The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century 9781442695122

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Landscapes of Humour: The History and Politics of the Comical in the Twentieth Century
1. When Are Jewish Jokes No Longer Funny? Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin
2. Creole Cartoons
3. Talking War, Debating Unity: Order, Conflict, and Exclusion in ‘German Humour’ in the First World War
4. Producing a Cheerful Public: Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism
5. Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The Disappearance of Destructive Satire in National Socialist Germany
6. Laughing to Keep from Dying: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show
7. Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands: The Rules and Attraction of Clandestine Humour
8. ‘The Tongues of Mocking Wenches’: Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction
Contributors

Citation preview

T HE POL ITICS OF HUMOUR Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century

GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: Rebecca Wittman

The Politics of Humour Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century

Edited by Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4292-8

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. German and European Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication The politics of humour : laughter, inclusion, and exclusion in the twentieth century / edited by Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger. (German and European studies) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-4426-4292-8 1. European wit and humor – History and criticism. 2. American wit and humor – History and criticism. I. Kessel, Martina II. Merziger, Patrick III. Series: German and European studies pn6149.p64p64 2012

809.7′93581

c2011-906205-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This book has been printed with financial support from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Germany, and the Series on German and European History, University of Toronto.

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction. Landscapes of Humour: The History and Politics of the Comical in the Twentieth Century martina kessel 3 1 When Are Jewish Jokes No Longer Funny? Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin peter jelavich 22 2 Creole Cartoons

mark winokur

52

3 Talking War, Debating Unity: Order, Conflict, and Exclusion in ‘German Humour’ in the First World War martina kessel 82 4 Producing a Cheerful Public: Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism monika pater 108 5 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The Disappearance of Destructive Satire in National Socialist Germany patrick merziger 131 6 Laughing to Keep from Dying: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show vincent brook 153 7 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands: The Rules and Attraction of Clandestine Humour giselinde kuipers 175 8 ‘The Tongues of Mocking Wenches’: Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction eileen gillooly 202 Contributors 221

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List of Illustrations

1.1: 1.2: 1.3: 2.1: 2.2: 2.3: 2.4: 2.5: 2.6: 2.7: 2.8: 2.9: 2.10: 2.11: 2.12: 2.13: 3.1: 5.1: 5.2:

Anti-Semitism: In the zoo a parrot squawks ‘Yid yid!’ (1924) 42 Gross: Two men pass by a manicure salon (1924) 43 The Epitaph: A man sees a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery (1924) 44 Frame capture from Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902) 59 Frame capture from The Enchanted Drawing (1900) 59 Frame capture from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) 59 Detail from Thomas Nast, ‘The Champion of the Fenians’ (1876) 60 Detail from Winsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Wonderland’ (1906) 60 H. Strickland Constable, ‘Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View’ (1899) 62 Frame capture from Little Nemo (1911) 63 Frame capture from Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923) 66 Frame capture from Felix in Hollywood (1923) 67 Frame capture from Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929) 69 Cab Calloway frame capture from Minnie the Moocher (1932) 76 Ghost walrus frame capture from Minnie the Moocher (1932) 76 Frame capture from The Old Man of the Mountain (1933) 76 Censored postcard from the First World War 93 Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Harmony’ (‘In Eintracht’) (1938) 145 Robert Högfeldt, ‘The Optimists’ (‘Die Optimisten’) (1937) 146

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Acknowledgments

This volume had its origins in a conference on Humour in the Twentieth Century, held at the Munk Centre of the University of Toronto. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support provided by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Munk Centre of the University of Toronto. Not all original participants could be included here, but we thank all for stimulating discussions. Jeff Kopstein and Edith Klein at the Munk Centre provided intellectual and administrative support. We would like to thank the Series on German and European History at the University of Toronto for including the volume and providing financial support, as well as the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for supporting the publication financially. Finally, we would like to thank University of Toronto Press for taking on this project and for providing excellent editorial support. M.K., P.M., Bielefeld/Berlin, January 2011

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T HE POL ITICS OF HUMOUR Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century

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Introduction. Landscapes of Humour: The History and Politics of the Comical in the Twentieth Century MARTINA KESSEL

