
kommt wieder zeitig ins Büro und die Kinder auch nicht mehr zu spät zur
Schule, dafür sorgt ja unser Herr Rauher.’ WDR, Historical Archive, March
1934, unpubl. letter no. 40, as cited by Schmidt, ibid.
44 See the reports from the district (Gau) Westfalia-South on the broadcast-
ing schedule, as cited by Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 342.
45 Moores, media/theory, 17.
46 This kind of radio entertainment has not attracted as much attention as
another product of popular culture, the Wunschkonzert (musical request
program) that showed the propagandistic intentions more openly. See,
for example, Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 224–39, and Hans-Jörg Koch,
Das Wunschkonzert im NS-Rundfunk (Köln, Weimer, Wien: Böhlau,
2003).
47 Hans Dieter Schäfer, ‘Das gespaltene Bewusstsein: Über die Lebenswirk-
lichkeit in Deutschland 1933–1945,’ in Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene
Bewusstsein: Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit (Munich, Wien:
Hanser, 1981), 114–62, here 121ff.; Peukert, Volksgenossen, 90–2.
48 See Daniel Mühlenfeld, ‘Joseph Goebbels und die Grundlagen der NS-
Rundfunkpolitik,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54, 5 (2006): 448.
49 Ellis, cited in Moores, media/theory, 18.
50 Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcast-
ing, vol. 1: Serving the Nation 1929–1939 (Oxford and Cambridge/MA:
Blackwell, 1991), 258.
51 The board-wide acceptance is evident in the use of communist agitprop
groups made of this format to attract a larger audience; see Peter Jelavich,
Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 211ff. For a
description of the Berlin music halls and variety shows since the end of
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 129

the nineteenth century see Wolfgang Jansen, Das Varieté, die glanzvolle
Geschichte einer unterhaltenden Kunst (Berlin: edition hentrich 1990), 87
and 192ff.
52 See, for example, Carsten Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag (Berlin: Vor-
werk 8, 1995), and more recently Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as
Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester,
NY: Camden House, 2004).
53 Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 187ff. See also Wolfgang Horn, ‘Der Reichs-
sender Köln und der “Frohe Samstagnachmittag”: Ein Regionalprogramm
im Einheitsrundfunk,’ in Rundfunk in der Region: Probleme und Mögli-
chkeiten der Regionalität, ed. Walter Först (Cologne et al: Kohlhammer,
1984), 187–204.
54 Scannell and Cardiff, Social History, 246–7.
55 ‘Achtung! Achtung! … / Ist die Milch vom Herd? / Et Badewasser ab-
gestellt? / Der Sonntagskuchen aus dem Backofen? / Kann nichts verder-
ben? / Überlaufen? / Anbrennen? / Na, dann können wir ja anfangen! /
Frohen Samstagnachmittag zusammen!’ WDR, Historical Archive, 36,12x2.
56 Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 200.
57 Ulrich Keuler, Häberle und Pfleiderer: Zur Geschichte, Machart und Funk-
tion einer populären Unterhaltungsreihe (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereini-
gung für Volkskunde, 1992), 40.
58 Harold Mendelsohn and H.T. Spretnagel, ‘Entertainment as Sociological
Enterprise,’ in The Entertainment Functions of Television, ed. Percy H.
Tannenbaum (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1980), 24.
59 Ibid., 25.
60 Scannell and Cardiff, Social History, 273.
61 See Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 245.
62 The Wehrmacht propaganda troops, known for war reporting, were also
responsible for the entertainment of troops. See Daniel Uziel, The Propa-
ganda Warriors: The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German
Home Front (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 101.
63 DRA, ‘Der blaue Brief’ (the blue letter): B 193 (17 May 1944), ‘Gebrauchsan-
weisung’ (directions for use), C 8059 (21 August 1944); for a more extensive
discussion, see Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 216ff.
64 WDR, Historical Archive, 38,12x2, p. 16.
65 Scannell, as cited in Moores, media/theory, 83.
66 Paddy Scannell, ‘Introduction, The Relevance of Talk,’ in Broadcast Talk
ed. Paddy Scannell (London: Sage 1991), 1–13.
67 ‘Aus diesen dreien spricht das Volk, diesen dreien hört das Volk zu.’ DRA,
Mitt. RRG, no. 495, 6–7, 28 April 1936.
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 87

secondary deprivations people suffered in terms of weather, food, or

other commodities. More striking were the extremely traditional and
conventional aesthetics. When printed jokes mentioned the concrete
fighting at all, they were framed in a nineteenth-century mode, just
like film comedies during the war. But conventional aesthetics should
not be cast aside with the thesis that the First World War saw the birth
of modern, ironic culture.25 Jay Winter’s argument that modern cul-
ture only helped to articulate the alienation the war engendered while
people turned to traditional cultural forms in order to find comfort in
times of grieving26 can also be applied here. At the same time, these
products must be understood as a part of popular light entertainment
that was on a secular rise, also because it answered specific needs.
Umberto Eco convincingly argued that products like serial fiction of-
fered repetitive, quasi a-historical plots whose sheer predictability an-
swered psychic needs in a society of vast changes.27 In times of war,
exactly the jokes’ conventionality could help to envision normalcy.
Recalling experiences from peace times, as they often did, they pro-
jected the continuity of a bygone world that would come back if the
war was won. At the same time, by picking up over and over again
the same experiences of deprivation, they offered ways of how to talk
about the unspeakable.28 Finally, many jokes were repetitive, but far
from diminishing their importance, this repetitiveness could help
those who lacked words or imagination to participate in the everyday
communication about the war.29
It is difficult to distinguish forms of humour that called for national-
istic drive or assured social order from caricatures or jokes that carried
potentially conflicting meanings. A lot of authors, however, and cer-
tainly those who projected their work explicitly as German humour,
left no doubt regarding their intention. Dozens of joke books like The
Joke-Sergeant (Der Witze-Feldwebel) or At Home Again (Wieder bei
Muttern), published in the series Humour for the Knapsack, depict-
ed dutiful Germans at the front and at home, finding inner strength
through affirmative humour and thus proving their superiority over
their enemies.30 This series in particular conveyed the class bias of a
lot of humour production. It portrayed soldiers as jovial infantrymen,
maybe not overly intelligent, but street-wise, good-natured, and ready
to give their lives for their country with a smile on their face. Though
at times querulous, such a humorous soldier and his equally working-
class wife never questioned his position in the army but affirmed the
cohesion of his group.
5

Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft:

The Disappearance of Destructive
Satire in National Socialist Germany

PATRICK MERZIGER

Humour and National Socialism are currently perceived as contradic-

tions in point. The National Socialist movement is not associated with
humour of any kind. Adolf Hitler is supposed to have been ‘a deeply
humourless person’ who pursued his aim with ‘deadly seriousness.’1
Accordingly, Germany between 1933 and 1945 is said to have been
characterized by a fanatical austerity, an aggressive humourlessness,
and even a ‘bestial seriousness.’2 Popular accounts present a period in
which ‘laughter could prove deadly’ and real humour was forbidden.3
Only a cheerless and cutting, aggressive, and combative form of sat-
ire has been attributed to National Socialist Germany and its public
sphere. Postwar anthologies of NS propaganda emphasized the close
link between the National Socialist Germany and satire by presenting
eye-catching, spectacular, and harsh caricatures. They republished
caricatures of ‘the Jew’ from the Stürmer (storm trooper), the sala-
cious anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Julius Streicher,4 and war
propaganda featured in the long-established satirical newspapers
Kladderadatsch and Simplicisimus depicting the Allies and the ‘Jew’
as predators and beasts.5 On the whole, this evoked a popular image
of the German population as being bombarded and incited by a con-
stant stream of sharp political satires.
This article, however, argues that the impact and importance of
such satires and caricatures has been overrated. Actually, satire as
a means to attack opponents was so widely challenged during Na-
tional Socialism that it almost disappeared. Although NS ideologues
propagated satire as a perfect means to do politics, it became highly
unpopular among critics, audience, and also authors. The public con-
132 Patrick Merziger

stantly complained about National Socialist satires aimed at members

of the National Socialist community, the Volksgemeinschaft, as being
too harmful; furthermore, what may be more surprising, the satires
against the alleged enemies of the German Volk were received as rath-
er awkward and counterproductive.
Satire’s political importance in National Socialism therefore lies less
in its function as a weapon or a means to unify the community, than in
its disappearance and the reasons for this disappearance. After show-
ing why the impression still persists that satire was the preferred hu-
mour of National Socialist Germany, this chapter undertakes to follow
the attacks on satire and its marginalization. By finding out that this
process was initiated by ‘the people’ rather than by the regime, the in-
herent politics should become apparent to the reader. The motivation
to protest against the National Socialist satire was by no means oppo-
sition. On the contrary, the protesters took the propagandists’ prom-
ises for granted; satire did not fit in the harmonious picture of the
Volksgemeinschaft, and that is why people turned away from this kind
of humour. In a last step the chapter suggests an outlook on what kind
of humour was popular instead. People did not stop laughing after
satire disappeared; humour was one of the most popular entertain-
ment genres in National Socialist Germany. But the popular laughter
fit much better into the Volksgemeinschaft than the National Socialist
satire did.
The idea that satire was the dominant and quasi-natural form of hu-
mour for National Socialism has gone unchallenged namely because
of the theories on the link between satire and totalitarianism and be-
cause of the National Socialist eulogies on satire which saw it as a per-
fect means of propaganda. In theories about the technique, function,
and application of satirical humour, the argument goes that during
times of intense confrontation or war, political humour always works
at the expense of the opponent, aiming to exclude and degrade. Satire,
and in particular caricature as its graphic form, is believed to be the
‘derisive laugh’ per se. Peter Berger argues that satire is ‘the deliberate
use of the comic for purposes of attack’; in satire, ‘the aggressive intent
becomes the central motive of comic expression.’6 Consequently, in
studies of the politics of humour in the twentieth century, satire of-
ten became the point of departure.7 Satires and their stinging humour
were held up as a ‘mirror’ reflecting the conflicts and confrontations
of modern societies and wars,8 and were in turn understood as means
to analyse central debates of the particular period in question.9
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 133

Especially in the ‘age of extremes,’ theorists saw aggressive tech-

niques and functions as satire’s characteristics.10 For them, its central
technique was to highlight a deviation from the norm, or, to be more
exact, a deviation from the norm or idea of the satirist,11 using distor-
tion to do so.12 This satirical technique was closely linked to the politi-
cal effectiveness of satirical humour. By using distortion, the satirist
showed the target in a manner that, according to his pen, existed but
was normally not apparent. Taken to extremes, the attacked society or
ideology appeared ridiculous, provoking damnation. Satire was used
to ridicule and demean the opponent, to make him appear intolera-
ble13 by claiming to show a hidden truth. Theorists of the time believed
that such satire even resulted in the ‘annihilation’ of the adversaries.14
Another function of satire was closely connected with the destruction
of the opponent through ridicule: Henri Bergson interpreted such sat-
ire as a form of bonding for those members of society who could af-
ford to laugh. By turning on the adversary, the supposed aberration
was excluded from the community and ascribed its separate identity
as the other. By laughing at the other, one could express a sense of
belonging to a particular community.15
Based on these ideas of how satire works within a society, Anton J.
Zijderveld considered the aggressive and unifying satirical laugh as the
laugh of the twentieth century. The overwhelming thirst for power, so
characteristic of fascism and communism, suppressed ‘real’ laughter.
If there was anything to laugh about in such societies, then, accord-
ing to Zijderveld, ‘it was always at the cost of others, that is to say, the
rivals.’16 Even from a less pessimistic point of view, satire and its social
functions seemed to fit into the concept of totalitarian regimes rather
well. Because such regimes tended to draw sharp boundaries between
themselves and others by urging members to close ranks and present
an aggressive front, they seemed to relate to satire. Accordingly, its ag-
gressive forms were often assumed to be typical of authoritarianism
and of National Socialism.17
A second reason for the unchallenged assumption of a close link be-
tween National Socialism and satire can be found in the self-descrip-
tion of National Socialist propagandists as satirists. They presented
the incorporation of satires in their propaganda as a central achieve-
ment and regarded satires as pivotal for a propaganda that, from their
point of view, had proven to be successful.
In applying satire, the National Socialist party followed a general
trend in the Weimar Republic; the famous critic Alfred Kerr even de-
134 Patrick Merziger

scribed the republic as a ‘factory of contemporary satire.’18 While, until

1918, satirical magazines tried to take positions above party lines, after
1918, especially partisan satire boomed; at the end of the twenties, a
satirical journal completed the portfolio of a modern political party.
The communist party had set an example for successful campaigning.
After the communist daily the Rote Fahne (Red Flag) and the illustrat-
ed journal Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Magazine), the party
founded its own satirical newspaper, which appeared under different
titles such as Der Rote Knüppel (Red Club) and, until February 1933,
Roter Pfeffer (Red Pepper). Other parties also had their own satirical
journals, and most satirical journals underwrote a particular political
perspective.19
Starting in 1927, Joseph Goebbels, at that time Gauleiter (region-
al party leader) of Berlin, also recruited satirists to write and draw
for his newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack). Goebbels’s friend Hans
Schweitzer, better known under his pseudonym ‘Mjölnir,’ soon be-
came famous, especially for his caricatures of Bernhard Weiß, the vice-
president of the Berlin police. Weiß was the favourite aim of the Angriff
because he recognized early the threat embodied by the National
Socialist party and consequently prosecuted their violations of law.
Schweitzer depicted Weiß as ‘a Jew,’ adding such typical stereotypes
as a big nose and big glasses, and he insinuated that Weiß himself was
breaking the law by prosecuting the National Socialist party. From the
propagandist point of view, those defamatory caricatures were suc-
cessful, because they caused a stir, involuntarily supported by legal
proceedings that Weiß took against Goebbels and his co-workers.20
At the beginning of the thirties, the National Socialist party intensi-
fied efforts to establish satire as a means of propaganda because, from
1930 onward, the movement had to incorporate growing numbers of
new followers. Satire obviously appealed to the party propagandists
as an entertaining and effective medium to achieve this integration.
In 1931, several anthologies of satires were published, taken from their
various newspapers: Der Kesse Orje (The Breezy Orje),21 the fifth edi-
tion of Das Buch Isidor (The book Isidor),22 and the second edition of
Knorke (Awesome).23 In the same year, the first satirical sketches and
plays were published, as well as two magazines, the Brennessel (Sting-
ing Nettle) and the Zeitlupe (Slow Motion).
Der Kesse Orje is a good example for those early satires since it was a
compilation of satires and caricatures from the newspaper Der Angriff.
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 135

It presented Orje, its main protagonist, as an ordinary member of the

SA, and the cultural and street life of Berlin were experienced through
his eyes. Here, satirical distortion was taken to extremes. ‘The Jew,’ for
example, not only has a big nose, but is also half the size of the average
man; he is overweight and smelly. The intention clearly is to destroy
through ridicule. But it is remarkable that the author did not regard
the distortion as sufficient to achieve the goal. Most of the texts in fact
enacted the opponent’s annihilation when Orje gave them a severe
beating in the end.24
While these texts were meant to be read by convinced members
of the Nazi Party, the satirical play ‘O diese Nazis!’ (‘Oh these Nazis’)
aimed to reach a broader public.25 The protagonist is the magistrate
Ehrlich, caricatured as a confused professor, who is at the same time a
pedantic and inhumane public servant. He is confronted by the vital,
revolutionary, and cordial National Socialists, thus illustrating anoth-
er element of ideological satire, the contrast of the negative with the
positive. The author tried to make the play accessible to a new audi-
ence. Ehrlich admits in the end that he also votes for the National So-
cialists, a surprising turn without apparent motivation. The play thus
introduced the idea of conversion to National Socialism as an option
even for the middle classes.
The magazine Die Zeitlupe and even more so the Brennessel pur-
sued a similar strategy to procure a broader acceptance for National
Socialism. The Brennessel imitated the cover of the Simplicissimus,
which had developed into a conservative middle-class satirical maga-
zine in the Weimar Republic. Not only was the layout influenced by
the Simplicisimus, but in contrast to earlier satires, the plots no longer
revolved around street fights. At the end of the republic, the maga-
zine attacked the representatives of modern Weimar culture and their
products.
To sum up, before 1933, National Socialists indeed successfully
used a distinct form of satire, characterized by extreme distortion and
aimed at ‘annihilating’ the opponent. In a manner typical for ideologi-
cally motivated satire, its authors underlined their intention by con-
trasting the ridiculous opponents with National Socialist hero types.
In the clash of opinions at the end of the republic, satire proved to be
an apt form of humour for the movement. At the same time, its theo-
reticians started to proclaim loudly that satire had achieved no less
than the destruction of the political enemy.26
92 Martina Kessel

Irony helped soldiers to vent frustration, but for censors to let that
pass, soldiers had to inflect it with the notion of duty. Duty was in-
deed one of those mental dispositions that made so many of them
hold out in this war,50 and whether listeners interpreted poems or
caricatures as humorous, satirical, or bitter, to fulfil one’s duty was
central for the formulation of acceptable humour. Authorities were
quick to confiscate any product whose irony might possibly implode
the notion of duty. Able cartoonists among the soldiers did so when
they commented ironically upon drill training. Soldiers often com-
plained about drill, which took up their time in the rear. Funny post-
cards showed soldiers doing forward bends and press-ups, carrying
the inscription that soldiers would get backbone (which in German
could also mean courage) only by such drill in time-controlled dis-
cipline: ‘Ein starkes Rückgrat kriegst du nur vom Armebeugen nach
der Uhr’ (A strong backbone you will get only by doing press-ups like
clock-work).51 They were immediately censored, leaving open the
question of how many had seen and interpreted them as a particular-
ly ridiculous feature of army life after the experiences in the trenches
(see figure 3.1).
But next to the fissures that soldiers’ irony let appear in the imag-
ined community of cheerful and dutiful soldiers, other jokes, openly
anti-Semitic, in yet quite a different way belied the image of an all-in-
clusive nation. Exactly because military duty featured so prominently
in these ubiqitous little narratives, jokes throughout the war made it
overly clear that some Germans could do their duty beyond call and
still be excluded, playing with traditional anti-Semitic prejudice with-
out fear of censorship. For sure, all the sharp divisions in German so-
ciety were debated in humour all the time. Especially after 1916, jokes
about farmers cheating the urban population, about affluent mem-
bers of the upper classes taking advantage of public services they did
not need, and about gender roles going topsy-turvy abounded. But
since the beginning of the war and ever more aggressively since 1915,
when conflicts in German society belied the obsessive talk about in-
ner unity, anti-Semitic jokes and caricatures projected an essentially
different difference, drawing on an imaginary that had all along tried
to keep Jewish and German history apart.
The racist vocabulary that degraded German Jews to national aliens
had been elaborated before the war,52 and connecting Jewish and for-
eign satire as cold and unfairly critical, thereby constructing ‘Jewish’
as always and intrinsically ‘foreign,’ had been a defining feature of the
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 137

speeches and the military marches that dominated the radio program
on the newly established Labour Day.34 Therein the former political
opponents were depicted as enemies of the working class and as ‘fat
cats.’ Such National Socialist satire now became popular even on the
stages of professional theatres. The satirical play Konjunktur (Boom)
by Diedrich Loder was one of the most frequently performed com-
edies of the season from 1933 to 1934.35 It aimed at internal German
politics and ridiculed those who wished to enhance their public image
by inventing a National Socialist autobiography and by expressing an
excessive commitment to the new ideology.
But this success of satire was only a flash in the pan, fuelled rather
by the political will to spread seemingly effective propaganda than by
popular demand. Soon it turned out that the conditions for humorous
entertainment had changed fundamentally, causing satire to backfire
after 1933. Writing satires was becoming problematic, because on the
one hand, members of the Volksgemeinschaft did not want to be the
aim of mockery anymore and, on the other, satires that were external-
ly aimed seemed awkward in concentrating too much on the alleged
enemies of the Volksgemeinschaft.
The first signs of irritation can already be found in March 1933. The
Brennessel received strong complaints from readers, despite suppos-
edly being the leading satirical newspaper. Letter writers insulted the
National Socialist editors as ‘Jews, pimps, perverts and scum.’36 Again,
in September 1933, some readers went into a rage because the mag-
azine had ridiculed moralists seeking to ban make-up, fashion, and
smoking for German women. One magazine writer had depicted the
moralists’ ideal woman as an ‘old bat’ who chewed tobacco and wore
lingerie made from flannel, dressed in a sack of potatoes and with
a face glistening like streaky bacon. Those who felt attacked in turn
insisted on their vision of the decent German woman. In response,
the editors repeatedly stressed that they were not obliged to react to
anonymous and insulting complaints. However, disapproval was so
strong that in the end they were forced to prove that their view on Ger-
man women was in line with National Socialist beliefs. To this end,
they printed a speech by Ernst Roehm, the leader of the SA, demand-
ing that German women wear make-up.37 And these disputes were
not isolated cases. Due to public complaints, plays were banned, film
scripts were rewritten, and satirical texts and caricatures became im-
possible to publish.38
In reaction to such objections, satirists and journalists sought to ex-
138 Patrick Merziger

plain the necessity of satire to the general public. They argued that, in
striving for a homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft, there still existed peo-
ple who needed help by having their faults highlighted satirically. In
addition, art itself had its own laws, so the argument continued, which
made satirical interpretations necessary.39 Without negative figures or
incisive, exaggerated images of the contrast between good and evil,
the artwork would have no tension, but would only depict ‘flowery
meadows and carefree springing lambs setting the background scene
for a couple languishing in the grass, temple to temple, looking on in
rapture as the sun sets.’40 A large number of articles asked the German
population to relax when confronted with satires lampooning their
work, their religion, or their lifestyle. In short, the articles demanded
‘more humour!’
The protests, however, became more severe. The German public
was not willing to be the target of satire. From their perspective, be-
ing satirized put into doubt their being part of society at all. Finally,
there was also a reaction from the political institutions. In 1936, for
example, the Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, started a cam-
paign to stop the ridicule of Saxons.41 Up to that point the Saxons had
for decades been a popular target of satirical drawings and texts that
depicted them as provincial, meddlesome, and prying gossips.42 Mut-
schmann’s goal was now to promote publications in which ‘the Saxons
did not appear as fools and idiots, but as masters of the situation.’43 It
no longer appeared appropriate to satirize what was close to home,
and satire in general became nearly impossible.
In a democratic system, satire is a normal part of the political strug-
gle between differing viewpoints. In a society where conflicting politi-
cal positions have an equal standing, satire may be less destructive.
With a free press, victims of satire can argue back, choose their own al-
lies, and thereby still remain part of society. In its quest for unity, how-
ever, National Socialism did not allow for any alternative.44 In such a
context, being the object of ridicule could seem to result in exclusion
from society itself. Here, satire literally killed, since the subject could
then not belong to the only available community, the promoted Volks-
gemeinschaft. This fear of expulsion caused the sharp reactions, which
in turn demonstrated the widespread wish to belong.
But satirists had not only to deal with complaints from an audience
that felt deeply hurt. The satire that targeted ‘the Jew,’ emigrants, or
the English and clearly wanted to ‘annihilate’ those declared enemies
was also no longer successful. A good example of the rapid decline
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 93

3.1 Censored postcard from the First World War. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsar-
chiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv München, M Kr Bildsammlung, 97.
140 Patrick Merziger

as abhorrent, and nobody would have expected any misunderstand-

ing. Even so, Hugo Hartung got the impression that it would better to
explain his musical. To this end, he published a fictitious interview
between himself, the writer, and his protagonist, Jonny.
In the interview, Jonny speaks wistfully about his status in the Third
Reich. ‘Being famous … this is over now! That was a long time ago …
today there is no place for people like me in Germany anymore.’ To
which the writer replies: ‘Yes, that’s right. You have been completely
forgotten. More than forgotten! I must admit I don’t see any point in
reviving your name by writing an opera on you. Forgotten, buried …
that’s it.’48 And in fact, the writer was not able to explain why he had
written the parody. At most, he was able to explain the paradoxical
situation of the satirist. He wanted to eradicate Jonny by writing a sat-
ire on him, but the satire only kept his memory alive.
Critics were not amused by the parody, since, although the music
was bizarre and exaggerated, it still remained jazz.49 Consequen-
tially, in an internal assessment of Hartung’s satirical radio plays,
Willy Richartz, who was working for the Reichsendeleitung (the na-
tional radio administration) and was responsible for programming
until 1937, considered satire in general to be ‘highly questionable.’
He feared that most of the listeners might take the play seriously
because radio lacked those visual aids which in other media might
have clarified that it was a satirical piece. In his opinion, the problem
was reinforced by the fact that radio appealed to the ‘simple folk’ and
‘not only to the educated or the literati from Schwabing,’ a formerly
bohemian borough of Munich, who were better able to understand
subtle broadcasts. In this particular case, he feared that listeners only
heard the jazz first and foremost. Richartz concluded that broadcast-
ing could employ satire only ‘to a very limited degree’ for humorous
purposes.50
In other media as well, satirists found their role confusing. One ex-
ample from print media was the case of Fritz Reipert, who had edited
an extensive series of propaganda brochures targeting England, which
also meant ‘the Jews’ and their ‘world conspiracy.’ These propaganda
pamphlets, masked as academic studies, were in part printed by the
NSDAP publisher Eher, reaching large editions of up to one million
copies.51 Reipert was a propagandist in the narrow sense of the word.
Not only was he in total agreement with the regime, his publications
were also recognized by propaganda experts as exemplary and dis-
tributed as such by the party. In 1942, Reipert attempted for the last
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 141

time to address the theme ‘England.’ He used satire to do so, claim-

ing that any serious analysis would be futile, given the British conduct
against Germany. But even a satirical interpretation seemed too much
of an honour in Reipert’s opinion. Accordingly, his introduction was
confused:

