HOLOCAUST COMEDY?How soon is ‘too soon’?

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Revision of comedy

What makes something ‘comical’? Write a statement about how comedy works using these terms:

Intention Reception Purpose Composer Responder Values Context Subject

Dr Seuss’s political cartoons

Never released: The Day the Clown Criedhttp://www.examiner.com/article/the-day-the-clown-cried-forgotten-masterpiece-or-better-off-forgotten

Too Soon? The Case for the Holocaust

http://theconversation.edu.au/too-soon-the-case-for-holocaust-humour-9894

The Producers

Purpose within the text: bad taste will ruin the show But … it’s such a terrible production that

it’s funny. Purpose of the text:

To critique the public’s fickleness

Do you think it’s OK to use the holocaust as part of a joke about the public’s bad taste?

The Survivor

TV “Survivor” compared with holocaust “survivor”

Parody of sensationalised stories – hyperbole for the sake of earning praise?

Purpose: to show that we have lost perspective in what we admire.

Do you think the holocaust references are necessary to make that point?

Life is beautiful: genre?

Life Is Beautiful: criticismhttp://academic.sun.ac.za/forlang/bergman/real/holocaust/life/reviews/r_salon.htm

"Life Is Beautiful" is about Guido's attempts to keep that reality from his son; our being charmed by it depends on Benigni's ability to keep it from the audience. He shows us old men disrobing in preparation for the showers. He shows us Dora and the other women sorting the piles of clothes afterward. And then it's right back to his charming comic fable. The horrors of the camps become the familiar heart-tugging moments of melodrama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btRNa3CItMc

Just how far Benigni will go to get us choked up -- and how far he'll leave common sense behind -- becomes clear when Guido briefly commandeers the camp's public address system to issue his customary greeting to Dora ("Buon giorno, principessa!" -- Good morning, princess!) and then to put Giosué on. We see Braschi's weary Madonna eyes tearing up as she hears the voice of the husband and son that, as far as she knows, are dead. But why would Guido put himself and his son at risk this way? Especially since it has become necessary to hide the boy, because the order has gone out to gas the children. The only possible explanation for the scene is that it exists solely to affect us.

"Life Is Beautiful" has been the subject of great controversy, both in Italy (where it swept that country's equivalent of the Oscars) and at the film festivals where it has played. Miramax, which is releasing the film in the United States, has attempted a preemptive strike by including, in the press material, a brief essay by Andrew Stille, author of "Benevolence and Betrayal," the story of five Italian Jewish families under Fascism. Without alluding to the controversy, Stille mounts a defense. "Obviously," he writes, "the concentration camp that Benigni describes in no way approximates the horror of the actual camps.

But the film is not striving for straightforward realism." That's too easy: Benigni isn't even trying for straightforward realism. And any treatment of the camps that attempts to dodge the singular and irreducible fact of them hasn't reckoned with its subject. The enormity and inexplicability of what happened there cannot even be acknowledged within a winsome comic fable. Stille's conclusion, that "it is about the power of love, humor and imagination in the face of tragedy and death," suggests the grotesque folly of this film -- the attempt to give a heartwarming, life-affirming cast to an event that exists outside of human meaning.

1. What do you think about romance and love of family becoming the focus of a holocaust story?

2. How do our shared beliefs about an event shift as a result of the way a subject is treated in fiction?

3. Do fiction writers have a responsibility to their subjects?

Compare with MAUS: pp222-226