Narratives of the twentieth century usually focus on ‘big issues’: war, violence, and ethnic cleansing; the Holocaust; the conflict between democratic and authoritarian politics; or the development of nationstates and empires. So far, despite an immense literature on humour and the comical in general, humour and laughter have not figured high on historians’ agendas for this century.1 But humour is an important means to negotiate identity and belonging, and in the twentieth century, comics and funny magazines sold extremely well while cheerful radio shows and films attracted a huge audience both in democratic and authoritarian societies. Using humour as a category of historical analysis allows us to see not only how humour entertained, but also how it worked as a cultural practice that both organized social order and revealed shared assumptions about society and politics. This volume seeks to redress the balance, analysing humour in its political and social context in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary perspective. In a century defined by mass death, Germany occupies centre stage.2 A certain emphasis on humour in Germany in the first half of the century characterizes this collection, as a number of papers search for the links between humour and the increasingly intolerant redrawing of social boundaries that marked this period in German history. When the ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) turned deadly in Germany, humour became a practice of exclusion while at the same time hiding the terms of exclusion by projecting a cheerful state of normalcy. But historical humour research should not focus on authoritarian societies alone, although its impulse for the twentieth century so far is to go in this direction, singling out Nazi Germany or various communist countries for attention. Accordingly, the

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collection is rounded out by papers that examine the role of humour in processes of inclusion and exclusion in non-authoritarian countries throughout the twentieth century, including the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Researchers from the fields of history, media studies, sociology, and literature discuss the categories of ethnicity, race, and gender in their interplay with humour, in oral jokes, novels and comics, on stage, in radio and television. Most of the essays are not concerned with famous names but with mass media that were ubiquitous but only seemingly marginal as they discussed basic questions of social order in modern societies. In this sense, the collection, which grew out of a conference at the University of Toronto in 2006, would like to present starting points for future research about humour as a category of historical analysis in the twentieth century. Before outlining the chapters, the introduction will first give a short chronological overview and then focus on the basic thematic aspect of the volume, namely how humour served to produce inclusion and exclusion along the lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. I In order to draw attention to humour’s political meaning, a quick reference to the nineteenth century might help. In that century, humour changed from a primarily oral form of communication into mediaproduced entertainment, though, of course, oral humour did not disappear altogether. At the same time, satire, caricature, and comedies started to be used as political commentary, with censorship playing a greater role in Europe than in the United States, and in Germany more so than in England, where freedom of the press had been established earlier.3 As modern political systems developed, most political groups used cheerful entertainment to convey their political and social views, trying to activate a wider audience than with ‘merely’ political talk. Thus, the most renowned and long-lived German satirical journal Kladderadatsch, established as a liberal magazine during the revolution of 1848,4 was answered by the Prussian conservatives’ satirical magazine Der kleine Reactionär (The Little Reactionary) in the 1860s,5 just like the National Socialist magazine Die Brennessel (The Stinging Nettle), established in 1931,6 was supposed to win the social imaginary from democratic satirists like Kurt Tucholsky. At the same time, Germany seems to present a rather special case, as German intellectuals since the early nineteenth century also car-

Introduction 5 ried on a meta-discourse on the particular national character of German humour. The distinctiveness of this discourse, however, still needs to be analysed in a comparative perspective. Reaching back to a tradition that authors like Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte had invented around 1800, renowned conservative writers like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1910 claimed the existence of a special kind of German humour that supposedly could be distinguished from other forms of humour, namely satire.7 Their main argument was that this German form of humour pointed out conflicts and problems in society just like satire did, but that it did so with the intention of healing, not hurting. Their humour, so the argument went, showed real feeling and told ‘the truth’ about society. At the same time, they classified irony as French or Jewish and damned it as politically undesirable or aesthetically and emotionally wanting. In the nineteenth century, for example, conservatives accused social critics and satirists like Heinrich Heine of not being or acting German,8 a tradition that continued into the twentieth century. Thus, whoever claimed a particular German form of humour mirrored the German obsession with defining their self through an enemy other, using the term to delegitimize opponents as non-German. Such humour, and its negotiation, never became dominant before the wars of the twentieth century, but it became fused during the latter half of the nineteenth century with the notion of ‘catastrophic nationalism,’9 the conservative position which claimed that only war and fighting created real unity. This imaginary developed its full deadly impact during National Socialism, and so did so-called German humour, turning both into a discursive and social practice of exclusion.10 Still, as in all modern Western societies, the field of the comical became widely differentiated after the nineteenth century, and in the media explosion of the early twentieth century humorous entertainment in general continued its secular rise. The First World War in particular was a gigantic media war. All major warfaring countries relied heavily on caricatures or humorous trench journals to whip up emotions at home, offer visions of continuing social order, and denigrate the opponents. But at least Western governments could never control the mass media entirely, and how they dealt with humour they did not ask for also tells about war societies’ suppleness in dealing with conflicting positions. In France, for example, the satirical journal Canard Enchaîné, established in 1915, turned into an influential voice of criticism against the war.11 In Germany, on the contrary, all satirical