In this age of historical decisions and events determining the future on

the chessboard of world politics there are a number of figures for whom
no monument will be erected in posterity. Despite the insistence with
which they adhere to the past, the memories of them will vanish in the
same way that events have surpassed them […] And yet here it should
be attempted to safeguard such a tragicomic figure from obscurity. The
role which they have played in the wars which in turn has determined
the fate of the people cannot be divorced from the development of this
epoch. They are, then, the embodiment of the world of yesteryear, have
long been rotten, hollow, and damned to irrevocable demise.52

On the one hand, Reipert stressed that the British were so ridiculous
and insignificant that they were not worth remembering, since his-
tory had passed them by anyhow. On the other hand, he wrote a satire
about them in order to highlight their role in history. He considered
their impact to have been so negative that it had to be pointed out, but
in order to make that point, he had to revive them, if only by stating
that they would be condemned to oblivion at a later date. Reipert was
caught up in the typical paradox of somebody who wants to annihi-
late his opponent through satire but first needs to render his audience
familiar with the object in question before he then can ridicule and
distort it.
Although this paradoxical aspect of satire was well known, it had
not been perceived as a problem before 1933. Rather, satirists had
used this point to defend themselves against the charge that they
were seeking to destroy their victims socially. From their point of view,
the victims were indebted to the satirists because satires popularized
the victim.53 But when the politics of exclusion were put into practice,
the context for satires changed and satire’s characteristic of popular-
izing the victims became problematic. After 1933, the ideology of the
Volksgemeinschaft promised unity and the bridging of all social and
economic differences. But beyond this, propaganda made it unmis-
takably clear that such a unified community would be based on the
radical exclusion of those identified as disturbing and alien.54 Radical
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 95

And finally, such stories were associated with a different kind of

violence than all other differences in German society at this point.
They tied in with quasi-official publications, such as a collection of
letters from the front edited by Reinhold Zellmann in 1916. Entitled
Serious and Cheerful Episodes from the World War: A Collection of Let-
ters from the Front, the collection was supposed to bolster morale by
demonstrating soldiers’ good humour. Reprinted again in 1917, it did
not include letters by Jewish Germans but instead ‘true’ stories about
Eastern European Jews. In two comparatively long and rabidly anti-
Semitic letters, Adolf Stein, later one of Hugenberg’s spokesmen dur-
ing the Weimar Republic, depicted the occupation of Lodz, describing
with violent energy how Jewish shop owners supposedly had tried
to betray upright German soldiers. His aggressive style combined all
negative stereotypes about Jews, from dirt and lice to meanness and
corruption. But he also left no doubt about the brutality of the Ger-
man reaction, describing in detail how they used intimidation and
physical violence to rob the Jews’ possessions without paying at all.60

Regarding the home front, the discursive boundaries of permissible

humour seemed at first to be drawn wider than with regard to mili-
tary issues. At the same time, the authorities were unable to control
a discourse they themselves urged on. Funny postcards circulated
throughout the country, ranging in content from militaristic support
of the war to demands of peace. Of course, the latter was forbidden, but
all motives seem to have been produced throughout the war, and over
and over again all sorts of cards were confiscated, militaristic, pacifist,
or otherwise. Again, though, anti-Semitic jokes usually passed, in this
context bolstering the accusation of Jewish Germans as war profiteers.
The periodical Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter carried a typical
one-liner in 1916 with the caption ‘Fitting term,’ insinuating again that
German Jews not only did not suffer like everybody else during the
war but actually profited: ‘Look, how arrogant the family Meyersohn
is coming along there! – Indeed – quite a ‘Protzession’!’61 The play of
words only works in German, ‘Protz’ meaning to show off one’s money
tastelessly and ‘procession’ being changed to ‘Protzession.’ The nar-
rowing of the scope for Jewish entertainers making self-ironical fun of
‘Jewish-ness,’ which Peter Jelavich describes in this volume, was also
due to the effortless publication of jokes like these. While censors were
highly sensitive to the possible ambiguities of all sorts of caricatures
and jokes, they accepted an anti-Semitic clarity, which in this case ex-
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 143

Home Front), whose tone was to be set by a large caricature by Hans

Schweitzer, i.e. Mjölnir, resplendent on the front cover. Although, in
Goebbels’s eyes, Schweitzer had not accomplished much of late (his
caricatures had mostly disappeared), Goebbels still hoped that the
artist could be as effective as he was remembered to have been before
1933.58
But it should be clear by now that the perception of convinced Na-
tional Socialists did not necessarily reflect the actual presence sat-
ire had in the public sphere at the time. Such projects were merely
wishful thinking. Satire disappeared almost totally, not only in film,
radio, and theatre, but also in the popular press and the newspapers.
Whereas, before the Nazi takeover of power, the NSDAP journal the
Illustrierte Beobachter (Illustrated Observer) had regularly printed sat-
ire, by 1934 satire had completely vanished from the periodical. The
Brennessel, the prestigious satirical project, was shut down on 31 De-
cember 1938 because of its low circulation. At the end, it sold fewer
than 10,000 copies.59 Although managing to survive until the end of
1944, the Simplicissimus and the Kladderadatsch sold only 18,000 and
12,000 copies, respectively, in 1939, compared with 50,000 and 40,000
copies in 1931.
In the end, the Deutsche Presse and other semi-official journals had
to admit repeatedly that their efforts to implement the use of satire
were in vain. Newspapers that were published by the NSDAP or the
Ministry for Propaganda – for example, the Völkischer Beobachter or
Das Reich – printed caricatures as prescribed. The remaining newspa-
pers, however, only did so when they were explicitly ordered to.60 The
shortage of paper during the war was used as a welcome argument to
evade the demand to print such satires.61 Newspaper editors experi-
enced the unsolicited sending of material by the caricature office as
a burden and criticized the waste of costly resources on such ‘minor
matters’ in light of the paper shortage.62 The project Front und Heimat
was abandoned, despite having Hitler’s emphatic support and despite
Goebbels having already printed and distributed a dummy version.63
During the last year of war, even Goebbels could not get enough paper
to realize such an ambitious project. In addition, the propagandists
had to admit that the proposed layout, with Mjölnir’s caricature on the
cover, was not as popular as expected.64
However, satire’s loss of popularity did not mean that the German
populace had also lost interest in comic entertainment. The audience
discovered a new form of humour that was referred to as ‘Deutscher
144 Patrick Merziger

Humor’ (German humour). This form was grounded in the tradition

of the nineteenth century but was specific to National Socialist Ger-
many with its emphasis on harmony.65 This ‘Deutscher Humor’ could
be observed already in the Weimar Republic, but was not remotely as
successful as it was after 1933.
By one example out of thousands, I want to sketch some of the ba-
sic structures and functions of this special German humour. Unlike
the increasingly unpopular caricaturists, Robert Högfeldt, a Swedish
illustrator, met with public approval. In portrayals of his life, it was
stressed not just that he was a ‘Nordic’ illustrator but that his artistic
education had taken place in Germany, where he lived until moving to
Sweden in 1913.66 Published from 1937 onwards, German anthologies
of his illustrations were a great success. The picture shown in figure 5.1
is typical of his style. The title of the drawing was ‘In Harmony.’67 The
caption reads, ‘In the bosom of the family / lulled by merry humour /
a spot of bother now and then / when the waters ripple on the sea of
life.’
The implications of such drawings can only be understood by con-
trasting them with unpopular satire. What is depicted here is a family
or community that is sealed off. Conflicts, essential for humour in gen-
eral, are generated inside the community, and supposedly they are not
as intense as those which originate from outside. There is an under-
stood assurance that the members of the community will not get hurt.
In contrast to caricatures, they are depicted in a friendly and pleas-
ant way. More important is that the outside world is not encroaching.
The very style of drawing prevents some subjects from being touched
upon. Högfeldt would not be able to portray the stereotype of a ‘Jew,’ a
‘communist,’ or a ‘socialist.’
Högfeldt himself illustrated the closed-off nature of his style. The
introduction to his first volume contains some drawings that were not
as large as his other pieces. Much smaller, and printed in black and
white, one of these images again showed the happy community in the
boat. In this case, however, Högfeldt also showed their surroundings.
Entitled ‘Die Optimisten’ (The Optimists),68 figure 5.2 shows wolves
stalking a rowboat full of happy, drunk, and revelling people who are
being carried along by the current. It suggests that if the boat has to
land on the bank, the wolves will attack the unsuspecting and inno-
cent passengers. Högfeldt shows what lies outside the parameters of
the close community of ‘Deutscher Humor,’ namely, the terrifying
beasts, which were so central to NS caricatures and satire. Like the
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 145

5.1 Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Harmony’ (‘In Eintracht’), in Robert Högfeldt, Das
harmonische Familienleben (Leipzig: Neff, 1938), without pagination.

celebrating party on the boat, the German people were happy in their
ignorance and felt secure in their close-knit community. At least, the
sale numbers of products called German Humour implied this wish.69
Before coming to power, National Socialists chose satire because
they saw it as the most apt political form of humour for an extreme
party within the harsh conflicts of the time. After winning power, they
continued to use it as a matter of course, but contrary to their expec-
tations and to the standard view in historiography, it became increas-
ingly unpopular. The audience took part in the politics of humour,
146 Patrick Merziger

5.2 Robert Högfeldt, ‘The Optimists’ (‘Die Optimisten’), in Robert Högfeldt,

Das Högfeldt-Buch (Berlin: Neff, 1937), 3.

and its members managed to make disappear those forms which they
disliked. The rejection of satire’s aggressive and combative character
by parts of the population points to the specific relationship between
the ideological elite and ‘the people.’ Satire did not disappear because
politicians or institutions wanted it gone; ideologues, rather, support-
ed it. The demise of satire was due to the audience’s dislike, and in-
stitutions fell in step. As members of the Volksgemeinschaft protested
against being ridiculed publicly, their politics of humour reflected the
interaction between different groups in the public sphere in Germa-
ny, a collaboration of the audience, publicists, and National Social-
ist institutions. In fact, people classified as ‘German’ could not allow
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 147

themselves to be satirized, as this possibly meant being shut out of a

group that was the only option for social integration. To be sure, they
did not protest against the Volksgemeinschaft; rather, their indigna-
tion expressed the wish to be part of it. Furthermore, satire could not
destroy its chosen subjects outside of Germany but instead focused
attention on them. Seen from this angle, the disappearance of satire
was a step towards the total exclusion of opponents from the German
community. Satire turned out to be too destructive for the desired har-
monious world. Satire’s disappearance in popular culture tells about
a population which shared the longing for the Volksgemeinschaft with
its ideology of a sealed community.

notes

1 Walter Hagemann, Publizistik im Dritten Reich: Ein Beitrag zur Meth-

ode der Massenführung (Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag, 1948), 198.
Recently, Gudrun Pausewang, Erlaubter Humor im Nationalsozialismus
(1933–1945) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007), 32–7.
2 Christian Haider and Fritz Hausjell, ‘Die Apokalypse als Bildgeschichte:
Antisemitische Karikatur am Beispiel des “Juden Tate” im Wiener “Deut-
schen Volksblatt” 1936 bis 1939,’ Medien & Zeit 6 (1991): 9–16, here 11.
3 Ralph Wiener, Als das Lachen tödlich war: Erinnerungen und Fakten 1933–
1945 (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1988).
4 Fred Hahn, Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924–1945:
Eine Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1978), for example 127–8.
5 W.A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second
World War, 6 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus, 1985–93), 3: 458–553.
6 Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human
Experience (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 157.
7 Michael Mulkay, On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society
(Cambridge: Politiy Press, 1988); Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, ‘Intro-
duction: War in the Twentieth Century: The Functioning of Humour in
Cultural Representation,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 247–63,
here 251–5.
8 Ursula E. Koch, ‘Marianne und Germania: Zwei Nationalheldinnen aus
der Sicht deutscher und französischer Karikaturisten,’ in Marianne und
Germania in der Karikatur (1550–1999): Eine Interréseaux-Ausstellung, ed.
Ursula E. Koch (Leipzig: Institut Français de Leipzig, 1999), 5–12.
9 Mary Lee Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits
of Repression in Nineteenth-Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: The University
100 Martina Kessel

war effort, because they gave too much information about a particu-
lar area of fighting, or because they showed destroyed houses or dead
horses after a battle.81
All these messages were passed on in humorous guise. Far from im-
plying that it is therefore impossible to systematize the meaning of
humour, it is in fact exactly their multitude and their huge variety that
point to an underlying message: humour turned into one of the most
effective means to talk about war and the war society. The notion of
German humour, ergo the connection between talking in a suppos-
edly humorous vein and projecting a united German nation, had
been forged in the nineteenth century. The corresponding percep-
tion that German unity was won through war had carried enormous
weight since 1870–1. The idea of Burgfrieden relied on this correlation,
and humour coded as German supplied it with a powerful language.
Ubiquitous and repetitive, it offered semantics and images that at the
same time promised the restoration of the old order and allowed criti-
cism of what was perceived as current disorder. The boundaries of the
permissible, however, remained disputed to the end, revealing con-
tinued conflicts in German society that centred on differering defini-
tions of what it meant to be a nation. In humorous poems, soldiers
asserted their own courage and attacked those Germans whom they
considered cowards, while others satirized military drill and short-
comings in the army. Civilians called for militaristic aggression and
criticized the authorities for not supplying them with the necessary
means of holding out. While sometimes transporting radical criti-
cism, such humour most often served to pinpoint particular griev-
ances, not reservations about politics in general. Still, censors took no
risks, but, at least on the home front, their efforts regularly came too
late. Anti-Semitism, however, was a different story. The more disunity
in German society became obvious and uncontrollable, the more the
radical exclusion showed, turning the attack on ‘Jewishness’ into a de-
fining and negative measure of non-belonging. Hurtful jokes implied
that Jewish Germans still were not and might never be part of the
Volksgemeinschaft in arms, as jokes excluded them from both the im-
agined community of cheerful fighters at the front and the mocking
community of sufferers at home. This inner exclusion, transported
through a paternalistic narrative of German society defined as Ger-
man humour and presented as the only legitimate story about war,
was an uncanny legacy of the war. The fight over the war’s meaning
in the late Weimar Republic would be won by those who once again
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 149

20 Dietz Bering, Kampf um Namen. Bernhard Weiß gegen Joseph Goebbels

(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1991), 283–352.
21 Friedrich Karl Martin, Der kesse Orje: Spaziergänge eines Berliner Jungen
durch das System: Mit einer Einleitung von Joseph Goebbels und Zeich-
nungen von Mjölnir (Munich: Eher, 1931).
22 Mjölnir [i.e., Hans Schweitzer] and Joseph Goebbels, Das Buch Isidor: Ein
Zeitbild voll Lachen und Hass (Munich: Eher, 1931).
23 Joseph Goebbels, ed., Knorke: Ein neues Buch Isidor für Zeitgenossen
(Munich: Eher, 1931).
24 For example Orje [i.e., Martin Bethke], ‘Ick machet nochmal, Neese,’ in
Martin, Der kesse Orje, 14.
25 Max Reitz, ‘O diese Nazis!’ Nationalsozialistisches Lebensbild in 3 Akten
(Leipzig: Strauch, 1931).
26 Kim, ‘Satire ist, wenn man …,’ Die Brennessel 2 (1932): 266; Hein Schlecht,
‘Karikatur und Photographie als politisches Agitationsmittel,’ Unser Wille
und Weg 2 (1932): 139–40; Heinrich Salzmann, ‘Das Bild in der Presse als
Kampfmittel,’ Unser Wille und Weg 2 (1932): 348–50.
27 Angelika Plum, Die Karikatur im Spannungsfeld von Kunstgeschichte und
Politikwissenschaft: Eine ikonologische Untersuchung zu Feindbildern in
Karikaturen (Aachen: Shaker, 1998), 133–44. Reumann, ‘Das antithetische
Kampfbild,’ 108–36.
28 Klaus Schulz, Kladderadatsch: Ein bürgerliches Witzblatt von der Märzre-
volution bis zum Nationalsozialismus 1848–1944 (Bochum: Brockmeyer,
1975), 202. Cf. Ulrich Appel, Satire als Zeitdokument: Der Zeichner Erich
Schilling. 1885 Suhl/Thüringen – 1945 Gauting bei München. Leben – Werk
– Zeit – Umwelt (Witterschlick/Bonn: Wehle, 1995), 259.
29 Joseph Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin: Der Anfang (Munich: Eher, 1934),
140–2; Joseph Goebbels, ‘Haben wir eigentlich noch Humor?’ Völkischer
Beobachter: Norddeutsche Ausgabe, 4 February 1939.
30 Ludwig Fischborn, ‘Ironie und Satire als publizistische Kampfmittel,’
Augustinus-Blatt 37 (1933): 7–8; Georg Foerster, ‘Können wir heute Humor
haben?’ Der Tag, 19 April 1934; Heinz Riecke, ‘Der politische Sinn des Hu-
mors,’ Wille und Macht 3 (1935): 20–5.
31 Appel, Satire als Zeitdokument, 262–3.
32 For example, Eduard Schwechten, Das Lied vom Levi (Düsseldorf: Knip-
penberg-Verlag, 1933); Wladimir von Hartlieb, Ich habe gelacht: Satiren
gegen die Linke Europas (Berlin: Neff, 1933).
33 Heinz Pohle, Der Rundfunk als Instrument der Politik: Zur Geschichte des
deutschen Rundfunks von 1923/38 (Hamburg: Hans Bredow-Institut, 1955),
89–117.
150 Patrick Merziger

34 Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, C 1216 m, 59 U 227/Bd.3.

35 Dietrich Loder, Konjunktur: Eine Revolutionskomödie aus dem Frühjahr
1933 in 3 Akten (Berlin-Halensee: Chronos, 1933).
36 Lanzelot [i.e., Carl Martin Köhn], ‘An “Porzia!”’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 182.
37 Lanzelot [i.e., Carl Martin Köhn], ‘Darf die deutsche Frau …,’ Die Brennes-
sel 3 (1933): 446; Orpheus der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], ‘Aufbau-
ernde Gardinenpredigt,’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 435; Die Brennessel, ‘In
Sachen: “Darf die deutsche Frau …,”’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 471; Orpheus
der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], ‘Babette wird abermals verwarnt,’
Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 471.
38 For further examples, see Patrick Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire
und ‘Deutscher Humor’: Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populär-
er Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 113–39.
39 Sigmund Graff, ‘Die “negative” Figur,’ Der Neue Weg 64 (1935): 264–5.
40 Anonymus, ‘Mehr Humor!’ Das Schwarze Korps 2 (1936): 1.
41 Thomas Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur und Diktatur: Sächsische Hei-
matbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/
DDR (Cologne: Böhlau), 124–56. Schaarschmidt describes the campaign
misleadingly as a private obsession of the Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann
that allegedly was not successful.
42 See, for example, Gustav Schumann, Partikularist Bliemchen aus Dresden
in Rom und Neapel (Leipzig: Reißner, 1887); Hans Reimann, Sächsische
Miniaturen (Leipzig: Steegemann, 1921).
43 Schl., ‘Wahrt Ehre und Ansehen des Gaues Sachsen, schützt unser Volks-
tum und unsere Arbeit!’ Die Deutsche Arbeiterfront: Rundbrief für die
politischen Amtswalter und Amtswarte der DAf., NSG. ‘Kraft durch Freude’
und NSBO. im Gau Sachsen, 15 August 1936.
44 David Welch, ‘Nazi Popaganda and the “Volksgemeinschaft”: Construct-
ing a People’s Community,’ Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004):
213–38.
45 Dietrich Loder, Die Eule aus Athen: Eine historische Komödie aus dem
klassischen Altertum in 3 Akten (Berlin: Langen-Müller 1933).
46 Heinz Steguweit, ‘Dietrich Loder: “Die Eule aus Athen”: Festaufführung
zur Reichstagung des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Presse,’ Deutsche
Presse 25 (1935): 659–60; Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph
Goebbels: Teil I Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941 (Munich: Saur, 1998–2005),
1 December 1935.
47 An answer to the complaints can be found in Orpheus der Zwote [i.e.,
Goetz Otto Stoffregen], Das sind Sachen! Neue freche Verse (Berlin: Brun-
nen 1933), 5.
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 151

48 Hugo Hartung, ‘Zwiegespräch mit Jonny: Zur Ursendung des musika-

lisch-parodistischen Hörspiels “Jonny spült ab,”’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk
13 (1935): 6.
49 W.G., ‘“Jonny spült ab,”’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk 13 (1935): 67.
50 BArch (BDC) RK, Hugo Hartung (Brief des Leiters der Abteilung A2, Willy
Richartz, an den Reichssendeleiter, Eugen Hadamovsky, vom 15.2.1936)
51 Fritz Reipert, ‘Das ist England! Weltherrschaft durch Blut und Gold’ (Ber-
lin: Rödiger 1939); Fritz Reipert, ed., In acht Kriegswochen 107 mal gelogen!
Dokumente über Englands Nachrichtenpolitik im gegenwärtigen Kriege
(Berlin: Eher 1939).
52 Fritz Reipert, ‘Ein Wort zuvor,’ in Fritz Reipert, Die von gestern: Satirische
Glossen (Berlin: Rödiger 1942), 7–9.
53 Hans Reimann, Neue sächsische Miniaturen (Dresden: Reissner, 1928), 185;
Thomas Theodor Heine, ‘Einiges über Karikaturen,’ Pester Lloyd, 7 Octo-
ber 1936.
54 Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the “Volksgemeinschaft,”’ 213–38.
55 For the chronology of sanctions, see, for example, Otto Dov Kulka et al.,
eds., Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (Düs-
seldorf: Droste, 2004), 586–651.
56 For example, ‘Die gute politische Karikatur’ Deutsche Presse 29 (1939): 365
and 375.
57 Carl J.H. Villinger, ‘Die Vermittlung von Karikaturen an die Presse,’ in
Handbuch der Zeitungswissenschaft, ed. Walther Heide (Leipzig: Hierse-
mann, 1940–3), cols. 2256–60.
58 Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Teil II Diktate
1941–1945 (Munich: Saur, 1993–6), 25 January 1944, 2 February 1944, and 18
April 1944.
59 Hans Reimann, Mein blaues Wunder. Lebensmosaik eines Humoristen
(Munich: List, 1959), 503.
60 C. Sch.., ‘Warum nur vorübergehend Karikaturen?’ Deutsche Presse 28
(1938): 402–6.
61 Gerhard Eckert, ‘Karikaturen in der Zeitschrift,’ Der Zeitschriften-Verleger
43 (1941): 165–7; -lt-, ‘Unentbehrliche Mittel der geistigen Kriegsführung:
Auch der engere Raum berechtigt nicht zum Verzicht auf Karikatur und
Karte,’ Zeitungs-Verlag 43 (1942), 202–4.
62 Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich 1938 – 1945: Die geheimen
Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984), vol.
15, 6135.
63 Goebbels, Die Tagebücher Teil II, 2 June 1944.
64 Goebbels, Die Tagebücher Teil II, 6 June 1944.
 ‘German Humour’ in the First World War 103

