If you can make people laugh at Hitler, you win, the filmmaker and comedian Mel Brooks once said. He wrote the movie The Producers, with a priceless show ballet to the song ‘Springtime for Hitler’. Despite protests, the film was in 1968 made, and in 2005 a remake: „Hail myself!”
Making fun of Hitler by imitating him turned out to be tricky at the beginning of this month. Alexander Graham-Dixon, a British art historian, briefly imitated Hitler in a debate at the Cambridge Union university club. Graham-Dixon argued that Hitler’s taste for art, his distaste for modern art and preference for pure, vernacular German art, had led to his abhorrent political ideas and the war. Bad taste exists, according to the art critic, turning against the proposition that bad taste does not exist. He then briefly interpreted Hitler’s views with a funny German accent: that Jewish art dealers spread modern art and that modern Cubist art was derived from the work of black artists from Africa. It was laughed at, according to a video recording.
But activist students couldn’t help but laugh. They were shocked. They did not feel safe in a debate club where such racist and anti-Semitic statements were made. The club soon put together a blacklist, with speakers never allowed to speak at the club again, and Graham-Dixon, of course, was at the top. That went down the wrong way for British comedian John Cleese, who was also invited as a speaker. He himself canceled his performance. „I also played Hitler in Monty Python”, he tweeted, “I am blacklisting myself before someone else does.” He was in solidarity with the canceled Graham-Dixon. Who, with apologies for those who felt hurt, once again emphatically stated that he had turned against Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic statements.
Cleese made Hitler’s Ambitions in Monty Python Ridiculous. He went into hiding as ‘Hilter’ with other Nazi masterpieces after the war in the British seaside resort of Minehead.
He is working on his comeback and is running in the local elections. He gives a shouting speech from a small balcony. He wants to annex a neighboring British village and Poland! A passer-by looks on in surprise. Cheers and ‘Heil!’ shouts from the audience come from a record that plays ‘Hilter’s’ henchman.
Even more famous is Cleese’s Hitler impersonation as Basil Fawlty, owner of hotel Fawlty Towers, from Cleese’s 1975 comedy series of the same name. ‘Don’t mention the war’ scene Basil drives his German hotel guests to despair by constantly talking about the war. When one of the German women bursts out crying, he wants to comfort her with his comically intended Hitler impersonation, by parading militarily with exaggerated steps, with his finger under his nose on the spot of Hitler’s mustache. “She’ll love it, she’s German!” calls Basil. It is satire on the British obsession with Hitler, which the Germans appreciated; of the mirror called it a “brilliant satire.”
The students at Cambridge regret that Cleese is not coming. The debate club has now abolished the blacklist.
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