6 Martina Kessel journals stayed on a rather official line until the end of the war. But while the dominance of what was called German humour was now obvious, it still could not quell the diversity of political opinions, expressed in cartoons, funny postcards, or jokes. Furthermore, German censors had to cater to the taste of the public as they needed to shore up energy for the war and at least in Berlin grudgingly accepted cabaret that made fun of important politicians.12 Weimar culture is a synonym for modern culture in general – a witty, sarcastic onslaught of satire that appealed to many but may in fact have frightened more. But just as the famous examples of anti-war literature like that of Erich Maria Remarque have to be read within their context of widely published and always present pro-war literature,13 democratic satire should be perceived within the continued presence of either conventional entertainment or outright right-wing humorists, who touched people’s emotions with their diatribes against Versailles, the Weimar Republic, and German Jews. Since the late 1920s, the majority of the German population preferred seemingly unpolitical, cheerful entertainment to the democratic political exchanges that had until then often taken place on stage, but even more so in the new mass media like the radio or in films with competing political messages. As a consequence, primarily liberal and democratic voices were driven from the mass media, while the audience opted for humorous presentations that were at best paternalistic, at worst outright antidemocratic.14 A large part of the population carried this preference into National Socialism and beyond, betraying their preference for security over democratic politics from the 1920s up to postwar (West) Germany. Oral jokes in authoritarian regimes have for a long time steadfastly been interpreted as a sign of everyday resistance.15 West German cultural memory clings to this view regarding National Socialism despite studies showing that the number of trials conducted for so-called political jokes was minimal compared with the number of jokes the Gestapo knew about.16 More recently, humour has been interpreted, at least for the First World War, as a means of coping and as an outlet in times of disorder and friction.17 The Nazi elite, in fact, activated it in this sense, in a permanent debate among the political leadership, humorists, and average Germans about correct humorous speech performances. Walter Hofmann, for example, star caricaturist of the SS journal Das Schwarze Corps (The Black Corps), in 1937 issued a collection of his comics under the title Lacht ihn tot! (Laugh him to death). In one of them, Göring suddenly appears next to a hushed man who

Introduction 7 had been telling jokes about him, asking the man to come up with some new jokes as he was bored by the old ones.18 The public, in turn, asked for and received light entertainment that showed cheerful pictures of German society with no need of exclusion any more.19 As a number of the permissible jokes about the Nazi party reappeared as jokes about the SED in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and 1970s, we might use insights about the GDR in order to analyse Nazi Germany. Regarding postwar East Germany, there is an awareness that jokes in the GDR showed grudging respect and even admiration for East German politicians. The same insight still seems difficult to accept for National Socialism. Here, the argument stops at saying that, ironically, the constant joking seemed to have confirmed the ruling party’s grip upon a reluctant following.20 Of course, there is another story about National Socialism and the comical. It happened in the newest media of the time, namely film, and was told from the outside. Charlie Chaplin with The Great Dictator in 1940 and Ernst Lubitsch with To Be or Not to Be in 1942 both played with the power of ironical inversion. Through exaggeration and doubles, they distorted Hitler and other National Socialists into grotesque figures and helped the audience to see through a charade of gestures. They did not prevent war or genocide but maybe fissured the perception of a seemingly unbreakable power through the laughter of the audience.21 When in 1946 American occupation officers showed The Great Dictator to German audiences, as part of the re-education effort, early laughter gave way to hushed silence.22 The real Hitler, with his immediate pathway into violence, was too close for humorous comfort, due to the audience’s own involvement in a monstrous history. In recent decades, the debate about whether the Holocaust can be told in a humorous way has picked up,23 initiated by examples like Art Spiegelman’s comic Maus: A Survivor’s Tale 24 or films like Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1997) and Dani Levy’s Mein Führer (2007). Mein Führer tells the story of Professor Adolf Grünbaum, famous actor and stage coach, who is brought from Sachsenhausen to Berlin in late 1944 to restore the power of speech to a burnt-out Hitler. In the case of this movie, German newspapers debated whether it was acceptable to laugh about Hitler, while Mein Führer actually played through various other questions, turning the comical into a deadly serious historical issue. On the one hand, it is the story of spectators’ laughter about something they consider funny that is also based on terror, so that their laughter can easily become complicit. On the other

