While I sympathise with your sentiments, I have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion. It's definitely a matter of taste for you to decide if you want to engage such humour but I think this is a personal choice. If you personally choose to avoid comedy of this nature then far be it for anyone to tell you that you made the wrong choice. You can criticise the comedy for its lack of empathy or any other offence you might take from it, but I don't agree that it should never be a source of humour as I believe free speech is more important than sensibilities. Personally, I agree with you that it's in bad taste but that's my personal belief and I don't think I should impose that sensibility on other's freedom to find humour in it. Anyway, I hope I wasn't being offensive. I just wanted to add my thoughts to this issue.

@Vingo said:

While I sympathise with your sentiments, I have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion. It's definitely a matter of taste for you to decide if you want to engage such humour but I think this is a personal choice. If you personally choose to avoid comedy of this nature then far be it for anyone to tell you that you made the wrong choice. You can criticise the comedy for its lack of empathy or any other offence you might take from it, but I don't agree that it should never be a source of humour as I believe free speech is more important than sensibilities. Personally, I agree with you that it's in bad taste but that's my personal belief and I don't think I should impose that sensibility on other's freedom to find humour in it. Anyway, I hope I wasn't being offensive. I just wanted to add my thoughts to this issue.

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I said it's NOT a matter of free speech. That means I'm NOT saying it should be banned. I'm just expressing my opinion that it is in poor taste, despite its being protected speech. That's all.

@Vingo said:

While I sympathise with your sentiments, I have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion. It's definitely a matter of taste for you to decide if you want to engage such humour but I think this is a personal choice. If you personally choose to avoid comedy of this nature then far be it for anyone to tell you that you made the wrong choice. You can criticise the comedy for its lack of empathy or any other offence you might take from it, but I don't agree that it should never be a source of humour as I believe free speech is more important than sensibilities. Personally, I agree with you that it's in bad taste but that's my personal belief and I don't think I should impose that sensibility on other's freedom to find humour in it. Anyway, I hope I wasn't being offensive. I just wanted to add my thoughts to this issue.

PT 100 was just saying that, with the zillion other things available to poke fun at, it is in poor taste to use the holocaust. It's a poor creative choice. And I think Chaplin would have agreed. It's not a matter of free speech, which protects it, and I think we all agree on that. It's an issue of a poor creative choice.

@virics said:

Personally I think it's even offensive to adopt the Jewish terminology by calling the Nazi holocaust The Holocaust, since there were worse acts committed in history.

You are expressing what is sometimes called "holocaust fatigue."

But it's such a taboo we could never question it. For example, more Russians died in WWII and even more died after under Stalin; didn't stop anyone poking fun at the Stalin regime. The Japanese did their own version of holocaust in China; didn't stop Spielberg (who's Jewish, too!) making the terribly insensitive Empire of the Sun.

Most of the articles I've read on this subject, including interviews of leading comedians, indicate that there is an important distinction between making jokes about the holocaust itself (not recommended) and making jokes about the Nazis--or Stalin--(okay--e.g., Mel Brooks; Hogan's Heroes; etc.). One might well argue that this film is in that anti-Nazi genre, not actually holocaust humor. (And, in case it's not obvious, Empire of the Sun is not a comedy; it is a highly rated drama.)

At some point we need comedies like this so people can start facing the history fairly.

A comedy about the holocaust is not needed in order to face the history fairly. Serious documentaries do that just fine, and they also honor the memory of its victims in a respectful way. And this film didn't even really portray the real holocaust; is just skated around the edges because at that time there wasn't the awareness of it that we have today.

And I think everyone who has posted here so far, including the OP, actually agrees that how one feels about holocaust humor is a matter of personal taste. That is not in dispute.

Another great comedy/drama in this vein is To Be or Not to Be (1942), starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. I think both of these films tend to escape negative criticism by focusing their satire on the Nazis rather than the holocaust per se. As Zurich Gnome said earlier, many comedians and comedic analyses make that distinction when trying to determine whether something is comedic vs. in poor taste.

Some articles also point out the maxim that tragedy + time = comedy. Sometimes the distance from the event makes it more acceptable or easier to take. It is also perhaps worth noting that both films are considered both comedy and drama, not just comedy.

So how do people feel about two other Holocaust related comedies?

The more recent is Life is Beautiful, an acclaimed Italian film for which Roberto Benigni won the Best Actor Oscar.

Much earlier, Jerry Lewis made a film The Day the Clown Cried about a clown who entertains children in a death camp, which has never been released in the US due to issues of taste. The two films appear to have some parallels, since in LIB, Benigni uses humor to divert his son's attention from the horrors of the camp.

Very interesting discussion! I find humor to be an important device to overcome and even understand the horrors of history. As long as the intentions are good (As with Great Dictator or Life is Beautiful) I think it's justified to use it. On the other hand, it definitely shouldn't be used to play those horrors down.

I had no problems with the subject matter while watching The Great Dictator. There are some comedic gems in this film, particularly the shaving sequence (which Chaplin also used much earlier in one of his silent films). The concluding speech was perhaps a bit melodramatic, but I enjoyed this film. It's not his finest comedy, but it is a brave film.