Schneider-Verlag Hohengehren, 2006), 140–58. See also Christine Brocks,

Die bunte Welt des Krieges: Bildpostkarten aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–
1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2008).
22 Martin Baumeister, ‘“L’effet de réel”: Zum Verhältnis von Film und Krieg
1914 bis 1918,’ in Krieg und Militär im Film des 20 Jahrhunderts, ed. Bern-
hard Chiari (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), 245–68, here 259f.
23 Pierre Purseigle, ‘Mirroring Societies at War: Pictorial Humour in the Brit-
ish and French Popular Press during the First World War,’ Journal of Eu-
ropean Studies 31 (2001): 289–328, esp. 326; Jean-Yves Le Naour, ‘Laughter
and Tears in the Great War: The Need for Laughter / The Guilt of Humour,’
Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 265–75, esp. 268. See also Kessel,
‘Gelächter, Männlichkeit und soziale Ordnung.’
24 Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg
1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007), 390.
25 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Mod-
ern Age (London: Black Swan, 1990).
26 Jay Winter, ‘The Great War and the Persistence of Tradition: Languages of
Grief, Bereavement and Mourning,’ in War, Violence, and the Modern Con-
dition, ed. Bernd Hüppauf (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1997), 33–45.
27 Umberto Eco, ‘Der Mythos vom Supermann,’ in Umberto Eco, Apoka-
lyptiker und Integrierte: Zur kritischen Kritik der Massenkultur, 2nd ed.
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 187–232, esp. 212f.
28 For a more detailed argument, see Martina Kessel, ‘Gewalt schreiben.
“Deutscher Humor” in den Weltkriegen,’ in Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur
politischen Kulturgeschichte 1900–1933, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2007), 229–58, and Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death?’
29 Hermann Bausinger, ‘Ironisch-witzige Elemente in der heutigen Alltag-
skommunikation,’ in Hermann Bausinger, Der blinde Hund: Anmerkun-
gen zur Alltagskultur (Tübingen: Verlag Schwäbisches Tageblatt, 1991),
243–56, here 252.
30 Der Witze-Feldwebel. Ein bunter Strauß Kasernenhofblüten, zusammen-
gefegt von Artur Lokesch (= Tornister-Humor, vol. 18) (Berlin: Lustige
Blätter, n.d. [1915]). Wieder bei Muttern: Feldgrauer Heimatsfilm, gekur-
belt von Alfred Brief (=Tornister-Humor, vol. 19) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter,
n.d. [1915]). The explicit claim of superiority was made by Hanns Floerke,
Deutsches Wesen im Spiegel der Zeiten (Berlin: Reichl, 1916), 95–8.
31 Schipper Hans und Schipper Franz. Urberliner Humor im Feld und da-
heim, erlauscht von Georg Mühlen-Schulte (= Tornister-Humor, vol. 8)
(Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1916]), 34.
32 Ibid., 20, 21–2.
6

Laughing to Keep from Dying:

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry
Sanders Show

VINCENT BROOK

Did the Jews invent self-hatred? A case can be made – from the produc-
tion and the reception end. Centuries before they were branded col-
lective Christ killers in the Gospel of St Matthew, a calumny that laid
the groundwork for both anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred, Jews
themselves had planted the seeds of self-hatred for all humanity in the
Garden of Eden. The biblical God’s banishment of the ur-couple from
Paradise inflicted a primal self-loathing (with a decidedly gendered
component) that would prove, at least for the faithful, all but inex-
pungable. Then there’s the Jewish Freud, whose non-denominational
take on original sin postulated a phylogenic and an ontogenic source:
the collective killing of the primal father and the individual Oedipal
complex. Freud’s daughter Anna, meanwhile, gave self-hatred back to
the Jews through her concept of ‘identification with the aggressor.’ Al-
though the concept can be applied universally, it derived specifically
from the observations of Jewish children who had survived Nazism
and yet identified positively with their Nazi persecutors and negative-
ly with themselves as Jewish victims.1 Last not least, the poet laureate
of existential angst, Franz Kafka, historicized self-hatred, laying the
theoretical and experiential groundwork for what Jewish filmmaker
Henry Bean calls ‘the ambivalent, self-doubting, self-hating modern
condition.’2
To ascribe a privileged role for Jews in the encoding and decoding of
self-hatred is certainly not to deny other groups’ significant enmesh-
ment in the process. Power relations in general are a fertile field for the
sowing and reaping of self-hatred, be it from the conquest, coloniza-
tion, or enslavement of entire peoples to the subjugation and oppres-
sion of women. Those whose ‘otherness’ dare not speak its name have
154 Vincent Brook

perhaps borne the greatest burden of self-inflicted shame, given the

depth of self-denial imposed upon and induced within them. Just as
Jews have introjected anti-Semitism, people of colour, women, gays,
and lesbians have internalized the damaging social messages of rac-
ism, misogyny, and homophobia, directing against themselves the
projected hatred of the normative society.3
Jews, as a religious or ethno-racial grouping, do appear to have the
most historically overdetermined claim to self-hatred. In the modern
era alone – dating for our purposes from the European emancipation
of Jews in the late eighteenth century – the manifestations of Jewish
self-hatred, including its mutation into virulent internecine strands,
have been striking. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, es-
pecially, the permutations have been unique. This uniqueness derives
largely from the expression of Jewish self-hatred despite, and because
of, the well-documented and openly acknowledged preponderance of
Jews in the U.S. entertainment industries and their remarkable mate-
rial success in American society.4 It also relates to the integral role self-
hatred has played in the formation of what is arguably the greatest
contribution of Jews to American popular culture: comedy – be it on
the vaudeville stage, the movie screen, radio, or television.
In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud located
an explicitly Jewish self-critical component in the joke whereby ‘the
mocker [the joke teller] participates in the defect being mocked [the
butt of the joke].’5 This self-deprecatory aspect is often cited as a main-
stay of Jewish humour – and, by influence and extension, of minoritar-
ian humour in general – and its function as a self-defence mechanism
is patently evident. However, rather than functioning primarily as a
mode of perseverance – laughing to keep from crying – as humour has
for other minorities and people in general, for Jews humour has oper-
ated additionally as a mode of survival – laughing to keep from dying.
Albert Goldman has analysed the origins and applications of surviv-
alist Jewish humour in the Brooklyn-bred comics who invented stand-
up comedy: Milton Berle, Shecky Green, Lenny Bruce, and others.
These comedians’ particular mode of satire, according to Goldman,
was born of rejection of their immediate Jewish-immigrant families,
neighbourhoods, and milieux. But instead of ‘swallowing or disguis-
ing their [negative] emotions, these young Jews – consumed with self-
hatred or shame – came out in the open and blasted the things that
hurt them.’6 By turning a perceived weakness into a weapon, such
volatile humour served to assuage self-hatred by both acknowledg-
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 155

ing its source and distancing the comics from it, while also offering
protection from the source’s career-, and potentially life-, threatening
consequences.
In the post-Second World War/post-Holocaust era, as overt anti-
Semitism in the United States receded dramatically and government
policies and Jews’ own upward mobility encouraged widespread
Jewish entry into the white middle class, self-hatred as a foundation
for Jewish humour may well have declined but, as I will show, by no
means disappeared.7 The focus of my analysis is the highly acclaimed
‘Jewish’ sitcom The Larry Sanders Show (1992–8), regarded by some
critics as the most influential television series of the 1990s.8 Before
embarking on a case study of Larry Sanders, however, it is necessary
to contextualize the show in relation to what has become, in the past
twenty years, an unprecedented ‘Jewish’ sitcom trend.

The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom

I address in Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom
(2003) the complex historical and institutional factors contributing to
the marked increase in sitcoms featuring explicitly identified Jewish
protagonists since the late 1980s.9 Suffice to say here that even con-
sidering the barely decipherable, largely ‘virtual’ nature of the Jewish-
ness displayed in most of these shows, the large number of mega-hit,
Emmy-winning, ‘must-see’ shows featuring explicitly Jewish main
characters over the trend period – close to forty such shows in all com-
pared to only seven in the previous forty years – is extraordinary.10 A
brief list of these shows reads like a Who’s Who of American television
comedy over this time: besides Larry Sanders, they include Seinfeld
(1989–98), The Nanny (1993–9), Mad About You (1992–9), Friends (1994–
2003), Dharma and Greg (1997–2001), Will and Grace (1998–2006), Curb
Your Enthusiasm (2000–), and Arrested Development (2002–5).11 This
recent surge in ‘Jewish’ television further begs the question of why
Jewish self-hatred should remain a factor in the postmodern era, in
Jewish media representation and, by extension, in Jewish life.
Yet remain a factor it clearly does, and The Larry Sanders Show,
though perhaps the most prominent example, is not the only case
in point. One of the first of the ‘Jewish’-trend sitcoms, the short-lived
Chicken Soup (September-November 1989), starring the Borscht Belt
stand-up comedian Jackie Mason, was arguably forced off the air by
Jewish self-hatred, of the internecine variety. Internecine self-hatred
106 Martina Kessel

Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland (Paderborn: Schö-

ningh, 2002), 437–67, esp. 439–48. See also the essay by Peter Jelavich in
this volume.
58 Der gemütliche Sachse 20, no. 5 (1915): 11.
59 For the time up to 1914 see Martina Kessel, ‘The “Whole Man”: The Long-
ing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth Century Germany,’ Gender and
History 15 (2003): 1–31.
60 Reinhold Zellmann, Ernstes und Heiteres aus dem Weltkriege. Eine
Sammlung von Feldpostbriefen (Leipzig: Xenien-Verlag, 1917), 52–4, 56–7.
61 Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter, no. 119 (1916): 7.
62 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M Kr Bild-
sammlung, 3439.
63 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13 345/1, No.
392 P 5., Stellvertretendes Generalkommando I. beim Armeekommando,
Munich, 17.1.1918, Stahl.
64 Stefan Kestler, Die deutsche Auslandsaufklärung und das Bild der En-
tentemächte im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Propagandaveröffentlichungen
während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994), 179.
65 Gary Stark, ‘All Quiet on the Home Front. Popular Entertainments, Cen-
sorship, and Civilian Morale in Germany, 1914–1918,’ in Authority, Identity
and the Social History of the Great War, ed. Frans Coetzee and Marilyn
Shevin-Coetzee (Providence: Berghahn, 1995), 57–80, here 72–3.
66 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M KR Bild-
sammlung, 3433, Poststempel Munich, 4.10.1917.
67 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13 345/1, I 16663,
Durch das A.O.K. B (IIIb), 9.10.1917, dem Stellv. Generalkommando des I.
K.B. Armeekorps, Munich; Nr. 168461, A./17. Erlaß des K. Bayer. Kriegsmi-
nisteriums.
68 Chickering, Great War and Urban Life, 390; Belinda Davis, Home Fires
Burning, Politics, Identity, and Food in World War I Berlin (Ann Arbor, MI:
UMI, 1992); Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, 26–53.
69 Uns kann keiner. Feine Kosthappen aus der Kriegsküche, gehamstert von
Alfred Brie (=Tornister-Humor, vol. 30) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d.[1916]),
50.
70 Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, 28.
71 Rüger, ‘Laughter and War in Berlin.’ Members of the House of Hohen-
zollern were not to be parodied, just like Frederick the Great.
72 As just one example: Hindenburg-Anekdoten. Unser Hindenburg im
Spiegel des Humors. Nebst vielen feldgrauen Schnurren aus dem Osten. Ein
zweiter Tornister voll Humor eingepackt von Felix Schloemp (=Tornister-
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 157

intermarriage rates.13 The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles com-

bined the two issues in its trashing of the show: ‘As if this [intermar-
riage] problem isn’t bad enough […] [Mason’s negative stereotypes]
are a pathetic reminder of an era long ago […] as inappropriate and
offensive to Jews as Amos and Andy [sic] would be to blacks today.’14
Anti–Chicken Soup campaign organizer Dan Bloom added: ‘Many
Jews […] have heard this type of humour in their homes, but in the
public living rooms of America for everybody to hear it seemed em-
barrassing.’15
It is worth pursuing what it was, more precisely, that made Chicken
Soup so hard for Jews to swallow in 1989, especially given that another
Jewish sitcom that premiered the same year, Anything But Love (1989–
92) – although it featured an equally guilt-obsessed, Jewish mother-
saddled, shiksa-enamoured Jew (played by Richard Lewis) – managed
to survive for three years comparatively unscathed by Jewish critics.
Much of the double standard, as Sander Gilman proposes, consisted
in Mason’s, as opposed to Lewis’s, combination of Eastern-Europe-
an Jewish (read: stunted) body, ‘vulgar’ attire, and Yiddish-inflected
language. In short (no pun intended), Mason’s gnomish figure, loud
dress, and immigrant speech not only articulated him as less than ful-
ly American, and less of a man, but also associated him with the less
prized – that is to say, more despised – aspects of Jewishness.16
Offering an interesting comparison with Chicken Soup, from a gen-
der standpoint, is the 1990s ‘Jewishcom’ The Nanny. While the show
was taken to task in the Jewish press for its alleged caricaturing of a
Jewish princess type – a ‘Shleppin Fetchit’ performed with chalk-
board-scratching nasality by Fran Drescher – it was also lauded in Jew-
ish circles. Representatives of a newly formed Jewish women’s media
watchdog group, the Morning Star Commission, deemed Drescher’s
portrayal of the working-class Jewish nanny ‘funny and fine and terrif-
ic’; Forward columnist Robin Cembalist called Drescher ‘a conceptual
artist’ who ‘is not merely rehashing stereotypes but questioning them’;
while critic Susan Glenn defended Drescher as the ‘only reigning Jew-
ish actress on television with the chutzpah to celebrate her ethnic
“otherness.”’17 Drescher, meanwhile, took the offensive. Responding
to one of her Jewish critics, Judith Peiss, in a Los Angeles Times ‘Coun-
terpunch’ article, she wrote:

The truth of the matter is I created Fran Fine based very closely upon
my mother, myself, and all the wonderful and rich characters I grew up
158 Vincent Brook

around in Flushing, Queens. I am sorry and sad if the way we really are
(yes, plastic covers and all) offends [critics like Peiss] mainly because all
her article accomplished was to reveal her insecurities as a Jewish wom-
an living in a Wasp culture. Perhaps Peiss finds Fran Fine too blatantly
Jewish for her taste. But Fran is openly proud of her heritage […] I find
it infuriating to deal with negativity regarding a character who is clearly
carving inroads for other Jewish characters – particularly women – who
will not have to apologize for who or what they are. Maybe Peiss has been
brainwashed – by the very media she puts down – into believing that the
only good portrayal of a Jew is an assimilated one.18

The Nanny ultimately was able to survive the sort of assault that
sank Chicken Soup, for several reasons. First, as we have seen, Jew-
ish reaction to Drescher’s show was less monolithic, more ambiva-
lent than it had been to Mason’s. The Nanny had strong supporters
not only among Jews generally, but, most significantly, among Jew-
ish women. Second, The Nanny benefited from timing. Had it been
one of the first Jewishcoms to hit American airwaves after a decade-
long hiatus, as had been the case with Chicken Soup, The Nanny’s fate
would have been far more uncertain.19 By the time of its premiere in
1993, however, the ‘Jewish’ sitcom trend was well established. There
were five other Jewishcoms on the air, including the mega-hits Sein-
feld and Mad about You. A range of Jewish portrayals existed, in other
words, making The Nanny less subject to the Amos ’n’ Andy effect –
that is, a show’s vulnerability to outside pressure, and thus to can-
cellation, when its alleged unsympathetic representations are not
balanced by shows with more favourable ones.20 Third, Drescher’s
nanny, unlike Mason’s schlemiel, had a host of redeeming character
traits. As the otherwise critical Joyce Antler observed, ‘What many
find likeable in the show are the nanny’s cleverness, honesty, sense
of pride, and warmth […] [She] outsmarts her antagonists, whomever
they may be, because of her innate shrewdness, a genuine concern
for others, and the folk wisdom apparently imparted from her her-
itage.’21 Finally, and most crucially, the nanny is a knockout. Unlike
Mason’s conventionally unprepossessing figure, Drescher’s character
is darkly attractive and very sexy. More than any other factor, I be-
lieve, it was this non-stereotypical physical representation of a Jew-
ish woman, at least for American television, that inclined a sizable
portion of Jewish viewers, male and female, to tolerate her other, less
flattering qualities.22
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 159

Another sitcom with a repository of purportedly negative Jewish

traits, and therefore another test case for internecine Jewish self-
hatred, is Seinfeld. Indeed, the show ‘about nothing’ was infamously
rejected, initially, by NBC President Brandon Tartikoff (himself a Jew)
for its alleged ‘too Jewishness’: the Jewish-named and -looking main
character (Jerry Seinfeld), Jerry’s Jewish occupation (stand-up come-
dian), and his place of residence (‘Jew York City’).23 The show was only
green-lighted, reluctantly, once Jerry’s hall mate’s name was changed
from the more seemingly Jewish ‘Kessler’ to the more denomination-
ally neutral ‘Kramer.’24 The character of Elaine, meanwhile, played by
the Jewish (in fact and, arguably, appearance) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was
explicitly marked, in several episodes, as non-Jewish.25 The show’s Se-
mitic fault lines remained gapingly exposed, however, through the
ethnically ambiguous character of George Costanza, played by the
otherwise ‘quite Jewish’ Jason Alexander.
Physically and behaviourally as much a ‘Jewish body’ as Jackie Ma-
son (minus the Yiddish accent), George is Seinfeld’s Jewish bone of
contention. Is he or isn’t he Jewish? Nobody, on or off the show, seems
to know for sure. Jerry Stiller, who played George’s father, offered an
explanation in an interview that trenchantly transposed Jewish self-
hatred into humour: ‘I think we’re a Jewish family living under the
Witness Protection Program under the name Costanza.’26 George is
also the prototype for an emergent televisual response to Jewish self-
hatred, the ‘perceptual Jew’: a character who is perceived as stereo-
typically Jewish by many viewers (Jewish and non-Jewish) yet who is
diegetically represented as non-Jewish. The ‘perceptual Jew’ serves a
twofold commercial function: general audience appeal is broadened
and Jewish audience aversion assuaged due to the character’s ethnic
hybridity.27 The ‘perceptual Jew’ also serves a therapeutic function: by
foisting putatively unsympathetic Jewish traits onto a non-Jew, both
the production and reception of Jewish self-hatred are shown to be
contingent.
One can make the argument – and the Jerry Stiller ‘Witness Protec-
tion’ joke lends it support – that the ‘perceptual Jew,’ as well as other
examples cited so far, is not so much a sign of self-hatred as of self-
preservation. In other words, the various adverse responses to ‘too
Jewishness,’ from stereotype aversion to assimilationism, can be tak-
en as deriving more from concern for the commercial consequences
and physical repercussions of such displays, in a decreasingly yet per-
sistently anti-Semitic climate, than from aversion to the representa-
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 109

But this overestimates the power of the media and underestimates

the role of the general social conditions. Crucial for the acceptance
of National Socialism were the experiences of the German populace
in the last years of the Weimar Republic and the transition period that
lasted until June 1934, times that were characterized by political and
economic instability.4 The experiences of this period, which seemed
like an almost everlasting crisis, resulted in the desire for a ‘normal
life’ in stable and ordered conditions, which was characteristic for the
general spirit during the early 1930s.5 The necessary basis for a nor-
mal (i.e., somewhat more secure) life was a decrease in unemploy-
ment rates and poverty. As employment gradually grew, so did hopes
for a stable and acceptable standard of living.6 The National Socialist
concepts of entertainment, voiced by Joseph Goebbels as Minister for
Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda as early as 1934, tied in with
these wishes for a normal life. This concept could not immediately be
put into practice. In the first two years, heavily ideological broadcasts
– be it talks, radio plays, or entertainment – dominated the schedule.7
Cheerfulness became a central feature in the descriptions of actual
radio programs from the end of 1934 onwards. Unfortunately, only a
few tapes of humorous broadcasts have survived,8 but they can still
serve as a typical example of how popular culture was framed by the
regime while still meeting ‘the people’s’ expectations and desires.
However, ‘the people’ must be recognized as a problematic concept in
the context of the Third Reich. Broadcasts were aimed at those defined
as belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community); hence,
in the entertainment shows of the 1930s, only a few traces remain of
those excluded from this community.
Peter Reichel and Kaspar Maase have pointed to the dual nature of
the Third Reich, referring to its delicate balance between terror and
agreement. Both demonstrate the role of leisure and entertainment in
stabilizing National Socialism.9 Radio entertainment clearly belonged
to the bright and fascinating side in the 1930s, aiming to produce if
not commitment then at least a kind of passive agreement and ac-
quiescence. By definition, exclusion, followed by terror, only leaked
through in these broadcasts, perhaps as a kind of reminder that it was
advisable not to cross the line to unacceptable behaviour. However,
after 1933, people defined as ‘undesirable’ were not only almost im-
mediately removed from the broadcasting workforce but also, albeit
more gradually, excluded from the audience. If indeed horror and idyll
were produced in combination as the psychologist Peter Brückner ar-
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 161

racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, ‘was the admixture of Negro

blood with Jewish in the Diaspora of Alexandria.’33 As for empirical
‘proof,’ this was provided by Jews and Blacks’ purported physical
resemblance. As Adam Grotowski, a Polish noble, observed about a
trip to the United States in 1857: ‘Jews [in Poland] have the greatest re-
semblance to the American mulattoes: Sallow carnation complexion,
thick lips, crisped black hair. On my arrival in this country I took every
light-colored mulatto for a Jew.’34
Whether the contemporary TV viewer takes Larry Sanders for a
‘Black Jew,’ or a ‘White Negro,’ is not the point here; rather, my concern
is with the implications, for Larry’s self-image, of an aversion to traits
associated with both Jews and another ‘other.’ And the aversion is not
limited to only one ‘other’; ambivalent relations between Jews and
gays are also abundantly cross-referenced on the show. Theoretically,
as with Jews and African Americans, the Jewish/gay bond is a ‘natu-
ral’ fit. The Jewish male’s ‘resemblance to the homosexual’ through
physical imputations of effeminacy was one of the main ‘pathological’
symptoms attributed to Jews by ‘scientific’ racism. Equally pertinent,
and more grounded in reality, is the historical ‘affinity with the closet’
that the Jewish and gay subcultures have shared.35 Both the discursive
and the historical aspects of Jewish-gay interaction are evident in The
Larry Sanders Show.
Virtually every main character, including Larry, is subjected to at
least one embarrassing moment regarding his perception as being gay.
The culmination of this metatextual motif occurs when the talk show’s
chief writer, Phil (Wallace Langham), the most brazenly homophobic
of the lot, ends up acknowledging his own repressed homosexuality
when he falls for the openly gay secretary, Brian (Scott Thompson),
whom he had been harassing. Before their climactic embrace in the
studio offices, the gay-Jewish connection was made explicit when the
trouble-shooting producer, Artie (Rip Torn), warned Phil about the
potential damage to his career of his gay-bashing. Artie: ‘You know
who runs this town?’ Phil: ‘The Jews.’ Artie: No, the gay Jews!’ (Episode
#88: ‘Putting the “Gay” Back in Litigation’).36
Beyond what they reveal about the intersection of Jewishness, race,
and sexuality, the show’s Jewish-Black and Jewish-gay approach-
avoidance complexes go a long way to explaining Larry Sanders’s
highly overdetermined Jewish self-hatred. For unlike the other ‘Jew-
ish’ sitcoms discussed so far, in which Jewish self-loathing has been
more discursively inferred than explicitly represented, Larry Sanders’s
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 111

Listening to the radio competed with other, more established and

mundane, engagements of everyday life and was not yet a widespread
activity in the German pre-war society, but it still contributed to lis-
teners’ sense of leading a ‘normal life.’ Listening to the wireless inte-
grated ordinary citizens into the National Socialist society by allowing
them to settle into their familiar surroundings while others were fac-
ing terror. In view of the extraordinary experiences of these ‘others,’ it
is not surprising that light entertainment, be it film or radio, became
the focus of historiography rather late. Clearly, the terror needed ex-
plaining first.13

Mechanisms of Exclusion

The dismissal of employees from broadcasting stations started in

March 1933, after the Reichstag elections. People were discriminated
against on account of their ethnic and political ‘undesirability.’ There
are no reliable data regarding all broadcasting stations during that
time.14 However, the figures from the Cologne station suggest that
between 13 to 20 per cent of all employees were dismissed until the
summer of 1933. Top managerial positions as well as low-level assist-
ants and technicians were replaced by committed National Socialists,
thereby ensuring control of radio production within the first year.15
Not only party members profited from the dismissals, but also na-
tional-conservatives like Günter Eich took the opportunity to start a
career in broadcasting.16 By discussing individual fates, Daniela Mün-
kel shows that the range of the possible offences which could lead to
dismissal was constantly growing during the Third Reich. In the years
after 1933, broadcast employees continued to be discharged due to
non-conformist behaviour.17
The ascent of National Socialism also involved drastic changes in
the program structures. Constant modifications were accompanied
by transmissions of political speeches and party meetings, whereas
cultural or educational shows were reduced considerably.18 In hind-
sight, a Jewish worker described the effect of the continuous propa-
gandist barrage: it was a message that did not address him and he felt
that he did not belong any more.19 Such feelings probably intensified
in the following years. The more indirect consequences of the Nazi
takeover were also significant, leading to a decrease in cultural and
educational programs, which constituted a clear contrast to the Wei-
mar schedule.20
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 163

lawn in the middle of the night. Freud, one can imagine, would ac-
cuse David of protesting too much, and he would have ample support
for such a diagnosis. David’s disassociation of his self-hatred from
his Jewishness recalls a classic Seinfeld episode (‘The Yada-Yada,’ co-
written by David) in which Jerry, upset about his dentist’s conversion
to Judaism so that he can learn better jokes, complains to a priest in
a confessional that the conversion doesn’t offend him as a Jew but as
a comedian. The deeply self-loathing George Costanza, meanwhile,
may technically have been only a ‘perceptual Jew,’ but his perform-
ance by actor Jason Alexander was modelled on a combination of se-
ries co-creator Larry David and Woody Allen.40 Allen himself famously
quipped that ‘while it’s true that I am Jewish and I don’t like myself
very much, it’s not because of my persuasion.’41 And Allen’s disclaimer
echoes Kafka’s claim that his lack of identification with himself as a
Jew was superseded by his lack of identification with himself as a hu-
man being.42 Existentialist claims to self-hatred have a long history,
in other words, among Jews (and, recalling Grossman’s point, among
Jewish comedians).
Where Larry Sanders parts company from all of the above is that
while these other fictional and non-fictional figures may disassociate
their self-hatred from their Jewishness, they still (with the exception of
George Costanza) admit that they’re Jewish. Larry Sanders fastidious-
ly, and at all cost, avoids the subject. The only way to determine Larry’s
ethnicity, besides inferring it from his appearance or from extratextual
or intertextual associations with Garry Shandling or It’s Garry Shan-
dling’s Show, is to have caught one of the two episodes (out of a total of
eighty-nine) that directly confront the issue – or to have been a proac-
tive participant in a panel discussion on the topic, as I was. At a ‘Creat-
ing Comedy’ panel sponsored by the Museum of Television and Radio
in Beverly Hills, I asked the panel of TV writers, which included Garry
Shandling and Larry Sanders Show writer Judd Apatow, what part their
Jewishness had played in their creative work (only one of the five pan-
elists, Bernie Mac Show creator Larry Whilmore, was not Jewish). After
the nervous uproar – among the writers, not the audience – caused
by my question had subsided, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil
Rosenthal broke the ice: ‘What part has it played? Not one shtickle!’
When the laughter greeting this Yiddishism died down, Apatow con-
fided that the Larry Sanders writers had debated behind the scenes
about whether Larry was Jewish and had concluded that he was a self-
hating Jew.43
164 Vincent Brook