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hand, the film discusses a basic dilemma of power and agency. Thus, Grünbaum’s sense of irony seems to open spaces of action for him although he is in a hopelessly inferior position in radically asymmetric power relations. This works as long as Goebbels keeps the agreement, but the victim’s power of laughter and therefore any hope disappears the very moment the Nazis decide to replace agreement by dishonesty and violence. Right after the Second World War, Germans continued to opt for paternalistic, non-ironical, and supposedly non-political versions of cheerful entertainment. Their dislike of satire affected especially those few who as early as the 1950s and 1960s discussed in a self-ironical and moving way German complicity in genocide and war crimes. Films like Rolf Thiele’s mocking Mamitschka from 1955, satirizing both expellees and native Germans, and Wolfgang Staudte’s hilarious Herrenpartie from 1964, showing the deep involvement in National Socialism and war crimes of a complacent men’s choral society on postwar holiday in Yugoslavia, were defeated fast and hard at the box office and then wiped out from cultural memory as well.25 What is needed are truly historical analyses of humour in the postwar era which not only focus on the level of the media or its content, but connect such analysis with a history of mentalities and politics. Not only German, but also North American, politicians and intellectuals attacked comic books in the 1950s as a new, politically and socially dangerous,26 aesthetic form that appealed to youngsters and was quickly associated with unruly behaviour. The art world, however, has long since accepted them not only as a form of subversive counterculture but as art.27 Furthermore, we could ask whether the rather mellow U.S.-style comedies of the McCarthy era, made for a white middle class,28 were typical for the 1950s in Western popular culture in general. Did the prominence of ethnic humour, so important in the United States in the twentieth century, recede in the 1950s not only due to the civil rights movement but also due to the impact of knowledge about the Holocaust? In turn, did the sharp British satire in the 1960s, with its class emphasis, have effects in other countries? Generally, notions of humour refer back to cultural norms that may differ from culture to culture, so the transfer of humour across cultural borders proved difficult throughout the twentieth century, despite the increasingly transnational character of comedy shows.29 The turn of British satire to a more absurd form since the 1960s, with Monty Python as its most successful icon on television,30 definitely preceded a

Introduction 9 similar shift in Germany by at least two decades.31 But while for some decades humour’s possible political meaning might have receded into the background in democratic countries, as it seemed ‘merely’ popular culture, it has came back with a bang more recently. Humour’s sharp political impact and the complex relationship between cultural norms and censorship of the comical as a touchstone of the permissible were in the forefront again in the belated but harsh Islamic opposition to caricatures about Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. II Humour’s political and social meanings actually stay apparent all the time if we look at the twentieth century not just chronologically but through the lens of the processes of inclusion and exclusion that characterize democratic as well as authoritarian societies. Humour was a device to negotiate belonging and to mark boundaries, just as the categories of race, ethnicity, and gender have been organizing social order, probably surpassing class in its importance as a marker of difference. The essays in this volume are all concerned with inclusion and exclusion. Anti-Semitism obviously played a major role for the duration of the whole century. Anti-Semites turned religious confession into the category of race by using satire, particularly in the intense visualization of anti-Semitic stereotypes in so-called humorous postcards and caricatures in the modern media since the 1880s.32 During the First World War, the German media machine called for unity at home in humorous entertainment but excluded Jewish Germans from this imagined community of fighters and sufferers, as Martina Kessel argues in this volume. This grasp of humour by the majority reduced the possibilites for the Jewish German minority to speak, as Peter Jelavich discusses in his analysis of Jewish jokes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin.33 While Jewish entertainers until 1914 had successfully used self-irony on stage to negotiate their ambivalent position in German society, violent anti-Semitism after the German defeat in 1918 narrowed dramatically the boundaries of what they could say in a selfderogatory manner as anti-Semites might pick it up as a ‘true’ description of Jews by themselves. National Socialists radically sharpened the connection between excluding the so-called enemies of the Reich and presenting a cheerful facade of normalcy that the average German audience relished, as Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger show.

