shoop and really tasteless holocaust humor

This one was going to be about The Hangover, but I find that I have comparatively little to say about it. Don't get me wrong--it's funny as hell, with a brilliantly built script and hysterical comic turns from just about everybody. And as for Zach Galifianakis, there are just three words necessary--not since Belushi. (I almost put a period after each word, but that's a pre-adolescent, sub-literate habit which does no one any good.) The thing is, I'm so late getting to this one, it's not news to anybody. At some point, I might point to this movie again as a paragon of comic screenplay construction, but for now I want to focus on something that almost amounts to a throwaway line, but which nonetheless had me laughing hysterically, and then wondering about what I was laughing at.

One of the guys in The Hangover, Stu the dentist, laments the fact that he gave his grandmother's "Holocaust" ring to a stripper. Alan, Galifianakis' character, responds, "I didn't know they gave rings at the Holocaust." Now one thing upon which most of us agree is that there's absolutely nothing funny about the Holocaust. The systematic and methodical murder of millions still, and will forever, stand as one of mankind's most horrific atrocities.

So it takes some balls to make fun of it, or find humor in it. Such jokes, when they work, elicit those big, shocked, appalled laughs--initial disgust followed by sheer delight that you just don't get with most "did you ever notice..." jokes. How much Holocaust humor do I enjoy? It's worth thinking about...

1) Mr. Floppy, on "Unhappily Ever After"--this was not, I should state up front, an underrated or overlooked show. It was pretty stupid, but at its best, entertainingly so--never more so than when Bobcat Goldthwait, as Mr. Floppy's voice (he was a toy bunny), would go off on some tangent, the producers' admission that whatever the plot was, wasn't that important. At some point, Jack, the only member of the family who can talk to the bunny, mentions something about learning French. The only phrase you need to know in French, Mr. Floppy explains, is "blah blah blah blah blah blah. That's French for, 'The Jews are in the cellar. Please do not disturb the wine.'" Just plain wrong on so many levels--and hysterically funny.

2) The Producers--yes, the stage musical was, and remains, very funny. But the 1967 movie--just 22 years after the end of World War II--was a horrible lapse in taste. And two recognizably Jewish men putting on a musical that promised to give us "the Hitler with a song in his heart?" It's still hard to believe Mel Brooks went there. But he did, and the laughs are still remarkably potent.

3) Life is Beautiful--this one got a lot of backlash after its initial acclaim. Somehow, we found a lot to be embarrassed about--this simple movie with its message that sheer love and playful humor can overcome humanity's greatest evil seemed insultingly naive to those who gave the film serious second thoughts. Well, fuck second thoughts--this is Roberto Benigni's masterpiece.

Not many examples here, understandably. In a world where such atrocities can happen, and in the same world where so many people can deny that it ever happened, this is bitter, pungent humor, as excellent as it is rare.