As for the two episodes that affirm Apatow’s claim, the first (Episode
#59: ‘I Was a Teenage Lesbian’) features comedian Brett Butler play-
ing ‘herself ’ as a talk-show guest. In response to Larry’s reference to
the success of her recent best-selling book, Butler opines that after
buying a house for her mother with proceeds from the book, ‘every-
thing you do with your money is okay.’ ‘You don’t have any guilt,’ Larry
continues her thought. Butler: ‘No, uh-uh, I’m a WASP.’ Larry: ‘WASPs
don’t have guilt, do they?’ To which Butler retorts with a wry smile and
her Southern drawl: ‘Y’all killed Him, we didn’t!’ Larry bows his head
embarrassedly amid the in-house audience’s nervous laughter, as the
show-within-the show cuts to commercial.
The second episode (#72: ‘Make a Wish’) similarly conflates Larry’s
closeted Jewishness with its self-hating component. The spark here is
Larry’s desperate need to make People magazine’s ‘Ten Sexiest Men’
list, even if it means bumping talk-show guest, and friend, Ben Stiller
off the list. Stiller finds out about the dirty trick and, while he remains
amiable during the talk-show interview, angrily confronts Larry be-
hind the scenes. Feigning innocence, Larry tells the irate Stiller: ‘If you
could see how Jewish you look!’ Stiller snaps back, ‘Oh, that’s great!
Coming from a self-hating Jew like yourself!’ Before Larry can respond,
Artie, the trouble-shooting producer, breaks up the argument.44
One can hardly conceive a more succinct delineation of the origins
and manifestations of Jewish self-hatred than these two sitcom mo-
ments provide. The one highlights the condition’s anti-Semitic un-
derpinnings – still very much alive, as the flap over Mel Gibson’s The
Passion of the Christ (2004) affirmed – in the Christ-killing myth; the
other illustrates its internecine expression in reaction to assimilation
and self-denial. Larry Sanders emerges ‘guilty’ on both counts. The
issue of self-denial, specifically, is elaborated on in another episode
(#67: ‘My Name Is Asher Kingsley’).45 Here the issue is approached
from two different angles, one related to Larry, the other to Larry’s
talk-show sidekick and the series’ comic foil, Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey
Tambor).46 Both aspects intersect with the notion of self-preservation.
The episode opens with Hank’s abrupt decision to reclaim his Jew-
ishness, starting by affixing a mezuzah (talisman) beside his office
door and changing his stage name back to his birth name, Hank Lep-
stein. Referencing the self-preservation motif, Hank explains, ‘I’ve
hidden it [my Jewishness] all my life. First in school so I wouldn’t get
beat up. Then in show business so I wouldn’t alienate my public […] I
want to regain my faith, I want to rejoin my people!’ It turns out that
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 165

Hank’s motives, as usual, are hardly pure: his real reason for coming
out Jewish is to seduce Rabbi Klein, an attractive female rabbi he met
at Marvin Hamlisch’s synagogue. In a vain attempt to dissuade Hank
from his conversion, Artie reinforces the self-preservation theme with
a gentile twist: ‘You know, I’ve worked for your people a long time.
They run this town. They’ve run it a hell of a lot better than the agents
[…] But we’re just trying to entertain people and morality’s just gonna
get in the way.’47 The Jewish jokes come fast and furious. When Larry’s
Black secretary, Beverly (Penny Johnson), complains because Hank is
allowed to give his rabbi a tour of the studio when her pastor wasn’t
afforded the same privilege, Hank defends the double standard: ‘I
think you’ll agree that a rabbi fits more nicely into a show business
environment.’ Phil, also a non-Jew, questions whether Hank is really
Jewish because he had previously seemed to deny it. ‘People change,’
Hank insists; ‘it’s called spiritual growth.’ Phil: ‘Well, this is called spir-
itual disbelief, because most Jewish people I know are smart!’ As for
the connection to Larry, Artie cautions Hank about bringing the rabbi
around the set because ‘religion makes Larry very uncomfortable.’
The topper comes when Hank surprises everyone by putting a yar-
mulke on during the talk show. During commercial break, after being
scolded by Larry for his unscripted embarrassment, Hank asks Larry
about his religion, which Hank hasn’t the slightest idea about even
though he has known Larry for fifteen years. ‘That’s a private matter,’
Larry mutters evasively, though he tells Hank that his cap is on inside
out. Artie adds in an aside, ‘His religion is talk-show host.’48
A subsequent backdoor meeting between Hank and two network
executives expands on Artie’s aside, while putting the kibosh on
Hank’s religious fling. ‘They [the network] want our appeal to be non-
denominational,’ one of the execs explains.49 ‘But you’re Jewish, aren’t
you, Stu?’ Hank protests. Updating the assimilationist adage ‘A Jew at
home, a gentleman on the street,’ Stu responds, ‘Yes, but I’m behind
the camera where the viewing public can’t see me.’ The meeting ends
with Hank calling Stu an Uncle Tom and Stu calling Hank a schmuck.
Hank, as usual, ultimately sacrifices personal principle for self-pres-
ervation, the urgency of which is underscored by the hate mail he
receives. A swastika is scrawled on one envelope, and another letter
reads, ‘Dear Jew: Keep wearing your Jew hat so I can use it as a target
when I blow your Jew head off!’ When a third correspondent threatens
to stop buying the brand of orange ‘jews’ Hank peddles, it’s off with
Hank’s kippah – an opportunistic gesture that turns out to be redun-
114 Monika Pater

ment in other industrialized countries, the number of wireless sets

multiplied quickly during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1942, there existed a
radio set in approximately every second German household.32
In 1933–4, the overt propagandistic character of the program did not
motivate people to listen. Quickly, it became obvious that listeners
could not be forced to switch on the radio. However, as it was so im-
portant to keep people listening, Goebbels underlined the necessity
of entertaining a hard-working population via the wireless. From 1935
onward, radio stations introduced a number of new shows, embedded
in a discourse about spending leisure time with and through broad-
casting.33
However, one should be careful not to take this discourse too se-
riously as that might lead to reproducing NS views concerning the
success of their propaganda34 and to disregarding the agency of the
listeners. Although the aim was clearly defined as increasing the
performance and the commitment of the workforce (constructed
as male) and their wives, the daily schedule owed more to the con-
ditions of production and reception than to the propaganda aims of
the ministry of propaganda. Taking into account the circumstances of
listening, the Deutschlandsender (DS, German broadcasting station)
developed a program schedule including standardized formats based
on the tacit knowledge of daily routines. Thus, the wireless was now
being turned into a companion for the whole day. The recurring daily
schedule included first the early morning shows, to cheer people up
on their way to work, then the factory break shows and the Serenade
to the Housewife, followed by a lunch break show called Sundries from
2 until 3 (Allerlei von 2 bis 3), which offered music and almost no talk
during the time people were expected to hold their siestas. The time
slot from 3 to 5:30 p.m. addressed women and children, while the
daily show And Now Is Evening Leisure intended to offer ‘merry spir-
its and good entertainment at a time when the worker tiredly returns
from work.’ This series was primarily composed of music and variety
shows.35 Here, leisure time was presented as complementing work.
The program schedule was, moreover, deeply gendered, particu-
larly the notion of the male working day with its clearly marked be-
ginning and end, and the ceaseless work of the housewife organized
the schedule. Again, however, that was not specific to Germany. In
fact, in many industrialized countries, the emergence of the wireless
as a mass medium was connected to addressing housewives as radio
consumers, with special attention given to programs considered rel-
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 167

of marginality) in their role as the eternal outsider. When this outsider

role is challenged, however, as it is today by Israel’s militarily domi-
nant position in the Middle East and Jews’ insider status in the U.S.
entertainment industry and society, the predicament becomes pre-
carious once again.
Ultimately, manifestations of Jewish self-hatred in American media,
particularly in television, remain predicated largely on self-preserva-
tion. Thus, while the Jewish sitcom and overall Jewish TV trend may
continue, fuelled by a conflation of assimilationist and multicultural-
ist forces, aversions to ‘too Jewishness’ will undoubtedly also persist,
fed partly by commercial desire to reach the broadest audience, partly
by sensitivity to Jews’ perceived ‘over-representation’ in the media and
U.S. society. As Larry Sanders co-creator Klein stated in our interview:
‘It’s an accepted wisdom. For example, during casting sessions, after
an actor does a reading and walks out, someone will say, “Too J,” and
everyone will know what is meant. There’s always been, and remains,
a tendency to veer away from overt Jewishness.’ Such a tendency will
certainly prevail so long as the Jewish fat-cat, media-control, and
world domination ca(na)rds continue to be played, by everyone from
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Mel Gibson.52
As for internecine Jewish self-hatred, this dynamic, while changing
significantly, has, if anything, been exacerbated by the continuing Jew-
ish intermarriage crisis and conflicting attitudes toward Israel. With
the intermarriage rate approaching 50 per cent in the 1990s, and with
religious observance and child-rearing statistically also in decline, the
combined survival-threatening trend has been called a ‘Silent Holo-
caust’ by many Orthodox survivalists, who compare the phenom-
enon to self-imposed genocide.53 The actual Holocaust, meanwhile,
remains one of the most palpable postmodern sources for Jewish self-
hatred, no longer so much through ‘identification with the oppressor,’
which applied more to the generation that had directly experienced
Nazi persecution, as through shame at the alleged passive submis-
sion of Jews to the Final Solution. The Tough Jew of modern-day Is-
rael and the Jewish Defense League (with antecedents in the Zionist
pioneers and American gangsters) epitomizes psychosocial resist-
ance to the ‘Jewish weakling’ syndrome. The most potent new source
of internecine Jewish self-hatred is Israel itself – post-1967 Israel, that
is, of the Palestinian occupation, the Lebanon invasions, the ‘Who is
a Jew?’ controversy, and the two intifadas. The ‘good’ Jew/’bad’ Jew
dichotomy that previously pitted Eastern European vs assimilated
168 Vincent Brook

Jews in ways that saw the judgmental labels gyrate from one to the
other54 now characterizes an equally voluble conflict in which ortho-
dox vs secular beliefs and pro- vs anti-Israeli government sentiments
are regarded alternately as badges of honour or disgrace. Jewish self-
criticism, a long-honoured Jewish tradition, which, only in the face of
heightened anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe, trans-
mogrified into the Jewish ‘pathology’ of self-hatred, has become an
endangered species once again. This time, however, the transmogri-
fication has been effected by Jews themselves.55 Stuck between im-
ages of a wimp (the Holocaust) and a storm trooper (Israel), Jews seem
more mired in internecine self-hatred than ever before, with – as was
demonstrated in the 1995 killing of Prime Minister Rabin by an ultra-
Orthodox Jew – potentially lethal consequences.56
In the end, as it has been throughout post-Emancipation Jewish
history, one of the prime ways of dealing with this dilemma has been
through transformative humour, humour that seeks to loosen, if not
to break through, the multiple double-binds of Jewish self-hatred.
Comedy has become for postmodern Jews much as epic poetry was
for the Romantic Goethe, one of the main lines of defence in the Faus-
tian psychodrama of self-loathing. Of course, channelling this defence
mechanism through a mass cultural medium such as televison that
is perceived, not unjustifiably, as dominated by Jews, potentially re-
binds with one hand what is loosened with the other. Even here, how-
ever, the Sisyphean absurdity merely adds another layer of humour to
the mix, at least from the existentialist perspective of a people post-
biblically confronted with the cosmic joke of ‘chosen-ness.’
To illustrate the multifarious strands of the self-preservational para-
dox, let the last word go to The Larry Sanders Show, which in one of its
most postmodern ‘Jewish moments’ uses the self-referential logic of
media representation to deconstruct the torturous illogic of the ‘Jew-
ish question.’57 In the episode titled ‘Adolph Hankler’ (#84), comic Jon
Stewart, as himself, acts as Larry’s talk-show-host substitute. As if to
compensate for Larry’s, and Hank Kingsley’s, avoidance of Jewish-
ness, Stewart does a sketch lampooning the game show Jeopardy that
functions as a limit case for the ‘return of the repressed.’ Called ‘The
Adolph Hankler Show,’ it features Hank as Adolph Hankler, the game-
show host, dressed in a Nazi uniform and wearing a Hitler moustache.
The correct ‘question’ to all of Hankler’s ‘answers’ – such as ‘They
caused the sinking of the Titanic’ and ‘The small people that controls
the world’s money supply’ – is, uniformly of course, ‘Who Are the
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 169

Jews?’ When the non-Jewish Artie complains about the offensiveness

of the sketch, Stewart responds, ‘Yeah well, it doesn’t bother me, and
I’m Jewish.’ ‘So was Jesus,’ Artie fires back, ‘and look where he ended
up?’ ‘On the WB [network],’ Stewart retorts.58

notes

This essay was developed from an earlier essay of mine titled ‘Y’All Killed
Him, We Didn’t: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show,’ in You
Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, ed. Vin-
cent Brook (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 298–331.

1 See Sander Gilman, ‘Jewish Self Hatred (I) and The Believer (II),’ in Henry
Bean, ‘The Believer’: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred (New York: Thunder’s
Mouth Press, 2000), 238.
2 Henry Bean, ‘The Believer,’ 19. Following the same line of thought, one
could easily include the (quasi-Jewish) Marx among self-hatred’s theoriz-
ers, given his class-based notion of ‘false consciousness.’
3 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,
1967); Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1948; repr., New York: Grove
Press, 1960); Miriam Greenspan, ‘The New Anti-Semitism,’ Tikkun 18 (Fall
2003): 33–42.
4 See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hol-
lywood (New York: Anchor Books, 1989); Neal Gabler, ‘Conference Pres-
entation,’ in Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (Los Angeles:
The American Jewish Committee and The Norman Lear Center, 1998),
3–12; Muriel Cantor, The Hollywood Producer: His Work and His Audience
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1998); Juliet Lushbough, ‘The
Hollywood TV Writer: A Descriptive Study of Sixty Primetime Television
Writers,’ (PhD. diss., Temple University, 1981); David Desser and Lester
Friedman, eds., American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends (Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside
the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
5 Quoted in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Affective Genealogies: Psychoanalysis,
Postmodernism, and the ‘Jewish Question’ after Auschwitz (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1997), 96.
6 Albert Goldman, ‘Boy-Man Shlemiel: The Jewish Element in American
Humour,’ in Albert Goldman, Freakshow (New York: Antheneum, 1971),
174–8; here 178.
7 See Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 117

audience to listen to the wireless.46 Radio variety shows consisted of

vaudeville acts, which were summarized under a broad general theme
to give the acts a common denominator, as well as musical acts, which
constituted about 60 per cent of each of these broadcasts. Variety
shows were also in line with the retreat to the private realm, which is
why they were able to contribute so well to the already growing con-
sensus and tacit acceptance of National Socialism in Germany. Yet, to
be successful in its ideological aim, radio programming had to offer its
listeners some kind of gratification. Such gratification may have been
in the form of the ‘continuity with a difference’ the shows offered,47 as
well as the integration of radio listening into daily or weekly routines.
In his discussion of the budget of the Ministry for Popular Enlight-
enment and Propaganda, Daniel Mühlenfeld has recently pointed out
that there was another strong incentive to offer an attractive program:
the broadcasting fees, which on average provided more than 90 per
cent of the ministry’s budget. Thus there were concrete economic mo-
tives to court the existing listeners and to attract new ones.48
Listeners chose specific shows to form part of their everyday life
and disregarded others. It is interesting to consider the relations that
existed between particular structural factors such as schedule and so-
ciability and the content of a specific show. The following refers to the
show Merry Saturday Afternoon broadcast by the Station Cologne. The
show was quite popular, and it is considered one of the first block-
busters of the time. It was the prototype of a variety show and a typi-
cal example of a seemingly apolitical entertainment program. At the
same time, it was clearly in line with the idea of a cheerful after-work
companion. Moreover, it was presented as derived ‘from the people.’
In the pre-war years, the politics of humour consisted of presenting
seemingly apolitical entertainment shows, which were openly draw-
ing on the successful formulas of vaudeville shows and cabarets. Thus,
the origins of radio variety shows lay in the music halls and stage vari-
eties which had provided entertainment for industrialized cities since
the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, stage variety, be it cho-
rus line, stand-up comedy, or even political cabaret, became popular
in all milieux.49 Hence, when developing radio entertainment, broad-
casters were able to draw on established popular forms of entertain-
ment. Consequently, one may assume that the succession of songs,
gags, and other acts was familiar to at least an urban audience, that
is, the majority of listeners. Similarly, Scannell and Cardiff trace the
development of entertainment formats in British broadcasting back
to music hall and stage variety.50 However, these urban forms of enter-
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 171

and New Media 1 (August 2000): 279–305, and Brook, Something Ain’t
Kosher.
23 David Kronke and Robert Gauthier, ‘There’s Nothing to It,’ Los Angeles
Times, 29 January 1995, C13.
24 Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (New
York and London: Routledge, 2000), 290.
25 For specific examples of Elaine’s ‘coming out’ non-Jewish, see Brook,
Something Ain’t Kosher; Stratton, Coming Out Jewish.
26 Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, 107.
27 For more on ‘perceptual’ Jewishness, see Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher.
28 Shandling offered this biographical information at the ‘Creating Comedy’
panel sponsored by the Museum of Television and Radio, held 26 Febru-
ary 2003, at the Director’s Guild of America Theater in West Hollywood,
California.
29 Appearing on HBO in the mid-1990s, when cable programming was less
of an industry force than it is today, the show received correspondingly
less audience and media recognition than popular network Jewishcoms
such as Seinfeld, The Nanny, Mad about You, and Friends. Nonethe-
less, Larry Sanders proved a success both critically and (comparatively)
ratings-wise, garnering numerous Emmy and Golden Globe nominations
(winning several of the former) and remaining on the air for a syndica-
tion-assuring six years (reruns of the show have since aired on Bravo and
ABC).
30 ‘Hyperconsciousness’ refers to ‘a hyperawareness on the part of the text
itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the condi-
tions of its circulation and reception.’ Jim Collins, ‘Postmodernism and
Television,’ in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen,
2nd ed. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
1992), 327–53, here 335.
31 The altered eponym was chosen to avoid confusion with Shandling’s ear-
lier sitcom, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986-9).
32 Gilman, ‘Self-Hatred,’ 7.
33 Quoted in ibid., 7.
34 Quoted in ibid., 8; emphasis mine. Larry also complained, in one episode
at least, about a talk-show guest’s mocking his ‘big hair.’ Catherine Seipp,
‘Cathy’s World: Garry Shandling’s “Larry,”’ United Press International, 25
December 2002). Bodily based self-hatred for Jewish women, while shar-
ing some of the same Black associative origins, is of course somewhat
different than for men. For more on self-hatred specific to Jewish women,
see Janice L. Booker, The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths: The
172 Vincent Brook

Many Faces of Self-Hatred (New York: Shapolsky, 1991); Ophira Edut, ‘Tales
of a Jewess with Caboose,’ in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish
Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1991), 24–30;
Riv-Ellen Prell, ‘Cinderellas Who (Almost) Never Become Princesses: Sub-
versive Representations of Jewish Women in Postwar Popular Novels,’ in
Antler, Talking Back, 123–38.
35 For more on affinities between Jews and gays, see Gilman, The Jew’s Body;
Naomi Seidman, ‘Fag Hags and Bu-Jews: Toward a (Jewish) Politics of Vi-
carious Identity,’ in Insider/Outside: American Jews and Multiculturalism,
ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 254–68; Daniel Boyarin,
Unheroic Conduct: Jewish Masculinity (New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkowitz, and Ann Pel-
legrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003).
36 The show’s reference to the entertainment industry’s gay-Jewish con-
nection was no doubt triggered by a high-profile incident involving Hol-
lywood power player Michael Ovitz. Upon his unceremonious firing from
a top position at the Walt Disney Company by CEO Michael Eisner, Ovitz
blamed his fate on Hollywood’s ‘gay mafia,’ in which category the appar-
ently straight (and Jewish) Ovitz included (not necessarily accurately)
Eisner, David Geffen, and Barry Diller (all Jews), among others. Ben H.
Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 34.
37 Quoted in Jay Martel, ‘True Lies,’ Rolling Stone, 8 September 1994, 66.
38 In It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, along with other Jewish references, Garry’s
having attended Hebrew school is revealed.
39 Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Cul-
ture (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1997).
40 Bill Zehme, ‘Jerry & George & Kramer & Elaine: Exposing the Secrets of
Seinfeld’s Success,’ Rolling Stone, 8–22 July 1993, 40.
41 Allen is quoted in Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of
Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 196.
42 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schock-
en Books, 1948–9). The exact quote (in translation), from the 8 January
1914 entry, is: ‘What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything
in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, con-
tent that I can breathe.’
43 ‘Creating Comedy’ panel. The fifth panelist was Beverly Hills 90210 and
Sex and the City creator Darren Star.
44 Apatow recalled a slightly different ending to the scene (probably from
 Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 173

the original HBO episode rather than the edited Bravo rerun I viewed), in
which Larry compounds the self-denying implications of Stiller’s remark
by replying, ‘You think I’m Jewish?’
45 The episode title is an obvious reference to the Chaim Potok novel My
Name Is Asher Lev.
46 Tambor had a featured role in Arrested Development as the incarcerated
patriarch of a wealthy, hyper-dysfunctional Westside Los Angeles Jew-
ish family. For more on this show, see Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger,
‘Something Old Is New Again? Postmodern Jewishness in Curb Your En-
thusiasm, Arrested Development, and The O.C.,’ in Brook, ed., You Should
See Yourself, 277–97.
47 The absurdist irony of separating agents from the ‘Jewish-run’ entertain-
ment industry cannot have been lost on the showbiz-savvy Artie, nor on
the (Jewish) writers of the episode.
48 At least this is how Apatow recalled the end of the scene at the panel,
again probably from the original HBO episode. Artie’s comment is not in
the Bravo rerun.
49 Larry Sanders Show co-creator Dennis Klein offered an elaboration of this
argument in our phone interview: ‘It would be a drag to bring in religion,
from a comedic standpoint. It’s not really funny. If you need it for an epi-
sode maybe, such as a bar mitzvah, but not to carry a series […] especial-
ly on network TV. The last thing you want is to have a fight with Standards
and Practices’ (Los Angeles, California, 14 February 2003).
50 Gilman, ‘Jewish Self-Hatred,’ 228.
51 Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 19.
52 Other recent high-profile examples: New Republic columnist Greg Eas-
terbrook’s blaming of a spate of Hollywood gore-fests on boorish Jew-
ish movie moguls who ‘worship money above all else’ – see ‘Take Out
the Gore and “Kill Bill” Is an Episode of “Might Power Rangers,”’ New
Republic, 23 October 2003; the Parent Television Council’s charge of the
anti-religiosity of the ‘Jewish’ television industry – see Lynn Smith, ‘Ad-
vocacy Group Says TV Has Little Respect for Religion,’ Los Angeles Times,
17 December 2004, E1, E6; William Donahue of the Catholic League for
Civil Rights’ sinister conflation of Jews, secularism, and sodomy: ‘Hol-
lywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and
Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? […] Hollywood likes anal
sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes,’ quoted in
Tim Rutten, ‘Yule Tidings of a Culture War,’ Los Angeles Times, 18 Decem-
ber 2004, E1, E26–7, here E27; and CNN newscaster Rick Sanchez’s on-air
comment that Jews run CNN and ‘all the other’ networks – see Melissa
120 Monika Pater