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The story of anti-Semitic joking in Germany after the Second World War still needs to be written. The absence of Jewish entertainers and the loud silence covering the violent jokes of the Nazi era were the backdrop of the desire for harmonious entertainment. But Jewish humour and anti-Semitism are also important topics for other, traditionally more pluralistic, cultures. In the United States, for example, Jewish humour has played a highly prominent role in the media and is debated intensely as a discourse to negotiate boundaries.34 In this context, Vincent Brook examines the double bind of anti-Semitic stereotypes and Jewish self-hatred in famous American sitcoms in the 1990s. The twentieth century was a century of globalization, migration, and ethnic tension in which ethnicity as the defining criterion for belonging or non-belonging has often played a deadly role. Its general importance as a marker of society has been obvious in the United States, while it was less visible or has been acknowledged later in Western European countries. In American humour throughout the twentieth century, ethnicity has been a rather straightforward topic, often focusing on Jewish, African-American, and more recently Native American humour.35 Its scholarly assessment goes both ways. A number of cultural analysts argue that groups on the margins, similar to Jewish Germans in Imperial Germany, managed to appropriate ethnic humour, thereby rendering themselves visible and rewriting their status from negative projections to members of American society.36 Others argue that black sitcoms, for example, for a long time relied on negative, stereotypical characterizations of blackness to promote humour.37 In the continued media explosion of the twentieth century, new forms of presentation and new technologies offered possibilities for shifting and blurring ethnic identity. Mark Winokur joins this debate by analysing how animated comic visual art in the early twentieth century allowed for the crossing of borders between ethnic identities. Ethnic joking having been carried over from the vaudeville of the early century to the television stand-up comedy of the late twentieth century, the variety of media today can offer new spaces as well. In moving between clubs, stage, television, and/or movies, black or Jewish comedians and other groups can redraw comic and perhaps social conventions by using each medium’s possibilities.38 A similar mechanism applies to ethnic groups in Western European contemporary societies, who shifted jokes from one group to another in order to position themselves and others, as Giselinde Kuipers

Introduction 11 shows in her essay on the Netherlands. In Germany today, however, ethnic jokes in the media still have an ambivalent status. The rise of German humour productions after the commercialization of German television in the 1980s was associated with the new tactic of breaking taboos as a source of humour, namely with anti-Polish jokes.39 At the same time, however, some Turkish comedians entertain their television audiences today with gags about the Turkish-German culture clash, introducing an ironic/self-ironic discourse about the sensitive issue of national or ethnic identity at the very moment when irony on a global scale has become charged terrain. Finally, the category of gender has not been sufficiently studied by historians of humour, particularly not for the twentieth century. Other fields like literature studies have been far more innovative here, though again they focus mostly on the periods up to the nineteenth century.40 Women who tried to gain a democratic share in society have been constantly the butt of jokes that shifted the level of discussion away from argument. At the same time, women’s possibilities of speaking up humorously have been tightly proscribed in any society analysed so far, with lasting constraints remaining even today.41 Still, there are many insights regarding the history of gender and humour in the twentieth century, although one should be careful not to prolong the problem of defining gender as meaning women only. As gender roles changed markedly during the First World War, due to the needs of war societies, media makers in the major Western European states used joke books and caricatures to reassert traditional gender roles.42 Simultaneously, the second important meaning of gender as a symbol for power relations played out in endless German caricatures that feminized the opponents, trying to render them ridiculous.43 For the Weimar Republic, we still need fully contextualized studies about the great number of new female stars and literary figures who showed not only their bodies, but also their sharp wit in public,44 adding to the sense that gender roles in general were out of control. During National Socialism, German satirical commentaries rarely passed up the chance to demean Western democracies by describing sexual and gender confusion as hallmarks of those societies.45 Staudte’s Herrenpartie (1964) made fun of the self-important German postwar masculinity of men who revealed their true character as willing and greedy Nazis when they found themselves in a tight spot. This particular sarcasm might well have spurred the film’s immediate rejection.

