Humor is, one might say, a funny thing. How one laughs about life, and what parts of life one laughs about, tells a lot about you. I find particularly interesting…
Humor is, one might say, a funny thing. How one laughs about life, and what parts of life one laughs about, tells a lot about you.
I find particularly interesting humor of people under stress or under strange conditions. Certainly my own sense of humor gets a bit warped when things get weird. How much moreso for people living in places like the Soviet Union — or, in this case, Nazi Germany.
Rudolph Herzog has released a new book about jokes and humor in the Third Reich, titled, Heil Hitler! The Pig is Dead! I listened to an article about it on the radio on Friday, and it sounds fascinating. Herzog’s thesis is that most German humor about the regime was less of a direct criticism, than bitching about the usual kind of stuff — funny mannerisms, corruption, things like that — at best, it was an uncomfortable admission about recognizing the excesses of the government without really being able or willing to do much about it. As the war progressed and things got harder, the humor became more dark (and the regime tended to become more likely to use jokes as an excuse for doing away with “dissidents”).
The title of the book, by the way, comes from the punch line of one of the jokes in the volume:
Hitler and his chauffeur take a drive in the countryside. All of a sudden, boom! They drive over a chicken. Hitler tells the chauffeur, “We have to tell the farmer. Let me do it. I’m the Fuehrer, he’ll understand.” After two minutes, Hitler runs back holding his backside – the farmer had given him a thrashing.
The two drive on. Again, boom! They run into a pig. Hitler barks, “You go to the farmer this time!” The chauffeur follows his orders but comes back a half an hour later, falling-down drunk with a basket filled with sausages and presents.
Hitler is stunned. “What did you tell the farmer?” And the chauffeur says, “I just said, ’Heil Hitler, the pig is dead!’ and they gave me these gifts!”
Unfortunately, it looks like this book is (currently) only available in German (the only reference I could really find to it was on the Das Spiegel page, and neither Amazon nor B&N have any record of it). I hope it makes it over here, eventually.