To a large extent, the comical effects of the show probably derived

from the way these stories were told, particularly from the combina-
tion and repetition of jokes and proverbial catchphrases, as well as the
slow understanding of the Hamburgian. Scannell and Cardiff explain
the same mechanism working in British radio shows: ‘Like the private
jokes of a family, radio comedy built up its far-fetched associations,
while remaining rooted in the charm of the familiar. One resource that
could always be relied upon as a shared point of reference available to
all listeners was the culture of radio itself.’60 This probably applied to
German radio variety shows of the 1930s as well.
From 1937 onwards any reference to politics, the state, religion, the
police, or the army was forbidden.61 This of course limited the the-
matic scope further: the only topics left for sketch comedy were from
the private realm. Although the proportion of word-based entertain-
ment programs diminished during the war, sketch comedy seems to
have been broadcast all over Germany and the occupied territories.
Produced mainly by the propaganda troops,62 recordings of the short
comic scenes have survived that show the thematic scope: ‘The Blue
Letter,’ where a secretary takes a dictation which turns out to be a
marriage proposal and her dismissal by the head of the firm at the
same time (May 1944); or ‘Directions for Use’ (August 1944), in which a
couple-to-be operates along a gender-specific set of directions meant
to ensure ‘success,’ i.e., becoming engaged to each other. However, the
formulaic directions at first impede a happy ending.63 During the war,
when German everyday life was characterized by largely absent men
and an increasingly difficult life, the necessarily apolitical word-based
entertainment resorted to fabricating scenes of happiness that again
drew on an imagined social order that was stable and reassuring.
Most social activities recur daily and weekly. But there are other re-
curring routines throughout the year, usually tied to seasonal feasts
and activities. Like other variety shows, Merry Saturday Afternoon re-
ferred to the course of the year as well. In the early twentieth century,
summer became synonymous with ‘vacation time,’ and broadcasting
picked up on that notion. Reasons could be twofold. It was a typical
feature of NS Propaganda to picture characters who had little money
but were still able to go to Austria or even Italy for a holiday. But at
the same time, broadcast authors who were constantly on the lookout
for new material happily took up the topic of vacation. At any rate, in
the only remaining typescript of the show, from August 1938, the three
‘jolly fellows’ focus on the subject of vacation. The topic was almost
7

Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics

in the Netherlands: The Rules and
Attraction of Clandestine Humour

GISELINDE KUIPERS

Introduction: Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Sensibilities

In the Netherlands of the early twenty-first century, as in most of

Western Europe, ethnic humour is the most ‘dangerous’ form of hu-
mour. People freely joke about nationals from other countries, such
as Germans or Belgians, or ‘native’ minorities like the Limburghers in
the south of the country, or the Frisians in the north. But jokes about
ethnic minority groups like Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, and Antil-
leans are highly contested. Since the 1970s, such jokes told in public
have caused considerable controversy from time to time, replacing
sex, religion, and the Royal Family as the most taboo topic for joking.
This reflects a greatly increased sensitivity to ethnic references. Even
in the private domain, humorous references to this sensitive and ‘se-
rious’ topic became subject to many informal rules and regulations,
making ethnic humour essentially a clandestine pleasure.1
Ever since Freud published Jokes and Their Relations to the Uncon-
scious in 1905, scholars have studied the relationship between hu-
mour and taboo. Humour often focuses on sensitive issues such as
sex, gender relations, death and disease, and – especially in authori-
tarian regimes – politics. Such themes are surrounded by taboos and
cannot be discussed freely, yet at the same time they provoke anxiety
and tend to be on people’s minds a lot – a combination with great
humorous potential. In Freud’s time, the obvious example of such
a sensitive, central, and restricted theme was sexuality. Many of the
jokes Freud cites are sexual, and so implicit that they are all but in-
comprehensible to present-day readers. Apparently, these oblique
jokes were suggestive enough in Freud’s age: the subject was so sen-
176 Giselinde Kuipers

sitive that people responded with understanding and mirth to even

the slightest hint of a sexual meaning. Joking about this dangerous
subject was considered risqué and relegated to male-only private and
semi-public settings.2
In the Netherlands after the 1970s, ethnic difference became a topic
rather like sexuality in Freud’s era: surrounded by anxieties and im-
plicit rules, to be discussed only with circumspection and care, yet
increasingly central to everyday experience, moral concern, and polit-
ical debate. This expansion of people’s ‘thresholds of embarrassment’3
with respect to ethnic difference resulted in the emergence of many
unwritten rules and regulations about ethnic discourse. Somewhat
pejoratively, this regime has been referred to as ‘political correctness.’
This growing sensitivity greatly contributed to the humorous poten-
tial of ethnicity: the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed an
explosion of jokes about ethnic minorities, which are almost exclu-
sively told in the private sphere. In the newly sensitive regime, ethnic
joking, like sexual humour a century earlier, became both attractive,
and illicit and dangerous.
This chapter explores the dynamics of humour, social sensibili-
ties, and the regulation of discourse by analysing ethnic humour in
the Netherlands around the turn of the twenty-first century. Why, and
how, do the Dutch joke about ethnic minorities? When and where is
ethnic humour allowed, when is it considered out of bounds, and how
are such regimes enforced? What is the appeal of ethnic humour? Why
is it considered offensive or even dangerous? How is the appeal of eth-
nic humour related to its clandestinity? By exploring this particular
form of illicit humour, this chapter highlights the relation between
humour, pleasure, and taboo, as well as the regulation of laughter
through informal normative regimes and self-censorship. Hence, this
essay analyses both the pleasures and the politics of joking.
This chapter consists of three parts. The first part looks at Dutch
ethnic humour: whom, and what, do Dutch people joke about? I
will argue that, although ethnic jokes partly reflect the actual ethnic
landscape of the Netherlands, they do so through the prism of a par-
ticularly Dutch perspective on ethnic relations. This perspective was
grounded in class and race at first, increasingly remapped onto cul-
ture and religion in the early 2000s – but it remained overly sensitive
to ethnic categories throughout this remapping. The second part ex-
plores the regime governing ethnic humour and the way this regime
has developed since the 1960s. Despite changes in public discourse,
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 177

and an increasing diversification of ethnic joking after 2001, ethnic

humour has remained risky and restricted.
The third part of this essay analyses the relation between ethnic
humour and the regulation of ethnic discourse. Ethnicity, ethnic di-
versity, or ethnic minorities are not ‘naturally’ funny: they become
humorous in a particular social and historical figuration. Moreover,
ethnic humour makes ethnicity humorous in specific ways, by map-
ping ethnicity onto semantic domains that are meaningful in specific
cultural contexts. Stupidity, dirtiness, religiosity, criminality, or skin
colour, the central themes of ethnic jokes, all point to wider concerns
in Dutch culture. Hence, Dutch ethnic humour tells us much about
Dutch society and its sensibilities, little about the minorities it mocks.
This is highlighted by the fact that sensitivity to ethnic difference pre-
dates the arrival of most migrants in Dutch society. The emergence of
ethnic joking in the Netherlands is therefore not the direct result of
increasing ethnic diversity.
Neither the increased sensitivity to ethnicity nor the growth in
ethnic humour is typical of the Netherlands. Both developments oc-
curred in most European countries, and – earlier – in North America,
too. This indicates that they are related, and, moreover, that they are
connected with shifts in Western culture as a whole. Christie Dav-
ies, in his seminal work on ethnic humour, has argued that the jokes
about stupidity and canniness which are told around the world are re-
lated to the rise of modernity.4 Ethnic groups dubbed stupid are lack-
ing rationality and hence modernity; canny groups are overdoing it.
The jokers are thus portrayed as exemplars of wise moderation. In a
similar vein, I will argue that jokes about ethnic minorities, which in
Europe emerged long after those jokes about modernity, are linked
with cultural developments of the past half-century. Ethnic humour
therefore has to be understood an attempt on the part of jokers both
to grapple with these developments and to position and align them-
selves with others in present-day Dutch society.
I will argue that the rise and the rules of ethnic joking in the Nether-
lands are related to two central sensibilities in Western culture. First,
social hierarchy: ethnic jokes mark and map status hierarchies in
Western societies. At the same time, they reflect and comment on the
grown sensitivity towards hierarchy, exclusion, and ascribed status.
Second, ethnic humour expresses and highlights the contradictions
in one of the central institutions of our era: the nation-state. Especial-
ly in Europe, the nation-state has always been associated with ethnic
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 123

vidual wireless was a new experience for the majority of listeners in

the 1930s, and routines in listening to the programs and handling the
radio set had not yet been developed.72 The aim of attracting people
to the radio and of keeping those already listening tuned in led to the
development of a schedule structure that mirrored the characteristics
of modern mass media in its daily or serial character. This should be
recognized as the success of the medium itself rather than the success
of a perfect propaganda plan. Integrating the wireless into daily rou-
tines, those defined as belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft were able
to use it as a marker of an ordered social environment. The entertain-
ment programs, as well as the overall program schedule, supported
the withdrawal into the private, seemingly apolitical space of home
and family. It thereby contributed to the acquiescence and stability of
National Socialism. In doing so, the listeners as well as the producers
tacitly accepted the exclusion of those defined as not belonging, who
were not even seen as part of the audience. Constructing an audience
through shows demonstrates the subtle use everyday NS propaganda
put the radio to. The radio schedule was designed to integrate only
the racially and socially desirable into the Volksgemeinschaft. How-
ever, the significance of the wireless and its programs needs to be put
into perspective by a consideration of the increasing overall prosper-
ity through economic revival. Consequently, the experience of listen-
ing to the wireless merged with other experiences and added up to a
general sense of improvement.73

notes

1 Passage from the poem by Bertolt Brecht, ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (To
Posterity): ‘Was sind das für Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast
ein Verbrechen ist / Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten ein-
schließt!’ Translated by H.R. Hays. http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/8787-
Bertolt-Brecht-To-Posterity (accessed 15 September 2009). For the
German text see Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9 (Frankfurt/M.
1967), 722.
2 See Thymian Bussemer, ‘“Über Propaganda zu diskutieren, hat wenig
Zweck.” Zur Medien- und Propagandapolitik von Joseph Goebbels,’ in
Das Goebbels-Experiment, Propaganda und Politik, ed. Lutz Hachmeister
and Michael Kloft (Munich: DVA, 2005), 54; Konrad Dussel, ‘Radio Pro-
gramming, Ideology and Cultural Change: Fascism, Communism and
Liberal Democracy, 1920s–1950s,’ in Mass Media, Culture and Society in
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 179

In 1995, I collected ethnic jokes on schools in the Netherlands.7 The

most popular joke targets were Belgians: 74.2 per cent of all students
knew a Belgian joke; 70.2 per cent of students told me a joke about
Turks; 34.7 per cent about Blacks;8 31.9 per cent about Jews; 13.3 per
cent about Surinamese; and 2 per cent knew a joke about Moroccans.
There were no jokes about Antilleans, the other post-colonial migrant
group. Most of these jokes were not exclusively Dutch, but stemmed
from an international repertoire of jokes, which relies mostly on oral
transmission and existed long before the Internet. International joke
scripts like stupidity, canniness, dirtiness, or laziness are adapted and
applied to a local group.9
Most groups in the joke universe had their own humorous ‘scripts’:
Belgians were stupid, Germans belligerent, Turks were dirty and crim-
inal, Jews were stingy and had big noses, and Moroccans – in the rare
jokes I found about them – were criminals and had a thing for cam-
els. However, there was considerable overlap between jokes about
Surinamese and Blacks: both were portrayed as lazy, oversexed, with
a typical physical appearance (black, big lips, curly hair). Some stu-
pidity jokes, which mostly target Belgians, were also told about Suri-
namese/Blacks, and I found Surinamese versions of some ‘dirty Turk’
jokes.
A comparison between the joke universe and the real universe of
ethnic relations in the Netherlands shows that Turks and Surinamese
were overrepresented whereas Moroccans and Antilleans were virtu-
ally absent. The joke universe tends to ‘lump together’ groups with
associated status and image in the humorous imagination. In 1995,
Turks and Moroccans were almost indistinguishable in Dutch eyes:
Mediterranean migrants with poor Dutch language skills, women
with headscarves, who came to the Netherlands as labour migrants
in the 1960s and 1970s. Turks and Moroccans had a similar low social
status in Dutch society: the lowest in the ‘ethnic hierarchy.’10 In pejora-
tive and joking language, the label ‘Turk’ was generally used to refer to
both groups.
Moroccan and Turk jokes had rather similar scripts, about dirtiness
and criminality. This is illustrated by this Morroccan joke: a pun on the
word ‘Moroccan’ which only works in Dutch:

What do you call someone who steals a lot? Kleptomaan [kleptomaniac].

What do you call someone who sets things on fire? Pyromaan [pyromani-
ac]. What do you call someone who does both? Marokkaan [Moroccan].
180 Giselinde Kuipers

This joke refers to a script mostly reserved for Turks. For linguistic
reasons, it targets Moroccans. Turks and Moroccans have similar ‘pro-
files’ in the joke universe. ‘Turk’ has probably become the umbrella
term because Turks were the larger of the two Mediterranean migrant
groups. Also, there are stylistic considerations: Turk is a short word,
better suited to an oral genre. Finally, the Dutch language already
had a number of negative phrases about Turks: dirty as a Turk, young
Turks. Intriguingly, English has similar expressions, which probably
date as far back as the Crusades. This means there was a label, with
connotation, ready for use in a new cycle of jokes.
A similar mechanism is at work in the case of Surinamese, Blacks,
and Antilleans. From the 1970s onwards, many Surinamese migrated
to the Netherlands from this former colony. In the 1970s and 1980s they
were the ethnic group with the lowest social status. Judging from the
overlap between joke scripts, Surinamese were generally subsumed
under the literally and politically incorrect heading ‘Black’ although
more Surinamese are of Asian descent. In 1995, I found no jokes about
the mostly African-American migrants from the Netherlands Antilles.
These various Caribbean migrants also had a similar status in Dutch
society.11 So here, as with the Turks and Moroccans, similar groups are
‘lumped together’ in one category, which in this case is mixed racial/
national.
Many of the jokes about Surinamese/Blacks feed on older stere-
otypes, such as the image of the lazy and silly Black person. The refer-
ences to appearance are reminiscent of old advertisements for soap,
chocolate, licorice, and toothpaste to make white teeth stand out in
a dark face with big lips.12 These jokes did not circulate widely in the
Netherlands before the influx of Surinamese migrants, suggesting that
the appearance of a people of African-American descent in the Neth-
erlands made these old humorous scripts salient again. This may have
set off the import of Black jokes from the United States, where most
joke cycles of the late twentieth century originated.
The humorous ‘profile’ for Turks is different from the Black/Suri-
namese category. Jokes about Turks are harsher in tone, with nastier
scripts. ‘Dirtiness’ is a stereotype generally associated with low class
(‘the great unwashed’), social exclusion, and general undesirability.13
Dirtiness was more typical of Turkish than of Black jokes. Moreover,
although I found some attitude jokes targeting Blacks, these were
most commonly applied to Turks. This joke category refers more di-
rectly to hostility and aggression than most stereotype jokes: jokes
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 181

that do not play on a stereotype but (jokingly) refer to an attitude or

opinion about a group: there are ‘too many’ of them; they should be
killed or exterminated. A common example has a man crying on the
waterside. When asked what the problem is, he sobbingly tells that a
van/car/bus/truck filled with Surinamese/Blacks/Turks/Moroccans
just drove into the water. When comforted because these were only
Blacks, Turks, etc., he retorts something like: ‘But the van was not full’;
or ‘Many more could have fitted into it.’
From a comparison of the various ethnic jokes cycles since the
1980s, attitude jokes emerge as the joke type most directly connected
to social status: they always target the group lowest in the ethnic hi-
erarchy. In 1995, most attitude jokes were about Turks, but a number
of them targeted Blacks/Surinamese. Other studies have shown
that in the 1980s, most attitude jokes dealt with Surinamese/Blacks.14
Since then these jokes have moved on, and now principally target
Moroccans.
Jokes are ‘social facts’: they only exist because there are enough peo-
ple willing to tell and retell them. This means jokes can be analysed
on the macro-level: as a reflection of what is salient in a specific soci-
ety. Moreover, jokes reflect the world view and preoccupations of the
joke-tellers, and often have little to do with the actual characteristics
of the groups targeted in these jokes.15 Thus, these jokes mostly tell us
something about the collective perspective of the Dutch on ethnicity
and various ethnic groups.
The existence of a large number of jokes about these ‘new’ minori-
ties indicates that ethnicity and ethnic difference are a central and sen-
sitive issue in Dutch society. In particular, the jokes show that by the
mid-nineties ethnicity had become an important dimension of social
status. This marks a major transition in the history of the Netherlands:
from an ethnically homogeneous nation-state towards a multi-ethnic
society. Within this new multi-ethnic society, status dimensions and
ethnic characteristics have become deeply entangled. Dutch ethnic
jokes reflect the status dynamics on the societal level: they target low-
status groups, using predominantly scripts that are associated with
low status, particularly low class and lack of civilization, and, in the
case of Surinamese, also racial characteristics. However, even though
groups with low social status are generally not looked upon kindly, low
status does not automatically translate into hatred or aggression. The
existence of ethnic jokes cannot, therefore, be interpreted automati-
cally as an expression of ethnic hostility.
124 Monika Pater

Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross

(Houndsmill and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 80–94, 85.
3 See Daniel Mühlenfeld, ‘Zur Bedeutung der NS-Propaganda für die Er-
oberung staatlicher Macht und die Sicherung politischer Loyalität,’ in
Deformationen der Gesellschaft? Neue Forschungen zum Nationalsozial-
ismus, ed. Christian A. Braun, Michael Mayer, and Sebastian Weitkamp
(Berlin: WVB, 2008), 107.
4 See Wolfgang Benz, ‘Konsolidierung und Konsens 1934–1939,’ in Das Dritte
Reich im Überblick. Chronik – Ereignisse – Zusammenhänge, ed. Martin
Broszat and Norbert Frei (Munich: Piper, 1999), 94–107; Mühlenfeld, ‘Zur
Bedeutung der NS-Propaganda.’
5 This is demonstrated, for instance, by the reports to exiled social demo-
cratic leaders (SOPADE reports). These reports were written with the aim
of strengthening resistance and determining when the time was right for
trying to overthrow NS rule; see Bernd Stöver, ‘Loyalität statt Widerstand:
Die sozialistischen Exilberichte und ihr Bild vom Dritten Reich’ Viertel-
jahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 43 (1995): 437–71. For a similar argument see
Detlef Peukert, Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfremde: Anpassung, Aus-
merze und Aufbegehren unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Bund-
Verlag, 1992).
6 See Stöver, ‘Loyalität statt Widerstand,’ 451.
7 See Monika Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1:
Radio im Nationalsozialismus zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge
Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern (Tübingen: edition discord, 1998),
142–4.
8 Entertainment shows, even if they were broadcast for years, were not re-
corded. As everything was broadcast live, recording constituted an extra
effort only made if something was considered important. Sources for in-
formation relating to entertainment shows consist mainly of radio guide
articles, a few manuscripts, and program outlines of individual shows; see
Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 132.
9 See Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reichs: Faszination und
Gewalt des Faschismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1996);
Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur
1850–1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), esp. 221–3.
10 Peter Brückner, Das Abseits als sicherer Ort: Kindheit und Jugend zwischen
1933–1945 (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1980), 38.
11 See Shaun Moores, media/theory: Thinking about Media and Communi-
cations (Milton Park, NY: Routledge, 2005).
12 For a more detailed discussion of the significance of the domestic setting
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 183

roccans. These jokes had already shifted from Surinamese to Turks

earlier. This further transference confirms that these jokes target the
group with the lowest status.
The Surinamese have become less prominent in the joke universe,
although there are still jokes about the physical appearance of Blacks
(these would be hard to transfer to other groups). But most jokes I
have recently heard that explicitly refer to Surinamese have to do with
the typical Surinamese accent, which is generally perceived as nice
and amusing. Moreover, Surinamese are increasingly the butt of stu-
pidity jokes, sometimes also in the context of public humorous per-
formances. This suggests a move of the Surinamese from the ranks of
the real ‘Others’ to the category of ‘Backward versions of ourselves,’
rather like Belgians. This coincides with the increased status of Suri-
namese, but also with a shift in the discourse of ethnicity away from
race. As Dutch-speaking, increasingly middle-class former colonials,
Surinamese are more like ‘us,’ despite their dark skin, than the Turks
and Moroccans, who are formally white but Muslim, lower class, and
less fluent in Dutch.
The Antilleans, on the other hand, have now been recognized as a
separate ethnic group in the joke universe. The main script in Antil-
lean jokes is criminality/stealing, a script previously associated with
Turks. The following is one example that illustrates the place of both
Moroccans and Antilleans in today’s joke universe:

An Antillean goes to a club with a T-shirt saying: ‘Moroccans have three

problems!!!’ A Moroccan comes at him and asks: ‘What sort of bullshit is
that?’ The Antillean answers: ‘Look that’s your first problem: you are way
too curious.’ The Moroccan leaves but returns a few minutes later with a
friend and starts to challenge the man. The Antillean reacts: ‘Look that’s
your second problem … you are much too aggressive.’ The two Moroc-
cans disappear and the Antillean finishes his beer, dances for an hour,
and goes home. Outside the club he is awaited by five Moroccans, all
drawing their knives. The Antillean reacts immediately: ‘See, and that’s
your third problem: you always take a knife to a shoot out!!!’21

This joke was found on the Internet, a rare find since most sites at-
tempt to exclude ethnic jokes. While the butt of this joke is the Moroc-
can, the position of the Antillean is ambivalent: he is portrayed as a
criminal, but he also challenges and outwits the Moroccan. Told by a
‘native’ Dutch teller, this seems a traditional ethnic joke putting down
184 Giselinde Kuipers

problematic minorities – and the more problematic, the more they

are put down. However, this joke can also be told in ethnically mixed
company, where it functions as an ethnic rivalry joke, one group out-
smarting the other.
In recent years, ethnic rivalry jokes have become common in the
Dutch joke universe. Previously, many ethnic jokes in the Nether-
lands (as elsewhere) showed a rivalry between three national groups:
a Dutchman, a German, and a Belgian. During his research in a multi-
ethnic neighbourhood in Utrecht, Theo Meder and his team found
many jokes featuring ‘A Dutchman, a Moroccan, and a Turk.’22 It de-
pended on the ethnicity of the teller, who, in such a joke, would come
out smartest. This formula has now become standard in ethnically
mixed settings.
The appearance of these ethnic rivalry jokes marks an important
change in the Dutch joke universe: the butts of the joke strike back.
Previously a domain in which the dominant group was ‘joking down,’
ethnic joking now is becoming a multi-ethnic enterprise. This indi-
cates that the former ‘outsiders’ have now gained sufficient confi-
dence, status, and cultural competence to appropriate this particular
genre from the ‘established.’23 This development occurred around the
same time as the emergence of ethnic comics, who had great success
joking about their ethnic background, which I will discuss below.
A final development in the Dutch joke universe is the emergence
of a new category, which I first encountered in 2003: the Muslim joke.
Strictly speaking, these are religious rather than ethnic, but these cat-
egories have become increasingly muddled. When I first heard these
Muslim jokes, many of them were new to me, which means that they
were not adaptations from previous recent Dutch joke cycles. Muslim
jokes tend to be short, which is typical of new joke cycles,24 and often
are puns on Muslim or Arab phrases or names. Some are more or less
transferable to English:

‘What is a Muslim prostitute? A ram-madam.’