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Literary scholars and sociologists have pointed out the social constraints that often force women to use different forms of humour. In cultures that mark aggressiveness as masculine and therefore as threatening in a woman, women, like other marginalized groups, often preferred wit, understatement, irony, and self-deprecation to derision and open aggression, thus minimizing the risk of challenging the status quo.46 It is revealing to look for different forms of humour in order to make visible both women’s irony and the context of inclusion and exclusion they argue within, as Eileen Gillooly shows in her contribution on late twentieth-century British novelists. Research with this focus could help to transcend the hidden assumption still at work in many studies that women’s humour is ‘the unimportant discussing the unofficial.’47 At the same time, further research should make masculinity visible as a category. Up to the present day, international relations are often symbolized by more or less aggressive caricatures questioning the other side’s masculinity.48 III The essays in this volume are all sensitive to the problems of inclusion and exclusion in authoritarian and democratic societies of the twentieth century. Beyond this shared interest, the collection covers a wide range of thematic and methodological approaches. Some authors focus on questions of ethnicity, race, or gender. Others, while also discussing some of these categories, raise the issue of the modern media and their inherent possibilities of organizing social order. Some highlight the problem of inclusion and exclusion from the perspective of groups on the margin, while others analyse humour that was used by a majority to support its claim to homogeneity and superiority. Peter Jelavich opens the volume with general remarks about the methodological problems involved in analysing jokes. He then uses the case of Jewish humour in Imperial and Republican Germany in the early twentieth century to discuss the more general and ambivalent problem of self-deprecatory humour by ethnic groups in front of others who do not necessarily have a favourable view of them. The development of the modern mass media broadened the reception of humour, thereby also intensifying the problem. Accordingly, the difference between private and public became more important, as jokes acquired different meanings and resonance in each context. In tracing how Jewish self-irony after the German defeat of 1918 was turned into

Introduction 13 an ever greater danger for Jewish Germans, or was perceived as such by Jewish organizations who feared that anti-Semites might pick up Jewish self-irony as the ‘true’ assessment of German Jews by themselves, Jelavich discusses a basic problem of the Weimar Republic where a newly established democratic political system had to contend with a society that was more democratic for some of its non-Jewish members, but in terms of anti-Semitism became ever more exclusive. He thus points to the momentous meaning the self-irony of a group on the margins can acquire: it highlights the basic problem of modern democracies needing all members of the population to respect its rules, namely free speech and non-violence. In the media explosion in the early twentieth century, funny entertainment comprised an ever-increasing share of the market. Mark Winokur picks up on the theme of race and ethnicity in humour by analysing early animated films in the United States. His reading of racialized modernism does not start, as usual, with Walt Disney but with other early animators whose technology allowed for an uncanny fluidity of ethnic identity. Cartoons moving from ‘Negro’ to Jewish to Irish to linguistically unidentifiable turned seemingly straightforward racist representations into ambiguous or uncanny Creole representations. Keeping all characters rootless, technologies such as cel technology or the use of sound, Winokur argues, prevented an ethos of victimization by any one group because all were wounded indiscriminately. In her essay on German humour during the First World War, Martina Kessel continues the debate about underlying forms of racism by looking at the majority’s use of a particular form of humour, classified as ‘German’ and projecting a united nation. Kessel underlines the various meanings such German humour could acquire, and the conflicts in German society that it both transported and bolstered, but also points to the permanent anti-Semitic undercurrent in humour production. Civilians and soldiers used humour to communicate about the war and discuss the rapid changes the war society seemed to undergo. A trivial counterpart to national pathos, humorous semantics and images promised the return of the old order and offered particular speech performances that allowed criticism of what was perceived as the current disorder. But while German humour envisioned a united nation, soldiers’ and civilians’ irony in fact splintered this projection. The humour market remained an embattled arena where producers, censors, and consumers continuously tested the limits of what could be said. Regarding anti-Semitism, however, humour served as the