@movie ghoul said:

So how do people feel about two other Holocaust related comedies?

The more recent is Life is Beautiful, an acclaimed Italian film for which Roberto Benigni won the Best Actor Oscar.

Much earlier, Jerry Lewis made a film The Day the Clown Cried about a clown who entertains children in a death camp, which has never been released in the US due to issues of taste. The two films appear to have some parallels, since in LIB, Benigni uses humor to divert his son's attention from the horrors of the camp.

TDtCC is not really a comedy, it is a very bad drama. The reason Lewis never released it is that it is, according to him, a terrible movie--just really bad. Harry Shearer viewed a rough cut of the film and said this about it (in Spy magazine, 1992):

"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. 'Oh My God!'—that's all you can say."

A summary of this awful film's plot may be seen here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068451/plotsummary

LIB I have not seen, but I understand that it is an excellent comedy-drama. But neither of these films makes jokes about the holocaust per se. They merely contain some humor that is intended to make a terrible situation easier for the characters. The former film is apparently in very bad taste, the latter film is apparently deemed tasteful in its treatment of its subject matter.

Does "The Day the Clown Cried" still exist anymore? I thought all copies were destroyed, other than some documentary footage. It has a poor reputation, but I'd like to form my own opinion of it, if ever given the chance to watch it. Not all films of "poor taste" are actually bad.

Classic example - Song of the South. I've seen it, and it's a fun film. It's meant for children, and for that audience, I think they'd really appreciate the humor and light-heartedness of the film. It's we adults who feel the film is racist and have pulled it virtually from all circulation.

@catmydogs said:

Not all films of "poor taste" are actually bad.

Maybe not. But this one was disavowed by even its creator. It's not only in poor taste, it's also apparently simply horrible from a creative standpoint. It's just a lousy example of film-making, according to those who have ever viewed it in any form. It does still exist. An August 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times claims that a copy of the film is held by the Library of Congress, but will not be screened for "another ten years." This donation was reportedly done by Lewis himself. This "10 year provision" would appear to be based solely on Lewis's request to hold back his contribution for ten years, but, as the underlying rights were never acquired by Lewis or the original financiers, the film cannot be screened, published, copied or shown in any form until and unless such rights are acquired.

On February 3, 2016, German public TV ARD aired a 2-hour documentary called Der Clown. German film maker Eric Friedler shows interviews, original footage and re-staged scenes from the original scripts with some Swedish actors who participated in Lewis' movie. Finally, the film shows the first full interview with Lewis about his work after 43 years.

In June 2016, a half-hour compilation of footage from Der Clown was uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo by editor Kay Brown, and dubbed into German with English subtitles, marking the first time a version of The Day the Clown Cried was made available to the general public.

I have not been able to track down either the German TV documentary or the half-hour compilation film. But here is an interesting video documentary discussing the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbZIyXNRxos&t=180s

And, finally, I reluctantly provide the following link to the actual script of the unreleased film. You may read it in its entirety and judge for yourself: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Day-the-Clown-Cried,-The.html

You may also want to download the pdf version found at that site, in case they remove the script that is now there. Also note that there may have been changes made during filming that are not necessarily reflected in that original script. I think Harry Shearer's assessment is probably correct, especially since the film's creator agrees with him that it is a terrible film.

Films like this were what undermined the Nazi's image. And besides, it provided one of the most powerful speeches in the history of cinema that moves me everytime

As a Jew and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I'm glad Chaplin made the film. It wasn't just a comedy but also a satire, and for all we know it may have helped raise awareness about the situation in Europe. It was one of the first Hollywood movies to go after Hitler.

Another point I've always found interesting is that the Three Stooges did a Hitler parody a few months earlier, "You Nazty Spy." Unlike Chaplin, the Stooges never regretted making it; in fact it was their all-time favorite of their films, and they later did a sequel (which itself directly parodies the iconic balloon-globe sequence from the Chaplin film).

I definitely don't agree that the Holocaust--or any other major tragedy--is completely off limits to comedy. It all depends how you approach it. Sometimes it can even be cathartic. I think of the classic Onion piece, "9/11 hijackers surprised to find themselves in Hell." Chaplin's film is like that. Even though he was unaware of the Holocaust, he got all the main points right, with his mockery of racism and call for universal brotherhood.

Ironically, the speech at the end has always been the most controversial part of the film. It helped get Chaplin blacklisted (he had been suspected of Communist tendencies since "Modern Times"), and even today it is often criticized as overly preachy.

Me, I love the movie and consider it one of Chaplin's best. I was practically raised on Chaplin films (my parents used to rent them from the video store when I was a kid), and I always found something awesome about how he took the Chaplin persona and applied it to the Nazis, taking advantage of his own physical resemblance to Hitler (with his little moustache) as well as his dark ethnic appearance. (Despite persistent rumors, Chaplin was not Jewish. He was, however, partly of Gypsy descent--which means he would have been a target of the Nazis had he fallen into their clutches.)