Madam means ‘Mrs,’ with the more specific connotation of the mis-
tress of a brothel, and ‘ram’ means to thrust or to poke, with probably
more explicit sexual undertones in Dutch than in English.
Although these Muslim jokes form a new category, there is some
overlap with jokes about Turks and Moroccans. I have encountered
dirtiness jokes and attitude jokes explicitly targeting Muslims. This
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 185

points to the ‘ethnification’ of Muslims in the joke universe and the

increasing conflation of ethnicity and religion/Islam. Some 1990s Turk
jokes containing a reference to Islam now circulate in a Muslim ver-
sion, such as this joke:

A Muslim dies and comes at the Pearly Gates, finding St Peter waiting for
him. ‘Ah Mr Abdul, we have been expecting you. God is ready to receive
you.’
Abdul: ‘But sir, I am a Muslim, I would prefer to see Allah!’
St Peter: ‘You will see him later, come along now, God is waiting for you.’
Abdul passes the gates, and there God is waiting for him.
God: ‘Ah, there you are, just come along now and we can register you.’
Abdul: ‘But I’m a Muslim and would like to see Allah.’
God: ‘Don’t worry, you will, just come with me.’
They enter God’s beautiful office, Abdul is very impressed, but really
wants to go to Paradise, where 70 virgins are waiting for him. Abdul: ‘I
really appreciated your willingness to receive me, mister god, but as you
know, I am a Muslim and I would like to see Allah.’
God: ‘All right, if that is so important to you.’ He presses the intercom
button and says: ‘allah two coffees!! and make it quick.’25

In the version I recorded in 1995, the butt was a Turk, and the punch-
line was ‘Allah, put down that broom and bring us two coffees.’ Thus,
this version combined the cleaner/dirtiness script with the Islam
script. The recent variation is more focused on the religious element,
and while it still suggests a lower status for Muslims (in heaven as on
earth) the status difference decreased: Allah has been promoted from
janitor to secretary. Muslim jokes differ from ethnic jokes in content,
but also in use: they are exempt from the strict rules that are applied to
ethnic jokes. They are easily found on the Internet,26 and they do not
come with the warnings and disclaimers accompanying ethnic jokes.
Apparently, they are not felt to be in violation of the regime of ethnic
joking.
The emergence of Muslims as a new joke target reflects a marked
shift in the Dutch discourse on minorities: boundaries are increas-
ingly drawn on the basis of religion and culture rather than race or
class. The conflation of Turks, Moroccans, and Muslims shows that
religion and ethnicity are increasingly felt to overlap. The changing
content and gradual disappearance of Surinamese jokes points to di-
minishing relevance of race in the joke universe: status trumps race.
 Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 127

they were not of Jewish faith. See Uta C. Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ in

Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1: Radio im Nationalsozialismus zwischen
Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern
(Tübingen: edition discord, 1998), 299.
29 See Bergerson, ‘Listening to the Radio in Hildesheim.’
30 See Michael Hensle, ‘Rundfunkverbrechen vor nationalsozialistischen
Sondergerichten. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der Urteilspraxis in
der Reichshauptstadt Berlin und der südbadischen Provinz‘ (PhD diss.,
TU Berlin, 2005), 47–50, http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2005/
1074/pdf/hensle_michael.pdf. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich
Security Main Office, RSHA) was formed in September 1939 through the
merger of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, i.e., Security Agency), the Sicherheits-
polizei (consisting of the Gestapo, Secret State Police, and the Criminal
Police). The RSHA was one of twelve subordinated departments in the SS
with the function of identifying and fighting ‘enemies of the Reich.’
31 Wessels, Hörspiele, 126–7.
32 Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 292; Chup Friemert, ‘Radiowelten. Objektge-
schichte und Hörformen,’ in Chiffren des Alltags: Erkundungen zur Ge-
schichte der industriellen Massenkultur, ed. Wolfgang Ruppert (Marburg:
Jonas, 1993), 77. In 1941, 16 million wireless sets were registered; cf. Reichel,
schöne Schein, 160. This is comparable to the increase in other industrial-
ized countries. However, the number of sets per 1,000 inhabitants was
lower than, for example, in Great Britain or Scandinavian countries; see
Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 223.
33 Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 143ff., 189–90.
34 See also Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 199; Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutsch-
land, 177.
35 DRA Pressedienst Deutschlandsender 1937, Mitteilungen Reichsrundfunk-
gesellschaft 1935.
36 This has been demonstrated by research into the implementation of the
wireless. For Britain see Moores, ‘Box on the Dresser’; for the U.S., Susan
Smulyan, ‘Radio Advertising to Women in Twenties America: A Latchkey
to Every Home,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13 (1993):
299–314; and for Germany, Uta C. Schmidt and Monika Pater, ‘“Adriennes
Hochantenne”: Geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte medialer Durchsetzungs-
prozesse am Beispiel des Rundfunks,’ Feministische Studien 15 (1997):
21–33, and Carsten Lenk, Die Erscheinung des Rundfunks: Vermittlungs-,
Aneignungs- und Nutzungsweisen eines neuen Mediums 1923 bis 1932
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 114–15.
37 Münkel, ‘Produktionssphäre,’ 113–14.
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 187

The Bureau’s view is representative of a view that has been domi-

nant in the Netherlands for a long time: ethnic jokes are ‘hurtful’ to
minorities, and possibly a sign of racism. While this line of thought has
been criticized as ‘political correctness,’ consensus is still that these
jokes are better not told in public. I originally collected ethnic jokes
in high schools because children are relatively unaware of these re-
strictions. During my later research I interviewed adults, who often
were reluctant to tell me their ethnic jokes. Usually, they would only
tell them by the end of the interview, after many disclaimers and ex-
cuses (‘I know you are not supposed to tell these jokes but …’). Among
these interviewees, I found a strong consensus on when, where, and
with whom it was allowed to tell ethnic jokes.30 Muslim jokes, which
target similar groups but draw on a different discursive domain, are
somewhat (not totally) exempt from this regime.
Joking about ethnic minorities is mainly a clandestine pleasure.
Apart from the (aesthetic/cognitive) enjoyment of the joke and its
punchline, exchanging ethnic humour has the added conspiratorial
pleasure of transgressing a norm: the ‘forbidden fruit’ effect. Rather
like sexual jokes in Freud’s time, ethnic joking deals with a topic that
is on many people’s minds and a central cultural concern but at the
same time strongly guarded and restricted. Ethnic jokes thus provide
a way of escaping one’s ‘inner censor.’ The ‘ethnic taboo,’ as Herman
Vuijsje31 dubbed it, is an important reason why ethnic jokes exist and
do so well. People realize they are ‘offensive,’ ‘off limits,’ and potential-
ly ‘hurtful,’ but still they like them, despite, or even because of, their
transgressive nature. This is solved by the introduction of the rules of
the ethnic joke: an informal regime that, despite recent changes in the
Dutch discourse on ethnicity, is still in place.
The increased sensitivity to ethnicity and ethnic humour started
in the late 1960s.32 Until then, humour scandals in the Netherlands
revolved around religion, sex, royalty, or a combination of those ele-
ments, but these topics lost their scandalous appeal. In 1972, the TV
program Hadimassa caused the first scandal related to ethnic hu-
mour. Comics told jokes about Jews and Blacks, which led to public
outrage and questions in Parliament.33 In the next thirty-five years,
various people got into trouble for publicly joking about ethnicity. In
2003, a complaint was filed against the makers of the daily cartoon
in the elite newspaper NRC Handelsblad for alleged racism.34 In
2008, a cartoonist known under the pseudonym Gregorius Nekschot
was arrested because of the discriminatory nature of his cartoons
188 Giselinde Kuipers

targeting Blacks, Muslims, and Jews. Eventually, the charges were

dropped.35
The rules of ethnic joking draw a strong line between public and
private spheres. One can always joke about migrants and minorities
as long as one is ‘among friends,’ when one is with people who are
known to be able to ‘take it’ and who are certain to understand you
are ‘just joking.’ Usually, this means: in the company of native Dutch.
However, joke-tellers have high praise for people from minority groups
who ‘can take’ such jokes, and being able to share jokes with a ‘for-
eigner’ means she or he is accepted as part of the in-group. However,
the regime stipulates that everyone may joke about their own group:
Turks about Turks, Jews about Jews, Surinamese about Surinamese.
Also, the exchange of jokes between members of minority groups of
similar status is deemed acceptable: Turks about Surinamese, Moroc-
cans about Antilleans, and so forth. Generally, ethnic humour is con-
sidered problematic only when it is ‘downward’ joking, about a group
with a lower social status.
This proved to be a golden opportunity for migrant comedians: they
can make the jokes that native comedians would never dare make, but
which both Dutch and migrants like to hear since it is such a charged
subject. During the late 1990s, comedians of Surinamese, Moroccan,
and Turkish background emerged, mostly in the stand-up comedy
scene. Especially in their early routines, they relied on references to
their ethnicity. A Surinamese comedian, Erik van Sauers, would make
his entrance on stage saying: ‘I suppose you’re all thinking: a Negro
on stage, so it’s gonna be tap dancing tonight.’ Often, such simple ref-
erences to ethnic background would be enough to provoke peals of
laughter. Many of these comedians performed together, and in their
acts they would joke back and forth about each other’s ethnic back-
ground.

Ethnic Comedians and the Rise of Reflexive Humour

These ‘ethnic comedians’ paved the way for more diverse and self-re-
flexive forms of ethnic humour. The comedy format allowed for more
sophisticated humorous techniques than the rather straightforward
joke form, and their ‘safe’ position as ethnic comedians made it possi-
ble to play with ethnic stereotypes and comic scripts. The culmination
of this self-reflexive humour is the successful film Shouf Shouf habibi
(2004), a comedy about a group of young Moroccans. It was popular
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 189

among both Dutch Moroccans and indigenous Dutch, and managed

to convince the critics as well, winning the critics’ award at the 2004
Dutch Film Festival. The film, which was also a modest international
success, has now been made into a TV comedy series.
In the trailer for this film the Dutch-Moroccan protagonist Ap (short
for Abdullah) introduces himself and his family. When introducing his
uncle in Morocco, a bearded man in traditional Moroccan dress, he
recounts his attempt at telling him a (new) ethnic joke:

What are the differences between E.T. and a Moroccan? 1: E.T. had a bike
of his own. 2: E.T. wanted to learn the language. 3: E.T. wanted to go back
where he came from.

His uncle, Ap explains, didn’t get the joke, because he didn’t know
who E.T. was. The shot then shifts to his father, another bearded man
in jellabah, but this time not in a Moroccan village, but in a Dutch
high-rise neighbourhood. ‘And this is my father, his brother. He went
to the Netherlands. And that’s why I speak two languages, and know
who E.T. is.’
Although his trailer is based on a joke, the result is more ambiguous
and self-reflexive than the average ethnic joke. This ambiguity is the
result not just of the joke being told by Ap, or the added context of him
trying to tell it to his uncle. The longer format of the trailer (like a mov-
ie or a comedy performance) creates identification with the various
characters, which rarely happens in jokes, and allows for more com-
plex and sophisticated employment of comic scripts and stereotypes.
Comic stereotypes are played with, mocked, reversed, exaggerated,
rather than simply invoked and repeated, as in most oral jokes. As a
result, in Shouf Shouf Habibi images and expectations of Moroccans
are at the same time confirmed, reversed, mocked, and destroyed.
The emergence of ethnic comics marked the point where humour
became a multi-ethnic enterprise, rather than a case of the estab-
lished36 joking about outsiders. It also implied the opening up of the
public domain to some forms of ethnic joking, although still governed
by the same regime of ethnic humour. Most importantly, it meant the
development of new, more varied forms of ethnic humour. Such self-
reflexive humour, however, is tricky: it can easily be turned back into
regular, unreflexive ethnic humour. This became clear to me when I
discovered the E.T. joke on www.stormfront.org, a white supremacist
site hosted outside of the country (since it would be banned if it were
190 Giselinde Kuipers

hosted by a Dutch provider), surrounded by openly racist language.

Without the careful framing, all of a sudden it is a straightforward,
rather blunt, ethnic joke.
For indigenous comedians, joking about minorities under the rules
of the joke is risky, but not impossible. Jokers have to make clear that
they are not serious and strongly distance themselves from the con-
tent of the joke. Since the 1970s, progressive comedians told ethnic
jokes and then chided their audiences for laughing at these jokes, call-
ing them racist. The National Bureau for the Prevention of Racism em-
ployed a similar strategy, using cartoons that made fun of racism, in
an attempt to prevent racism. In these examples, the framing as ‘anti-
racist’ is so clear there is no room for doubt about the joker’s intent,
and ethnic jokes become jokes mocking racists.
In the comic routines of the younger, more confrontational, but po-
litically less engaged comics of the 1990s and 2000s, these distancing
strategies have become less preachy and more absurdist. An early ex-
ample from comedian Theo Maassen (1994):

In the old days, the old days, there never used to be a problem with the
environment. Now we have all these foreigners here and all of sudden
there’s a hole in the ozone layer! Now guess how this happened! But of
course you can’t say that, because then you would be discriminating!37

In a similar vein, comic Hans Teeuwen (1997) portrayed the warped

logic of a bigot:

Moreover, the Powers That Be in The Hague [residence of the Dutch gov-
ernment] have allowed all these colored funny-speaking unemployed
from all sorts of far filthy countries into our country. On arrival, these
unemployed just lie down on their beds waiting till we come, meek as
lambs, bringing them money. These unemployed we call: the foreigners.
Also known as drug users. And they make no effort whatsoever to get
acquainted with our rich culture. At the mention of names like Ad Visser
[presenter of a 1970s pop music program] or Loeki Knol [actress in 1970s
TV shows. Her last name, Knol, means ‘Turnip’] they will look you in the
eye with a dull and uninterested gaze.

Both Teeuwen and Maassen present themselves as dim-witted

characters with rural accents. By using the guise of stupid bigots, they
manage to make ethnic humour palatable to diverse audiences, pleas-
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 191

antly transgressive, yet (to most people) not too offensive. This strat-
egy is actually quite like the self-reflexive ethnic humour of the ethnic
comedians: like them, Maassen and Teeuwen (and others) play with
ethnic scripts and with the rules of ethnic humour. In the end, the
butts of their jokes are never the minorities, but the native Dutch who
employ these stereotypes.
Such playing with the rules of ethnic humour became more com-
mon in comedy performances around 2000. While considered risqué
at first, it has become widespread now, mostly as a result of the break-
through of migrant comics. The rise of this reflexive humour reflects
not only the transformation of comedy into a multi-ethnic domain (as
has happened with oral jokes, too), but also a more general develop-
ment in comedy. Comedy became less overtly political, more reflex-
ive, and more confrontational. In this ‘postmodern’ style of humour,
the exploration of transgression and taboo is an important element.
The strongest taboo in Dutch society could not remain unexplored
– although the strategies these comedians use leave the taboo intact
and unbroken. However, comics today are generally careful in their
observance of the boundaries of the ethnic taboo. The changes in
public ethnic joking since the 1990s remain within the limits of the re-
gime. Even the most confrontational of these comedians, Hans Teeu-
wen, who has a reputation for keeping his audience in the dark as to
his intentions when joking about, for instance, pedophilia, has always
distanced himself from possibly serious racist ‘readings’ of his ethnic
jokes.
In recent years we see two shifts in comedy routines that mirror the
changes in oral joke-telling. First, Muslim jokes have appeared in pro-
fessional comedy routines, although especially in the routines of the
more ‘shocking’ comics like Teeuwen, or in the smaller stand-up com-
edy venues. Second, professional comics occasionally tell jokes about
Blacks and Surinamese, probably a reflection of the growing status of
Surinamese. However, despite these gradual shifts, the regime regu-
lating the public use of ethnic humour largely remains in place even
today, in 2009, and native Dutch comedians typically joke of other
topics, or make sure their good intentions are clear.

Ethnic Humour and Multicultural Sensibilities

Ethnicity and ethnic diversity became a delicate topic in the late 1960s,
and the first ethnic joke scandal occurred in 1972. This means the sen-
130 Monika Pater

68 ‘Wir stehen mitten unter euch, und das, was wir hier sagen, würdet Ihr
alle genau sagen.’ Theo Rausch, Die drei frohen Gesellen mit der Laterna
Magica (Cologne: DuMont-Schauberg, [1935]), 4.
69 Horn discusses the use of this program as achieving the goals of the re-
gime, particularly by cooperating with the KdF (Strength through Joy),
which organized the live broadcasts. See Horn, ‘Der Reichssender Köln
und der “Frohe Samstagnachmittag,”’ 195ff.
70 See Monika Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 171–210.
71 Kirsten Drotner, ‘Ethnographic Enigmas: “The Everyday” in Recent Media
Studies,’ Cultural Studies 8 (1994): 351.
72 See Pater and Schmidt, ‘Veralltäglichung des Radios.’
73 For an account of how the standard of living improved, see, for example,
Anne-Katrin Einfeldt, ‘Auskommen – Durchkommen – Weiterkommen:
Weibliche Arbeitserfahrungen in der Bergarbeiterkolonie,’ in ‘Die Jahre
weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll’: Faschismuserfahrungen
im Ruhrgebiet. Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930–
1960, vol. 1, ed. Lutz Niethammer (Berlin, Bonn: Dietz, 1983), 267–96, esp.
274–5.
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 193

sensitivity towards the experiences of the (former) colonized. Decolo-

nization, along with increasing international migration, challenged
the notion of the mono-ethnic nation-state, a core value in Dutch,
and European, politics during the twentieth century. The concern
with ethnicity and ethnic differences is inherent in the definition of
the Dutch nation as a religiously plural but ethnically homogeneous
society.
This development in the Netherlands is comparable to that in other
European countries, but differs from immigrant nations such as the
United States, Australia, or Canada. In the United States criticism of
ethnic humour was often voiced by members of minority groups who
increasingly spoke out.41 In the Netherlands, however, the concern
about ethnic humour and ethnic difference was mostly an affair of the
native Dutch. The multiculturalist discourse and ideology were firmly
in place by the time the immigrants arrived. In fact, ethnicity – in the
shape of concern over colonialism and attempts to grapple with the
Holocaust – had become a central issue in Dutch political discourse
before ethnic groups played a role of any significance in Dutch soci-
ety. Therefore, the sensitivity about ethnicity appears to be one of the
causes of the rise of ethnic humour, rather than the other way around.
Around 2000, the Dutch debate about migration and assimilation
became more heated, partly because of global developments such
as increased immigration, European integration, and the attacks of
9/11, but also because of the assassinations of two public personalities
known for their anti-immigrant stance: politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002
and filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004.42 Van Gogh himself had been
involved in various ‘humour scandals’ concerned with his allegedly
racist or anti-Semitic remarks in his satirical columns. These global
and national events led to a hardening of the multicultural debate and
a shift in the discourse about minorities. Ethnic and ‘integration’ is-
sues now virtually dominate the political debate.
Consequently, the guarded speech about migrants has been re-
placed by a discourse that is direct to the point of bluntness. After
the murder of van Gogh, foreign correspondents in the Netherlands
had a hard time explaining to their editors and their readers that the
filmmaker regularly referred to Muslims as ‘goat fuckers.’ The rules of
unspeakability and circumspection have declined: when it comes to
ethnicity and ethnic difference, most things can be said.
Still, the avoidance and regulation of ethnic humour in the public
domain persists. For instance, in the 2005–6 season of the immensely
194 Giselinde Kuipers

popular satirical television show Kopspijkers, jokes alluding to eth-

nicity were, even with the multicultural debate raging, conspicu-
ously absent. When satirists poke fun at anti-immigrant politicians,
they use the same distancing strategies Teeuwen en Maassen used in
the 1990s. Unlike the case ten years ago, this absence, and this cir-
cumspection, can hardly be explained exclusively by the fear of being
called ‘racist.’
Why, now that so much, and maybe everything, may be said about
migrants, has there not been an explosion of racist jokes on the Inter-
net, in theatres, in the newspaper, or on TV? A first explanation would
be that the demise of circumspection has made jokes superfluous. In a
reversal of Freud’s argument, if everything can be said directly, there is
no need to disguise it as a joke. However, history has shown that jokes
about sex have not disappeared with the decrease in taboos about sex;
rather, they have become more numerous. Similarly, ethnic jokes have
not disappeared but have become slightly more visible.
I think the persisting clandestine character of ethnic humour can
be explained in two ways. First, ethnic difference, in Dutch public dis-
course, still counts as first and foremost as a serious topic: a problem
that is too large and too serious to joke about. Even though the tone
has changed from circumspection to concern and alarm, ethnic dif-
ference is still identified as one of the nation’s central political themes,
social problems, and moral concerns. Maybe jokes about religion in
the 1950s and 1960s are a better analogy than the repressed sexual hu-
mour of Victorians: things that are so important, sacred, and urgent
that they can only be discussed in serious, reverent, tones.
Another reason for the clandestine attraction of ethnic jokes is that,
despite all the shifts in the debate, the discourse about ethnic minori-
ties has not become totally free of restrictions. Philosopher Baukje
Prins has aptly summarized the Dutch multicultural debate as ‘the
loss of innocence.’ People on all sides of the multicultural debate tend
to complain about being prevented from saying things, and being
muzzled. In practice, however, people are hardly actively restrained or
censored.43 The regime of ethnic joking is the result of internal controls
rather than external pressure: Selbstzwang rather than Fremdzwang.44
Drawing ethnic boundaries cannot be reconciled easily with the thor-
oughly internalized equality principle of meritocratic democracy and
its written and unwritten rules not to be ‘hurtful.’ Mocking and ridi-
culing the excluded and less powerful, even though they are consid-
ered a problem, still feels morally wrong.
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 195

Finally, members of minority groups themselves are not as pliant as

they used to be. This is the flipside of the rise of ethnic comedians and
their self-reflexive humour. Prins quotes the nostalgic reminiscences
of Black entertainers of yore by Vuijsje, the critic of multiculturalism
who coined the term ‘ethnic taboo’: ‘It seems like ages ago, in a bar-
barian prehistory, that Black artists would use their blackness coquet-
tishly and without reticence.’45 In 2003, shortly before he died, I spoke
to Donald Jones, for a long time the best-known Black entertainer of
the Netherlands, and one of the entertainers Vuijsje was so nostalgic
about. He had become very ambivalent about his former role as ‘the
Netherlands’ professional Negro.’46 The realization that stereotypes,
no matter how funny they are intended to be, can have serious con-
sequences has struck home among migrants as well as native Dutch.
And the effects of this realization are irreversible.
Thus, the Dutch inhabitants of the multicultural society have in-
deed, as Prins says, lost their innocence. Even though the space to
speak, and joke, freely about ethnicity has increased in the past dec-
ade in the Netherlands, this space is not unlimited. It is the realization
of the inevitable boundaries to speech that fuels ethnic humour in the
Netherlands. Whereof one cannot speak freely, thereof one must joke.

Conclusion: Ethnic Politics in the Nation-State and the Persistence

of Ethnic Humour

This chapter has explored the politics of joking through an analysis of

ethnic humour, its regulation, and its relation to ethnic politics in the
Netherlands from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century. Ethnic
humour is the most constested form of humour in the Netherlands as
well other Western liberal democracies. The analysis of this particular
case highlights two aspects of humour and laughter that make this
seemingly cheerful and non-serious mode of communication thor-
oughly political. First, humour and laughter are strongly connected
to status hierarchies. And second, humour and laughter reflect, com-
ment on, and occasionally offend social and moral sensitivities. Be-
cause of this, humour itself turns into a sensitive issue that needs to be
regulated, policed, and sometimes even prosecuted and suppressed.
The emergence of ethnic jokes about the ‘new’ minorities shows
the (grudging) transition of the Netherlands from a homogeneous
nation-state to a multi-ethnic society and the concurrent emergence
of ethnicity as an important marker of status. However, this hierar-
196 Giselinde Kuipers

chy is refracted through the prism of a Dutch perspective on ethnic

relations. This perspective was grounded in class and race at first,
increasingly remapped onto culture and religion in the early 2000s –
but it remained overly sensitive to ethnic categories throughout this
remapping. Hence, ethnic humour is not a direct reflection of Dutch
society or ethnic relations. Rather, it mirrors the discursive domains
– class, race, culture, religion47 – through which hierarchies are un-
derstood and conceptualized. The semi-standardized, semi-private
form of the jokes provides a cultural ‘free zone’ where such hierarchies
can be enacted, repeated, reinforced – and sometimes contested, as
in the newly emerged ethnic competition jokes. For the jokers, this
may present an opportunity to reaffirm group identity, stressing their
own normality, moderation, and (possibly) superiority. However, the
transgressive nature of these jokes adds as much to their appeal at this
identity-affirming aspect.
Neither the existence of ethnic humour, nor the increasing sensitiv-
ity to ethnic references is typical of the Netherlands. The Netherlands
was probably more extreme both in its embrace of multiculturalism
and in the anti-multiculturalist backlash of the early 2000s. But many
Western liberal democracies have witnessed the rise of ethnic humour
in the second half of the twentieth century, complemented by an in-
creasing sensitivity about this topic. This was illustrated most dramat-
ically by the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005–6, which highlighted
ethnic, religious, and political divisions all over Europe and around
the world.48 Hence, neither the rise of ethnic humour, nor its clandes-
tine and contested nature, can be explained from specifically Dutch
sensibilities.
Ethnic difference sits uneasily with the central ideologies and in-
stitutions of Western European nation-states. Ethnicity is hard to
reconcile with the European notion of citizenship, which, unlike the
American or Canadian one, is connected with local descent, parent-
age, and language. Most European countries are struggling with the
political puzzle of making old notions of ‘belonging’ fit the ‘new’ cit-
izens. Ethnicity also is problematic in the context of egalitarian de-
mocracies, where power differences are uncomfortable, and ‘ascribed
statuses’ like ethnic background especially problematic. Feelings of
superiority are increasingly suppressed, and, as we saw, ethnicity is
very much a status marker.
Thus, in the context of egalitarian European nations, ethnic differ-
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 197

ence is a cultural anomaly. And, as Mary Douglas noted in Purity and

Danger, cultural anomalies, while typically suppressed, ignored, or
filtered out because of their dangerous and disturbing qualities, are
also felt to be imbued with special powers. Hence, anomalies are of-
ten invoked in ritual, religion, and art. In domains that are carefully
separated from the real world, such as the sacred, the aesthetic, or the
humorous, the special appeal of anomalies can be exploited. Because,
as Douglas remarks, ‘it is not always an unpleasant experience to con-
front ambiguity. Obviously it is more tolerable in some areas than in
others. There is a whole gradient on which laughter, revulsion, and
shock belong at different points and intensities.’49 In ethnic humour,
the cultural anomaly of ethnic difference in the European nation-state
can be safely explored, because it is made into a – clandestine – aes-
thetic experience.
In the Netherlands, the concepts of equality, citizenship, and their
overarching political institution, the nation-state, were already in the
process of being redefined before the arrival of immigrants. The in-
flux of immigrants further muddled the notion of the imagined Dutch
community, aggravating the ‘crisis’ of the nation-state, and making
ethnicity even more of a challenge to national identity. Hence the cen-
trality of ethnicity to Dutch politics: ethnic difference is anomalous to
the core political institutions and beliefs.
I conclude with another analogy with Freud. Sexual humour in
Freud’s time was sensitive, clandestine, and attractive not just be-
cause sex was strictly regulated – that would be a tautology. This regu-
lation of sexuality was entwined with the central societal institutions
of the time, which were to a large extent based on keeping men and
women apart. The sexual division of labour, marriage, the family, but
also religion, the army, the educational system – all were based on a
notion that men and women should be separated, their sexual attrac-
tion repressed. In this constellation, sexuality was a social puzzle, an
anomaly, dangerous and funny at the same time. To the core insti-
tutions of the late twentieth century, ethnicity has become similarly
anomalous, complicated, and inevitable. It is the institution of the Eu-
ropean nation-state, proclaiming itself to be a homogeneous, meri-
trocratic community, that has given birth to modern ethnic politics,
and to the notion of the problematic ‘ethnic minority.’ And hence, it
is this institution that has given birth to the clandestine pleasure of
ethnic humour.
198 Giselinde Kuipers

notes

1 The author wants to thank Christie Davies, Martina Kessel, Patrick Mer-
ziger, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments
on previous versions of this essay. Special thanks to Christie Davies for
inspiring me to pursue this topic to begin with, and for many insightful
and stimulating discussions.
2 Elliott Oring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish
Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984).
3 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic In-
vestigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
4 Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), Jokes and Their Relation to Society (Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter, 1998), and The Mirth of Nations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-
tion, 2002).
5 Alan Dundes, Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles (Berkeley: Ten
Speed Press, 1987); Mahadev Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropo-
logical Approach (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Gershon
Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (New York: Breaking Point, 1975);
Kathleen Stokker, Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Nor-
way 1940–45 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Mary Lee
Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits of Repres-
sion in Nineteenth Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992); Eliott Oring, Engaging Humor (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2003); Paul Lewis, Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Con-
flict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
6 Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World, Jokes and Their Relation to Soci-
ety, and The Mirth of Nations.
7 Giselinde Kuipers, ‘The Difference between a Surinamese and a Turk:
Ethnic Jokes and the Position of Ethnic Minorities in the Netherlands,’
HUMOR: International Journal for Humor Research 12 (2000): 141–75.
8 The most commonly used word in Dutch jokes to refer to people of col-
our is neger (always uncapitalized), literally meaning ‘negro.’ However, I
have translated it throughout as ‘Black.’ Neger primarily denotes anyone
of African or African-American descent and does not carry the connota-
tions of colonialism, segregation, slavery, or the American South that
‘negro’ conjures up in (American?) English. Also, neger, like ‘Black,’ is
somewhat, but not very, taboo: there are better, more politically correct
equivalents, but using it is not seen as a major violation.
9 Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World.
134 Patrick Merziger

scribed the republic as a ‘factory of contemporary satire.’18 While, until

1918, satirical magazines tried to take positions above party lines, after
1918, especially partisan satire boomed; at the end of the twenties, a
satirical journal completed the portfolio of a modern political party.
The communist party had set an example for successful campaigning.
After the communist daily the Rote Fahne (Red Flag) and the illustrat-
ed journal Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Magazine), the party
founded its own satirical newspaper, which appeared under different
titles such as Der Rote Knüppel (Red Club) and, until February 1933,
Roter Pfeffer (Red Pepper). Other parties also had their own satirical
journals, and most satirical journals underwrote a particular political
perspective.19
Starting in 1927, Joseph Goebbels, at that time Gauleiter (region-
al party leader) of Berlin, also recruited satirists to write and draw
for his newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack). Goebbels’s friend Hans
Schweitzer, better known under his pseudonym ‘Mjölnir,’ soon be-
came famous, especially for his caricatures of Bernhard Weiß, the vice-
president of the Berlin police. Weiß was the favourite aim of the Angriff
because he recognized early the threat embodied by the National
Socialist party and consequently prosecuted their violations of law.
Schweitzer depicted Weiß as ‘a Jew,’ adding such typical stereotypes
as a big nose and big glasses, and he insinuated that Weiß himself was
breaking the law by prosecuting the National Socialist party. From the
propagandist point of view, those defamatory caricatures were suc-
cessful, because they caused a stir, involuntarily supported by legal
proceedings that Weiß took against Goebbels and his co-workers.20
At the beginning of the thirties, the National Socialist party intensi-
fied efforts to establish satire as a means of propaganda because, from
1930 onward, the movement had to incorporate growing numbers of
new followers. Satire obviously appealed to the party propagandists
as an entertaining and effective medium to achieve this integration.
In 1931, several anthologies of satires were published, taken from their
various newspapers: Der Kesse Orje (The Breezy Orje),21 the fifth edi-
tion of Das Buch Isidor (The book Isidor),22 and the second edition of
Knorke (Awesome).23 In the same year, the first satirical sketches and
plays were published, as well as two magazines, the Brennessel (Sting-
ing Nettle) and the Zeitlupe (Slow Motion).
Der Kesse Orje is a good example for those early satires since it was a
compilation of satires and caricatures from the newspaper Der Angriff.
200 Giselinde Kuipers

ciological Enquiry into Community Problems, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Sage,
1994).
24 Dundes, Cracking Jokes.
25 This version was collected on 20 June 2007 on a joke site: http://www
.flabber.nl/archief/009162.php?p=http://www.flabber.nl/archief/009162
.php?p=7.
26 See for instance the following joke sites: http://www.spacie.nl/weblog/
index.php?entry=437 http://www.newsgroups-index.com/group/
nl_-politiek_l4022.html http://hiphopinjesmoel.com/forums/1/
categories/2/topics/12122 (all visited 5 August 2007).
27 See Baukje Prins, Voorbij de onschuld. Het debat over integratie in Neder-
land (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2004).
28 Kuipers, ‘The Social Construction of Digital Danger.’
29 www.meldpunt.nl (accessed 10 June 2007).
30 Kuipers, Good Humor Bad Taste, 148–69.
31 Herman Vuijsje, The Politically Correct Netherlands: Since the 1960s (West-
port/London: Greenwood, 2000).
32 For two opposite interpretations of this development, see Prins, Voorbij
de onschuld, and Vuijsje, Politically Correct Netherlands.
33 Patrick van den Hanenberg and Frank Verhallen, Het is weer tijd om te
bepalen waar het allemaal op staat: Nederlands cabaret 1970–1995 (Am-
sterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1996).
34 For the documentation about this case, see the website of the Press
Council: http://www.rvdj.nl, zaak 2003/42.
35 Joep Dohmen, ‘Humor of haat; Feiten en dilemma’s van de affaire-
Nekschot,’ NRC Handelsblad, 5 July 2008, Zaterdags Bijvoegsel, 8–9.
36 Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders.
37 Source for all comics’ quotes: www.zwartekat.nl (Dutch Cabaret
Homepage) (accessed 5 August 2007).
38 Prins, Voorbij de onschuld; Vuijsje, Politically Correct Netherlands; Paul
Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn, When Ways of Life Collide: Multicul-
turalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007).
39 James Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in Aanbouw: Nederland in de Jaren zestig
(Amsterdam: Boom, 1995).
40 Cas Wouters, Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (London:
Sage, 2007).
41 Mahadev Apte, ‘Ethnic Humor versus “Sense of Humor”: An American
Sociocultural Dilemma,’ American Behavioral Scientist 30, no. 3 (1987):
27–41.
 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands 201

42 Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the
Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
43 Kuipers, ‘Social Construction of Digital Danger.’
44 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process 1: A History of Manners (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1978); Wouters, Informalization.
45 Cited in Prins, Voorbij de onschuld, 27.
46 Giselinde Kuipers, ‘1 oktober 1957: Donald Jones verschijnt in Pension
Hommeles. De rol van gekleurde acteurs in Nederlandse televisiehumor,’
in Kunsten in Beweging deel 1, ed. Rosemarie Buikema and Maaike Meijer
(Den Haag: SDU, 2003).
47 Arguably, religion here serves as proxy for modernity, contrasting the
modern, secular Dutch with the traditional, religious Muslim minorities.
48 Paul Lewis, Christie Davies, Giselinde Kuipers, Rod Martin, Elliott Oring,
and Victor Raskin, ‘The Muhammad Cartoons and Humor Research: A
Collection of Essays,’ HUMOR International Journal of Humor Research
21, no. 1 (2006): 1–46; Giselinde Kuipers, ’The Politics of Humor in the
Public Sphere: Cartoons, Power and Modernity in the First Transnational
Humor Scandal,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2011):
63–80.
49 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 37.
140 Patrick Merziger

as abhorrent, and nobody would have expected any misunderstand-

ing. Even so, Hugo Hartung got the impression that it would better to
explain his musical. To this end, he published a fictitious interview
between himself, the writer, and his protagonist, Jonny.
In the interview, Jonny speaks wistfully about his status in the Third
Reich. ‘Being famous … this is over now! That was a long time ago …
today there is no place for people like me in Germany anymore.’ To
which the writer replies: ‘Yes, that’s right. You have been completely
forgotten. More than forgotten! I must admit I don’t see any point in
reviving your name by writing an opera on you. Forgotten, buried …
that’s it.’48 And in fact, the writer was not able to explain why he had
written the parody. At most, he was able to explain the paradoxical
situation of the satirist. He wanted to eradicate Jonny by writing a sat-
ire on him, but the satire only kept his memory alive.
Critics were not amused by the parody, since, although the music
was bizarre and exaggerated, it still remained jazz.49 Consequen-
tially, in an internal assessment of Hartung’s satirical radio plays,
Willy Richartz, who was working for the Reichsendeleitung (the na-
tional radio administration) and was responsible for programming
until 1937, considered satire in general to be ‘highly questionable.’
He feared that most of the listeners might take the play seriously
because radio lacked those visual aids which in other media might
have clarified that it was a satirical piece. In his opinion, the problem
was reinforced by the fact that radio appealed to the ‘simple folk’ and
‘not only to the educated or the literati from Schwabing,’ a formerly
bohemian borough of Munich, who were better able to understand
subtle broadcasts. In this particular case, he feared that listeners only
heard the jazz first and foremost. Richartz concluded that broadcast-
ing could employ satire only ‘to a very limited degree’ for humorous
purposes.50
In other media as well, satirists found their role confusing. One ex-
ample from print media was the case of Fritz Reipert, who had edited
an extensive series of propaganda brochures targeting England, which
also meant ‘the Jews’ and their ‘world conspiracy.’ These propaganda
pamphlets, masked as academic studies, were in part printed by the
NSDAP publisher Eher, reaching large editions of up to one million
copies.51 Reipert was a propagandist in the narrow sense of the word.
Not only was he in total agreement with the regime, his publications
were also recognized by propaganda experts as exemplary and dis-
tributed as such by the party. In 1942, Reipert attempted for the last
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 203

Despite such passing nods of admiration, the aesthetic itself has

until quite recently attracted no sustained critical attention, presum-
ably as a consequence of its having acquired so few male practition-
ers.3 At once frustratingly evasive and thoroughly winning, the stylistic
effects of this humorous aesthetic are generated almost entirely by
the narrative voice as it deftly deploys a number of rhetorical tropes
and affective tactics that – owing to their indirection, subtlety, dif-
fuseness, and self-effacement – might be described, according to the
logic of gender, as ‘feminine.’ Such tactics, that is, are not ‘feminine’
simply because women have had recourse to them more frequently
than have men, but rather because they are associated with traits, be-
haviours, perspectives, and dispositions that – with remarkable con-
tinuity – have been trans-historically and cross-culturally prescribed
to women. (Another way of making this point would be to note that
the early Greek philosophical and social construction of the feminine
has proved to be alarmingly pervasive and resilient in our globalized
world.) Passivity, submission, selflessness, maternal feeling, and af-
fectivity in general have traditionally been gendered ‘feminine’ in the
West, just as agency, aggression, rationality, autonomy – and, indeed,
the rights-based notion of the Liberal individuated self – have been
gendered ‘masculine.’ And this is so no matter how often individual
male or female subjects may manifest traits associated with the oppo-
site gender. Similarly, in humour, well-known, widely respected, and
self-proclaiming rhetorical gestures – such as hyperbole, broad satire,
and blatant irony – culturally register as masculine, despite female us-
age, while quieter, receding tropes like meiosis (or understatement),
litotes (or double negatives), and periphrasis (or circumlocution) are
relegated to the feminine.
Affectively speaking, humour is gendered masculine when it ex-
presses aggression towards its victim in socially and psychologically
acceptable ways – through tendentious jokes, for example, as Freud
has famously discussed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncon-
scious (1905) – and through irony, which theoretically, at least since
Aristotle, requires not only an eiron but an alazon as well (that is, a
third party who, devalued by the ironist and the listener, is deaf to the
irony of the utterance). William Hazlitt, in his 1819 essay ‘On Wit and
Humour,’ goes so far as to insist that a necessary condition for ‘the
laughable’ is the complete absence of any sympathy for the victim: not
only do ‘we burst into laughter from want of sympathy’; we actually
derive ‘amusement from the very rejection of […] false claims upon
204 Eileen Gillooly

our sympathy.’ Only those ‘misfortunes in which we are spectators,

not sharers,’ are capable of evoking our laughter; for when we are the
victims of misfortune ourselves, ‘we feel the pain as well, which more
than counterbalances the speculative entertainment.’4
Certainly laughter of this sort – derisive and superior – is commonly
fuelled by feelings of hostility, more or less sublimated, depending
on whether our explicator is Hobbes or Freud. But there is another
sort of humour that, even if it does not move us to outright laugh-
ter, is nevertheless capable of eliciting an understanding smile. Such
humour expresses sympathy for its victim – however ambivalently,
however imbricated with mocking irony. In doing so, it may be said
to be affectively maternal – psychologically recalling the internaliza-
tion of the protective, pre-Oedipal mother-child dyad rather than the
triangulating, Oedipal configuration of jokes and irony. Such kindly,
compassionate humour results from our empathic identification with
the victim: rather than laughing from a safe emotional distance at
a stranger who is slipping on a banana peel, we are psychologically
encouraged instead to put ourselves in her position. The humorous
pleasure we experience in such a case, being not unmixed with a tinge
of pain, might be characterized as slightly masochistic, just as the
pleasure we derive from aggressive, emotionally distant humour is
recognized by its mildly sadistic edge.
In his book English Humour (1976), J.B. Priestley suggested the term
‘feminine humour’ to name the sort of humorous discourse I am de-
scribing here – what he called ‘the plentiful supply of light satirical
wit, much candid sharp humour, and fine eyes lighting up with laugh-
ter’ that he found most richly veined in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and
in Cranford (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell’s story of a northern English vil-
lage under the authority, the first line tells us, ‘of the Amazons.’5 To
his mind, feminine humour is quite different from humour ‘that is ag-
gressive, coarse in grain, predominantly masculine’ (128): it is a ‘very
gentle humour’ (122), a ‘tender humour,’ a humour that leaves us ‘with
our sympathies broadened instead of being further constricted’ (129),
and ‘while it is essentially feminine in spirit, any man not armoured in
machismo, too stiffly male, might create it’ (129).
Note well that, in borrowing Priestly’s term, I use it even more cau-
tiously, I suspect, than he did. It is for me not a physical but a phe-
nomenological mark of gender, bestowing a discursive identity upon,
and thus bringing to cultural consciousness, what might otherwise be
sensed as only faint textual muttering – or, as Boyet remarks in Love’s
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 205

Labour’s Lost (quoted in the epigraph to this essay), as a cut so ‘keen’

and ‘swift’ as to be invisible, if not altogether undetectable. The tactics
mobilized by feminine humour – notably its subtle subversiveness and
disarming self-deprecation – have much in common with the humour
of others who have similarly been marginalized (and consequently
been gendered feminine) in a culture dominated by white, hetero-
sexual, able-bodied, Christian, middle-class masculinity. Indeed, for
Kierkegaard, the distinguishing characteristic of the humorist is pre-
cisely ‘feel[ing] for a time like the other’ – though like minority hu-
mour of other sorts, feminine humour is probably best appreciated by
that coterie whose experiences and resentments most sharply resem-
ble those engaged in the humour, however amusing others outside
the targeted audience may find it.6 And yet without, I hope, treating
feminine humour as a restrictive critical category, I limit my discus-
sion here to the ways in which gender as an isolated variable – rather
than in conjunction with other aspects of identity or affiliation such
as race, nationality, class, religion, ethnicity, or sexuality, with which
it inevitably occurs in practice – makes its presence humorously felt,
however fleetingly. For feminine humour characteristically occurs as
an assortment of barely perceptible punctures in the narration, hid-
den in the interstices of otherwise sober expression.
Although the targets of feminine humour are no less numer-
ous than those of other, more traditionally-recognized, forms of the
comic, the delight such humour concocts from the often deadening
routines and duties of ‘women’s sphere’ – whether in the nineteenth
century or the twentieth – is one of its tell-tale features: observing the
intricate workings out of social relations, chronicling the minutiae of
domesticity, or otherwise dwelling with fondness upon the culturally
trivialized, ignored, and demeaned. Jane Austen, for one, relentlessly
mined the quotidian in her efforts to entertain her family and friends,
producing in her letters a bit of diversion from a weather report, a
country ball, or a shopping expedition. Indeed, references to work –
often prominent in the correspondence of her male contemporaries
– rarely surface in her own, and even when they do, they are barely
noticeable in the sea of gossip. When faced with an unpromising top-
ic, Austen discovered that rhetorical ingenuity in conveying it could
prove effective. In the following passage from a letter to her sister
Cassandra, dated 31 May 1811, she exploits apophasis and zeugma7
to create an imaginative alternative reading of an otherwise tedious
feminine script:
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 143

Home Front), whose tone was to be set by a large caricature by Hans

Schweitzer, i.e. Mjölnir, resplendent on the front cover. Although, in
Goebbels’s eyes, Schweitzer had not accomplished much of late (his
caricatures had mostly disappeared), Goebbels still hoped that the
artist could be as effective as he was remembered to have been before
1933.58
But it should be clear by now that the perception of convinced Na-
tional Socialists did not necessarily reflect the actual presence sat-
ire had in the public sphere at the time. Such projects were merely
wishful thinking. Satire disappeared almost totally, not only in film,
radio, and theatre, but also in the popular press and the newspapers.
Whereas, before the Nazi takeover of power, the NSDAP journal the
Illustrierte Beobachter (Illustrated Observer) had regularly printed sat-
ire, by 1934 satire had completely vanished from the periodical. The
Brennessel, the prestigious satirical project, was shut down on 31 De-
cember 1938 because of its low circulation. At the end, it sold fewer
than 10,000 copies.59 Although managing to survive until the end of
1944, the Simplicissimus and the Kladderadatsch sold only 18,000 and
12,000 copies, respectively, in 1939, compared with 50,000 and 40,000
copies in 1931.
In the end, the Deutsche Presse and other semi-official journals had
to admit repeatedly that their efforts to implement the use of satire
were in vain. Newspapers that were published by the NSDAP or the
Ministry for Propaganda – for example, the Völkischer Beobachter or
Das Reich – printed caricatures as prescribed. The remaining newspa-
pers, however, only did so when they were explicitly ordered to.60 The
shortage of paper during the war was used as a welcome argument to
evade the demand to print such satires.61 Newspaper editors experi-
enced the unsolicited sending of material by the caricature office as
a burden and criticized the waste of costly resources on such ‘minor
matters’ in light of the paper shortage.62 The project Front und Heimat
was abandoned, despite having Hitler’s emphatic support and despite
Goebbels having already printed and distributed a dummy version.63
During the last year of war, even Goebbels could not get enough paper
to realize such an ambitious project. In addition, the propagandists
had to admit that the proposed layout, with Mjölnir’s caricature on the
cover, was not as popular as expected.64
However, satire’s loss of popularity did not mean that the German
populace had also lost interest in comic entertainment. The audience
discovered a new form of humour that was referred to as ‘Deutscher
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 207

Newnham Colleges, intelligence was no longer the impediment it was

for, say, George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860),
whose childhood experience of being twice as ‘’cute’ (that is, twice as
acute) as anyone around her is only redeemed from tragedy by the
femininely humorous tone of sympathetic engagement with which
her experience is narrated. Racy jokes, satire, black comedy, and bur-
lesque became increasingly popular, and women who utilized such
forms – for example, Stella Gibbons in her grand spoof of the English
rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) – were generally considered to
be funnier than their nineteenth-century predecessors. Muriel Spark’s
corrosively satiric fiction, Iris Murdoch’s darkly humorous philosophi-
cal novels, Angela Carter’s droll bawdiness, and Fay Weldon’s barbed,
macabre, explicitly feminist humour are, for the most part, virulent,
aggressive, and other-directed rather than soft, passive, and internal-
ized.9 Broadly speaking, as the humour produced by women has be-
come more diverse, more ‘masculinized,’ in its strategies, targets, and
affects, it has also become less ‘feminine’ according to the prevailing
nineteenth-century connotation of that term. Even a book like Good
Behaviour (1981) by the Irish writer Molly Keane – which features an
ostensibly meek and dutiful daughter as its heroine – transforms that
topos so familiar to feminine humour into a bitingly funny revenge
plot, wherein the heroine ‘cares’ for the cold, withholding mother of
her youth by force-feeding her in old age.
But feminine humour is not only a product of nineteenth-century
historical contingencies: it forms part of that century’s legacy to our
own. As Mary Poovey has pointed out, despite enormous cultural
and legal changes over the last two hundred years, ‘many of the same
values and inhibitions persist, sedimented deep in the layers of our
culture and our consciousness.’ Despite the often vast difference in
material conditions, the ‘psychological experience of many women’
today still resembles to a significant degree that of their nineteenth-
century counterparts.10 It is hardly surprising, then, that appropria-
tions of masculine tropes like hyperbole and extended metaphor tend
to supplement rather than supplant traditionally feminine ones, even
in writers as caustically funny as Spark and Weldon. Circumlocution
may have been largely abandoned, but indirection, double negatives,
and understatement – if Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope
Fitzgerald are any evidence – continue unabated. Indeed, what some
readers perceive as an anachronistic (if not atavistic) element of style
in their work results less, I would argue, from their putative imitation
208 Eileen Gillooly

of Austen than from their participation in a humorous aesthetic and

discourse shared by a number of (mostly female) nineteenth-century
novelists.
Curiously, given its largely nineteenth-century provenance, femi-
nine humour achieves in these critically acclaimed late twentieth-
century writers a greater degree of visibility and attention than ever
before. (All three have been awarded or shortlisted – sometimes fre-
quently – for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, arguably the most
prestigious of all English-language prizes.) Pym’s fiction, in particular,
offers perhaps the most extensive example of such humour at work
in either century. Her heroines – acutely self-conscious but other-
wise psychologically undifferentiated from the narrator – are, by and
large, from novel to novel, disorientingly interchangeable: capable,
under-appreciated, quietly lonely women of indeterminate middle
age, whose amorous expectations, never very great, are sadly dimin-
ished by the time we meet them. With few exceptions, they wander
about in the confines of an almost static romantic plot – but a roman-
tic plot gone awry, in which persevering love is not inevitably fulfilled,
but rather frustrated, mis-allied, disillusioned, or rejected. Yet even
against the loss of conventional comic closure, the most memorable
feature of Pym’s stories is surely, as one reader has put, their ‘odd, ob-
lique, elegant humor.’11
Such humour springs, in part, from the abundant, affectionate ref-
erence to nineteenth-century women writers and their creations. Not
only does the title of Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953) playfully allude to
Austen’s most famous novel, but its heroine Prudence Bates associates
herself with ‘poor silly Miss Bates’ of Austen’s Emma (1816) by explic-
itly denying the association: ‘if she resembled any character in fiction,
it was certainly not Miss Bates. And yet how could Miss Trapnell and
Miss Clothier call her anything else?’ And Jane Eyre (who ‘must have
given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first
person’) blithely haunts more than one Pym novel.12 Like her name-
sake, the Victorian writer Margaret Oliphant, Catherine Oliphant of
Less Than Angels (1955) churns out articles for women’s magazines
to support herself and her sometime boyfriend (who, like Margaret’s
many dependants, eventually dies on her), while Mildred Lathbury
of the euphemistically entitled Excellent Women (1952) is only one
of several examples of the eponymous species inspired by the mor-
ally steadfast, slightly priggish, Fanny Price of Austen’s Mansfield Park
(1814): aging young churchwomen who dutifully apply themselves to
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 209

charitable causes of both a personal and impersonal nature, less from

a positive desire to be useful than to combat a feeling of uselessness
or redundancy.
Such allusions in the work of late twentieth-century writers to
nineteenth-century heroines generate a richly complicated humor-
ous connection to literary foremothers – a connection augmented
not only by an affinity for self-denying rhetoric and a shared thematic
concern with peculiarly feminine frustrations, but also by similar af-
fective goals. Sympathetic humour, that is, still crucially informs the
narrator-heroine bond in the work of writers like Pym, offering at least
a sense of commiseration, if no longer reassurance and comfort, to
the discontented heroine. ‘Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had
been ruined by literature,’ announces the first sentence of Brookner’s
The Debut (1981) – a sentence in which the wry humour is so finely
wrought that it effectively hangs on comma placement.13 Escaping
from parents far more infantile than Maggie Tulliver’s in George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss (1860), more distant and more demanding than
the Bertrams of Mansfield Park (the Brookner heroine’s mother, unlike
Lady Bertram, doesn’t simply loll on the sofa: she absolutely refuses to
leave her bed), Ruth Weiss loses herself in nineteenth-century novels,
where she discovers a modicum of emotional security. Yet even though
‘she ponder[s] the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary’ (7),
and, at forty, is the author of the cautionary Women in Balzac’s Novels,
she nevertheless finds, when she turns her own ‘life into literature’ (8),
that the heroine she most imitates is Dickens’s Little Dorrit (7). Less
willingly dutiful, Ruth is every bit as self-effacing as Amy Dorrit (she
dresses so as to disappear); and perhaps because more consciously
resentful, she is also more fatalistically submissive:

‘I don’t like the idea of your going away, Ruth [her father said]. Don’t like
it at all […] You have a duty to your mother, you know.’ Then he left, in a
hurry to get to Harrods to oversee his purchases and perhaps buy himself
a towelling bathrobe.
This was the first Ruth had heard of her duty, which she had imagined
was confined to the characters of Balzac. She had a duty to them, certain-
ly, and the British Council, no less, had recognized it. Her father could
not really imagine that she would be of any use here?
In the days that followed, it became quite clear that he did. (96–7)

Understatement is here honed to an almost lethal sharpness, and

210 Eileen Gillooly

its cut is felt to be largely self-inflicted. Yet, though undeniably pain-

ful, the gesture is not simply masochistic: Brookner’s humour does
not actively solicit punishment, but rather engages in shielding (how-
ever unsuccessfully) the heroine from the blows of reality. The effect
is less perverse pleasure in self-deprecation than a cosmic sense of
absurdity, less psychological bonding with a cold, withholding, puni-
tive mother than simply a recognition that the benevolent, consoling
mother is utterly inaccessible. The dynamic structure of feminine hu-
mour is retained: yearning for the lost mother can still be heard mur-
muring, but even momentary solace has become hyper-attenuated
– or perhaps simply exhausted, as it is in the following passage from
Brookner’s Brief Lives (1990):

I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser’s […] The child, whose
hair was about to be cut for the first time, screamed with terror and clung
to her mother. The hairdresser stood by gravely, comb in hand: he rec-
ognized that this was a serious moment. The mother, blushing, tried to
comfort the child who had suddenly plunged into despair; all around the
shop women smiled in sympathy. What impressed me, and what I par-
ticularly remember, was the child’s passionate attempt to re-enter her
mother, the arms locked around the woman’s neck, the terrified cries of
unending love […] I had tears in my eyes, witnessing that bond, seeing
that closeness, of which only a sorrowful memory remained in my own
life […] One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners,
and consequently can no longer manage these two functions – sorrow
and anger – adequately.14

Despite the classically comic arrangement of this scene, the acuity

of loss the narrator conveys blots out any hope of a maternally com-
forting humorous embrace. ‘Sorrow and anger’ – once the very fuel
of humorous sublimation – are now simply ‘no longer manage[able].’

The Example of Penelope Fitzgerald

In the globalizing middle-class culture of the late twentieth-century –

a culture founded economically and psychologically on the gratifica-
tion of self-interest – it is extremely difficult for feminine virtues like
self-sacrifice and eager sympathy not to appear contextually absurd.
As the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) remarks of her wid-
owed heroine, Florence Green, ‘she had a kind heart, though that is
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 211

not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.’15

The ‘insignificant,’ indeterminately middle-aged Mrs Green wonders
‘whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself, and probably to
others, that she existed in her own right’ (7). This ‘want[ing] to be do-
ing something,’ to be ‘any thing in propria persona,’ leads Mrs Green
to establish a bookshop in her Suffolk village, notwithstanding the
profound indifference of the local population (which only converts
at moments into active hostility) and the express disapproval of the
malignant Mrs Gamart, the self-appointed ‘world’s wife’ of the aptly
named Hardborough, whose ‘strict code of gentility’ is ‘rather upset by
the sudden transformation of our Old House into a shop’ (26).
Despite Mrs Green’s ‘ready sympathy’ (14), her strong passive resist-
ance (‘her courage […] was the determination to survive’ [88]), and
her active self-denial (she, like the Amazons of Cranford, lives in el-
egantly economic fashion, on tea, herring, and biscuits), Mrs Green
is ultimately vanquished by the combined forces of nature, culture,
and the supernatural: by, that is, the book-hating damp of East An-
glia, the treachery of Mrs Gamart, and the demoralizing attacks of a
poltergeist, whose actions (like Mrs Gamart’s) are sudden, unjust, and
unpredictable and whose ‘furious physical frustration’ (17) intimates
similar, though untapped, reserves of her own. The last line of the nov-
el ends with the now penniless Mrs Green taking permanent leave of
Hardborough, ‘her head bowed in shame, because the town in which
she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop’ (123).
Remarkably, despite the authentic sadness of this closing image
and the note of everyday hopelessness upon which the novel ends,
Fitzgerald’s narrative nevertheless manages not only to maintain
our willing empathic engagement with her heroine and her travails,
but to leave us with a sense of humorous satisfaction as well. This is
the signature effect of Fitzgerald’s work – this talent for eliciting our
fond, sympathetic, amused interest, under novelistic circumstances
that conventionally resist a romantic or comic resolution. Mrs Green,
apprehending – if not fully understanding – the affective poverty of
a culture that relies on commercial greeting cards to express private
feeling, observes that ‘the only two attitudes to the stages of life’s jour-
ney envisaged by the manufacturers’ (55) are the ‘Romantic’ and the
‘Humorous.’ By cheerfully ignoring the authority of these determin-
ing categories, by parsing the ‘Romantic’ into various other modes of
affectionate response and then crossing one such mode with an odd,
elliptical (feminine) variety of the ‘Humorous,’ Fitzgerald achieves,
 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft 147

themselves to be satirized, as this possibly meant being shut out of a

group that was the only option for social integration. To be sure, they
did not protest against the Volksgemeinschaft; rather, their indigna-
tion expressed the wish to be part of it. Furthermore, satire could not
destroy its chosen subjects outside of Germany but instead focused
attention on them. Seen from this angle, the disappearance of satire
was a step towards the total exclusion of opponents from the German
community. Satire turned out to be too destructive for the desired har-
monious world. Satire’s disappearance in popular culture tells about
a population which shared the longing for the Volksgemeinschaft with
its ideology of a sealed community.

notes

1 Walter Hagemann, Publizistik im Dritten Reich: Ein Beitrag zur Meth-

ode der Massenführung (Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag, 1948), 198.
Recently, Gudrun Pausewang, Erlaubter Humor im Nationalsozialismus
(1933–1945) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007), 32–7.
2 Christian Haider and Fritz Hausjell, ‘Die Apokalypse als Bildgeschichte:
Antisemitische Karikatur am Beispiel des “Juden Tate” im Wiener “Deut-
schen Volksblatt” 1936 bis 1939,’ Medien & Zeit 6 (1991): 9–16, here 11.
3 Ralph Wiener, Als das Lachen tödlich war: Erinnerungen und Fakten 1933–
1945 (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1988).
4 Fred Hahn, Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924–1945:
Eine Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1978), for example 127–8.
5 W.A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second
World War, 6 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus, 1985–93), 3: 458–553.
6 Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human
Experience (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 157.
7 Michael Mulkay, On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society
(Cambridge: Politiy Press, 1988); Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, ‘Intro-
duction: War in the Twentieth Century: The Functioning of Humour in
Cultural Representation,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 247–63,
here 251–5.
8 Ursula E. Koch, ‘Marianne und Germania: Zwei Nationalheldinnen aus
der Sicht deutscher und französischer Karikaturisten,’ in Marianne und
Germania in der Karikatur (1550–1999): Eine Interréseaux-Ausstellung, ed.
Ursula E. Koch (Leipzig: Institut Français de Leipzig, 1999), 5–12.
9 Mary Lee Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits
of Repression in Nineteenth-Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: The University
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 213

(where humorous pleasure derives from narrative identification with

the heroine in her pain), Fitzgerald’s narrator in this instance side-
steps the imputation by inverting the dynamic – by having her her-
oine’s sympathetic understanding of her aggressor’s motives swamp
any sense of her own woundedness at being thought simply ‘dull’ and
‘middle-aged.’ A similar dynamic structures Florence Green’s response
to the intimidating Mr Brundish, when an unexpected feeling of com-
passion suddenly replaces the anxiety he usually awakens, transform-
ing fear into the relief of recognition: ‘He wanted to welcome her but
was more used to threatening, and the change of attitude was difficult
for him. She felt the appeal of this’ (80).
Fitzgerald’s humour works against expectation in other ways as well.
Almost all theories of humour – from Aristotle and Cicero to Kant,
Darwin, and Freud – privilege incongruity, conceptualizing humour
as the disjunction (social, cognitive, biological, or psychological) be-
tween the norm and its transgression.20 Fitzgerald, in contrast, while
acknowledging the disjunction, produces humour not from the in-
congruity between the Ideal and the Real – between theory and prac-
tice, between what ought to be and what is – but rather from the quick,
surprising, appreciative embrace of the peculiar, the flawed, the hu-
man. In Offshore (1979), Richard Blake’s ‘war service in the RNVR, and
his whole temperament before and since’ (9), have made him excep-
tionally fit for the unexamined life. When he discovers that, despite his
strenuous efforts of resistance, questions, doubts, and marital prob-
lems will disturb his happy complacency, he resigns himself to the
psychic assault, asking merely that they take turns in their demands
for attention: ‘Richard did not like to have to think about two things at
once, particularly at the end of the day’ (60).

He kissed Laura, sat down, and tried to bring the two subjects put to him
into order, and under one heading. A frown ran in a slanting direction
between his eyebrows and half way up his forehead […]
Laura was lucky to be married to Richard, who would not have hurt her
feelings deliberately for the whole world. A fortnight with her parents, he
was thinking now, on their many damp acres of damp earth, must surely
bring home to her the advantages of living on Lord Jim [their houseboat
on the Thames]. Of course, it hadn’t so far done anything of the kind, and
he had to arrive at the best thing to do in the circumstances. He was not
quite satisfied with the way his mind was working. Something was out of
phase. He did not recognize it as hope. (60–1)
214 Eileen Gillooly

Here Fitzgerald’s humour – almost too keenly aphoristic to be im-

mediately perceived – is ironically inflected: the narrator and reader
both understand, as Richard does not, that the possibility of his wife’s
leaving him, because she refuses to tolerate living offshore any longer,
feels to him more like unanticipated relief than impending loss. But
whereas irony characteristically endows the eiron and audience with
a sense of superiority to the alazon, in this instance knowingness is
tempered by affection both for Richard (with whom the narration, of-
ten centred on his consciousness, has consistently urged us to iden-
tify) and for a former version of ourselves, whose emotional grasp of
Richard’s situation presumably results from a similar past experience.
Fitzgerald is adept not only at infusing irony with sympathetic
humour (and in so doing, avoiding any trace of arrogance, to which
irony in its purest form is highly susceptible), but also at crossing lit-
erary genres to produce a text, as she does in The Blue Flower (1995),
as hybridized and unclassifiable as feminine humour itself. Although
identified in the ‘Author’s Note’ as ‘a novel,’ Fitzgerald’s rendering of an
episode in ‘the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801) before he
became famous under the name Novalis,’ is sui generis: not history, bi-
ography, tragedy, or comedy, but rather a tragicomic quasi-philosoph-
ical novel, steeped in historical time, that imagines the domestic and
emotional life of a promising German university student who believes
himself in love, at first sight, with a twelve-year-old girl of no apparent
intellectual gifts or remarkable personal charms.
Although more eccentric in form and subject than her other novels,
The Blue Flower similarly muses about the binaries that structure life
and thought: the symbiotic bond between the Real and the Ideal, pain
and pleasure, self-regard and sympathy, tears and laughter, the gen-
eral and the particular, men and women. If elsewhere Fitzgerald turns
potentially aggressive laughter into an occasion of humorous sympa-
thy by siding with the victim, in this, her final novel, she generates
humour by suggesting, Sancho-like, that perhaps, as a matter of lived
experience, it is the Ideal, rather than the Real, that is contextually ab-
surd. Fritz (Novalis), the student of Fichte, Schiller, and Friedrich Sch-
legel, writes to Karoline Just – whom he has ‘perhaps not very tactfully’
made his confidante after having aroused her own romantic interest
in him – to say that he has been ‘marooned’ by a severe snowstorm at
the residence of ‘his Philosophy,’ the twelve-year-old Sophie:

While Karoline was helping to clear a path to the outside pump, a letter
arrived from [Fritz] […] The snow was so deep he alleged, that he couldn’t
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 215

go out without danger, and to take pointless risks was unworthy of a re-
sponsible man. ‘I shall, I will, I must, I ought, I can stay here, who can do
anything against Fate? I have decided that I am a Determinist. Fate might
not be so kind another time.’
‘In that great house there must be someone who can clear the carriage-
way,’ Karoline told herself. (77)

However much the Romantics may have prided themselves on their

originality and powers of self-definition, their actual investment in
received codes of gender is hardly distinguishable from that of previ-
ously fashionable ideologies. As Mary Shelley (1797–1851) well knew,
even women whose intellectual gifts were openly acknowledged and
praised were expected to maintain the domestic infrastructure: ‘“No
women!” cried Erasmus’ to his brother Fritz, on being informed of the
inhabitants of their enlightened Uncle’s household-cum-salon. ‘“Who
then did the washing?”’ (23). If men were somehow entitled by virtue
of their gender to be self-absorbed and philosophical, women must
perforce be sympathetic and practical, since ‘someone,’ as Karoline
Just points out to Fritz, ‘has to look after’ the ‘particulars’ (100). Gener-
alization, moreover – however widely esteemed as the superior habit
of mind (men ‘are morally better than’ women, Fritz explains, because
they ‘generalise’ while women can only ‘particularise’) – is shown to
have its internal defects, being insensitive, as it is, to the human, idio-
syncratic, emotional element that, predictably, undermines probable
universal truths:

‘No other system is so reliable as Brown’s,’ Fritz told Karoline Just, not
for the first time [referring to the medical therapy used to treat the dying
Sophie]. ‘To some extent Brownismus is based on Locke’s ideas of the
nervous system.’
‘We have to believe in someone,’ said Karoline. ‘Another one, I mean,
besides ourselves, or life would be a poor thing.’
‘I was talking of the exact sciences, Justen.’ (184)

By slyly exposing such defects – by subversively mocking normative,

‘naturalized’ values like generalization rather than those who fail, or
perhaps simply refuse, to practise them – Fitzgerald, like other femi-
nine humorists of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, regis-
ters a quiet political protest against prevailing gender conditions. And
yet, while the continuities and affinities between them are extensive
and pronounced, Fitzgerald’s humorous aesthetic – shared by Pym and
150 Patrick Merziger

34 Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, C 1216 m, 59 U 227/Bd.3.

35 Dietrich Loder, Konjunktur: Eine Revolutionskomödie aus dem Frühjahr
1933 in 3 Akten (Berlin-Halensee: Chronos, 1933).
36 Lanzelot [i.e., Carl Martin Köhn], ‘An “Porzia!”’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 182.
37 Lanzelot [i.e., Carl Martin Köhn], ‘Darf die deutsche Frau …,’ Die Brennes-
sel 3 (1933): 446; Orpheus der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], ‘Aufbau-
ernde Gardinenpredigt,’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 435; Die Brennessel, ‘In
Sachen: “Darf die deutsche Frau …,”’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 471; Orpheus
der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], ‘Babette wird abermals verwarnt,’
Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 471.
38 For further examples, see Patrick Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire
und ‘Deutscher Humor’: Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populär-
er Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 113–39.
39 Sigmund Graff, ‘Die “negative” Figur,’ Der Neue Weg 64 (1935): 264–5.
40 Anonymus, ‘Mehr Humor!’ Das Schwarze Korps 2 (1936): 1.
41 Thomas Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur und Diktatur: Sächsische Hei-
matbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/
DDR (Cologne: Böhlau), 124–56. Schaarschmidt describes the campaign
misleadingly as a private obsession of the Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann
that allegedly was not successful.
42 See, for example, Gustav Schumann, Partikularist Bliemchen aus Dresden
in Rom und Neapel (Leipzig: Reißner, 1887); Hans Reimann, Sächsische
Miniaturen (Leipzig: Steegemann, 1921).
43 Schl., ‘Wahrt Ehre und Ansehen des Gaues Sachsen, schützt unser Volks-
tum und unsere Arbeit!’ Die Deutsche Arbeiterfront: Rundbrief für die
politischen Amtswalter und Amtswarte der DAf., NSG. ‘Kraft durch Freude’
und NSBO. im Gau Sachsen, 15 August 1936.
44 David Welch, ‘Nazi Popaganda and the “Volksgemeinschaft”: Construct-
ing a People’s Community,’ Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004):
213–38.
45 Dietrich Loder, Die Eule aus Athen: Eine historische Komödie aus dem
klassischen Altertum in 3 Akten (Berlin: Langen-Müller 1933).
46 Heinz Steguweit, ‘Dietrich Loder: “Die Eule aus Athen”: Festaufführung
zur Reichstagung des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Presse,’ Deutsche
Presse 25 (1935): 659–60; Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph
Goebbels: Teil I Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941 (Munich: Saur, 1998–2005),
1 December 1935.
47 An answer to the complaints can be found in Orpheus der Zwote [i.e.,
Goetz Otto Stoffregen], Das sind Sachen! Neue freche Verse (Berlin: Brun-
nen 1933), 5.
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 217

en’s humour’ in all its complexity (that is, what I might call its masculine
as well as its feminine varieties), rather than as a strain of humour that
has been culturally marked feminine, regardless of the sex of the prac-
titioner. And, in contrast to my interest in the gendered implications of
sympathy in humour, what most intrigues Barreca about her subject is its
anger: ‘Women’s writing of comedy is characterized by its thinly disguised
rage’ (21).
4 William Hazlitt, ‘On Wit and Humour,’ in Lectures on the English Poets,
and the English Comic Writers, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: George
Bell and Sons 1894), 3–9 passim.
5 J.B. Priestley, English Humour (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), 115.
6 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to
Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Prin-
ceton University Press), 426.
7 Apophasis and zeugma are, like metaphor and simile, rhetorical tropes,
though it would be an understatement (meiosis) to say their meanings are
less well known to most of us. According to the OED (http://dictionary
.oed.com), an apophasis is ‘a kind of an Irony,’ ‘whereby we really say or
advise a thing under a feigned show of passing over, or dissuading it’: thus,
‘I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are
not alive.’ A zeugma is ‘a figure by which a single word is made to refer to
two or more words in the sentence; esp. when properly applying in sense
to only one of them, or applying to them in different senses’: thus, ‘I mean
to have them [pease] with a couple of Ducks from Wood Barn & Maria
Middleton’ (grammatically suggesting that Austen intends to eat both the
ducks and her guest for dinner).
8 Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R.W. Chap-
man, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 285.
9 Spark, Murdoch, Weldon, and Carter are all prolific, but for purposes of
illustration, see: Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and A Far Cry
from Kensington (1988); Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (1978); Carter, Wise
Children (1991); and Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1984).
10 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in
the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 245–6.
11 Robert Emmet Long, Barbara Pym (New York: Ungar, 1986), 40.
12 Jane and Prudence (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 36; Excellent Women
(New York: Penguin, 1978), 7. Like Jane Austen, Jane Eyre is often a back-
ground presence in the Pym canon, particularly Excellent Women and
Less Than Angels (1955; repr., New York: Dutton, 1990).
152 Patrick Merziger

65 Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und ‘Deutscher Humor,’ 212–53.

66 Anton Sailer, ‘Ein bezaubernd häßliches Völkchen,’ Signal 2, no. 20 (1941):
32–3.
67 Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Eintracht [Drawing],’ in Robert Högfeldt, Das har-
monische Familienleben: 40 Zeichnungen mit Versen von Hayno Focken
(Leipzig: Neff, 1938), no pagination.
68 Robert Högfeldt, ‘Die Optimisten [Drawing],’ in Robert Högfeldt, Das
Högfeldt-Buch (Berlin: Neff, 1937), 3.
69 For sale figures, see, for example, Tobias Schneider, ‘Bestseller im Dritten
Reich: Ermittlung und Analyse der meistverkauften Romane in Deutsch-
land 1933–1944,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52 (2004): 77–97; Gerd
Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersu-
chung über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs (Stuttgart: Enke, 1969).
 Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 219

and Breach, 1988), 135–48, admirably reviews and synthesizes these theo-
ries, and in Trollope and Comic Pleasure (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), Christopher Herbert gives a useful summary of several stud-
ies of humour theory of the past two centuries.
21 Polhemus defines comic faith as ‘a tacit belief that the world is both funny
and potentially good; a pattern of expressing or finding religious impulse,
motive, and meaning in the forms of comedy; and an implicit assump-
tion that a basis for believing in the value of life can be found in the fact
of comic expression itself.’ Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen
to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.
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Contributors

Vincent Brook has a PhD in film and television from UCLA. He

teaches media studies at UCLA, USC, Cal-State LA, and Pierce Col-
lege. Besides numerous journal and other articles, he has authored
or edited three books: Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the
‘Jewish’ Sitcom (2003), You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in
Postmodern American Culture (2006), and Driven to Darkness: Jewish
Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (2009).

Eileen Gillooly teaches nineteenth-century British literature and

women’s studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Smile
of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
(1999) and contributing co-editor of Victorian Prism: Refractions of
the Crystal Palace (2007) and Contemporary Dickens (2009). Among
her other publications are essays and reviews in Victorian Studies,
ELH, and The New York Times Book Review. She is currently complet-
ing a critical edition of David Copperfield and a monograph on pa-
rental feeling in nineteenth-century middle-class Britain.

Peter Jelavich teaches modern European intellectual and cultural

history at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Munich
and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance,
1890–1914 (1985); Berlin Cabaret (1993); and Berlin Alexanderplatz:
Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (2006).

Martina Kessel is professor of Modern History at Bielefeld Univer-

sity. Among her most important publications are Westeuropa und die
deutsche Teilung. Englische und französische Deutschlandpolitik auf
222 Contributors

den Außenministerkonferenzen 1945–1947 (1989) and Langeweile. Zum

Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20.
Jahrhundert (2001).

Giselinde Kuipers is associate professor of sociology at the University

of Amsterdam, and (part-time) Norbert Elias Professor of Sociology at
Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author of Good Humor, Bad
Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (2006) as well as numerous articles on
humour, popular culture, media, and cultural globalization.

Patrick Merziger is post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate School

‘Trans-National Media Events,’ Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen.
His latest publications include Nationalsozialistische Satire und
‘Deutscher Humor.’ Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer
Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (2010); Die Macht des Populären. Politik und
populäre Kultur im 20. Jahrhundert (2010) [ed. together with V. Borsò
und C. Liermann].

Monika Pater teaches journalism studies at the Institute for Jour-

nalism and Communications, University of Hamburg. Her major
publications in the field of German media history focus on broadcast
programs during National Socialism and the early German Demo-
cratic Republic (see Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern, eds.,
Zuhören und Gehörtwerden (1998), vol. 1: 129–241, and vol. 2: 171–258).

Mark Winokur has a PhD in film and literature from the University of
California, Berkeley. He teaches film, literature, and digital media his-
tory, criticism, and theory at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He
speaks and publishes on the same subjects. He has published most
conspicuously American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s
Hollywood Film Comedy (1996), and is working on two books, one on
film and one on new media: Technologies of Race: Makeup, Special
Effects and Ethnic Groups in American Film and The Point of View of
Information.
GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES

General Editor: Rebecca Wittman

1 Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford, Federica Bicchi, and Rafaella Del Sarto,
The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region
2 James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the
Authoritarian Imagination
3 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology
4 Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and
Russian Between the Wars
5 Laurence McFalls, ed., Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Revisited
6 Robin Ostow, ed., (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and
National Identities in Europe in the New Millenium
7 David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and
the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930
8 John Zilcosky, ed., Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern
Journey
9 Angelica Fenner, Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert
Stemmle’s Toxi
10 Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger, eds., The Politics of Humour:
Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century