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mechanism of a more deep-rooted inclusion and exclusion. The essay coincides with Jelavich’s findings by showing how non-censored anti-Semitic jokes excluded Jewish Germans both from the imagined community of cheerful soldiers and from a community at home that defined itself through its suffering and the right to mock the government’s failures. The articles by Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger explore the uncanny legacy of this fusion of cheerfulness and exclusion that marked all media during National Socialism. Radio was one of the most important new media at the time, its impact going beyond the number of radio sets as often whole families or groups of friends listened together. Its political potential had already been apparent during the Weimar Republic, and Goebbels was keen to use it. National Socialist radio politics picked up exclusionary practices fast and on various levels, combining them with the presentation of a cheerful Volksgemeinschaft on air, as Monika Pater argues. Like Winokur, she touches on the implicitly suppressive character of the absence of ethnicity. After excluding ‘undesirables’ in the workforce, in broadcast content and in the audience, German radio makers proceeded to structure listeners’ time with humorous broadcasts for every part of the day. The wireless was a technology that could, through its very character as a modern mass media, structure people’s daily and weekly experiences. Pater compares this impact with similar structural effects of the BBC, pointing to the problem that modern media may work identically in any political system. However, the radio as an instrument to structure one’s day was only accepted, Pater argues, when the open ideology of the early years gave way to cheerfully familiar, seemingly non-political variety shows. The German population’s dislike of aggressive humour and its preference for harmonious representations of society that simply eschewed the regime’s real character are also underlined by Patrick Merziger in his essay about satire before and after 1933. Here again, absence became conspicuous when the audience rejected National Socialist culture makers’ attempts to continue the sarcastic strategies that had been successful during the late Weimar Republic. Violent caricatures in publications like Der Stürmer pinpointed anti-Semitism as this society’s integrating disposition. But satire about inner and outer enemies also perpetuated their existence, while a large part of the audience, Merziger argues, preferred not to be reminded of them and opted for the supposedly harmonious version of so-called German humour,

Introduction 15 even attacking editors of the Brennessel as ‘Jewish,’ ‘pimps,’ and ‘perverts.’ Like Pater, Merziger highlights the active role of the audience in organizing the field of entertainment. Their discussions of humour point to the intense communication between mass media’s audiences and the political and cultural elite in an authoritarian society committing genocide, and thus tell us about the fabric of this society. The last three articles deal with the inclusive and exclusive dimensions humour could acquire in non-authoritarian postwar societies like the United States, the Netherlands, and Britain. Vincent Brook concentrates on the theme of Jewish humour and its meanings at the other temporal end of the twentieth century, probing Jewish selfhatred in The Larry Sanders Show within the broader context of an unprecedented ‘Jewish sitcom trend’ in the United States in the 1990s. The essay first delineates processes of inter-group stereotyping and labelling, relating to Jelavich’s analysis by showing Jewish objection to specific Jewish self-portrayals on screen, due to their being ‘too Jewish.’ Importantly, and this touches on the issue of democratization or its absence that Jelavich talks about as well, it is the broadening range of Jewish portrayals being aired next to each other that made each one less vulnerable to criticism. The show analysed here played with a number of often-linked prejudices concerning ethnic difference and sexuality. The Jewish self-hatred played out in some episodes remained subject to the classical double bind of assimilation: on the one hand the pressure to assimilate by rejecting a part of themselves, thereby confirming their otherness, and on the other hand the surrounding society’s suspicion of conspicuous Jewishness as well as its absence, which is read as false pretext. Brook, like Jelavich, in fact, answers to all the preceding essays regarding the relationship between dominant and marginalized positions by arguing that humour can be both a way of keeping up the double bind and one of the communicative processes to help loosen the knot. Some Western European societies like the Netherlands have changed during the last half-century from an ethnically more homogeneous to a multi-ethnic society, and here humour reveals the shifting of social hierarchies. Giselinde Kuipers describes how scripts of ethnic jokes moved from one ethnic group to another in the last decades, denoting a change in their position in the ethnic hierarchy of Dutch society. Furthermore, jokes now tend to focus less on class and race and more on culture and religion as attributes that can be influenced by the people joked about, while downward joking has often been re-

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placed by a more varied, multi-ethnic landscape that allows joking back. Like Jelavich, Kuipers also discusses the changing boundaries of private and public which allow or disallow for joking about sensitive issues. But although Dutch society has markedly changed regarding its ethnic composition, Kuipers argues that the rules regulating public jokes do not differ fundamentally from rules that applied in a more homogeneous society, at least in the very basic sense that ethnic joking is still a fraught issue. The fact that ethnic humour has been more evident recently should, in her eyes, be understood as a reaction to a growing political sensitivity regarding the subject. Finally, Eileen Gillooly combines gender and humour in her analysis of a classic medium, namely late twentieth-century British novels by female authors. In these novels, the role of technology is played by the narrative voice that marks femininity not in an essentialist way but as a phenomenological distinction, subtly subversive and self-deprecatory. Similar to cross-ethnic ambiguity, gender makes its presence felt humorously, however fleetingly. Such research uncovers strands of the comical that have long been neglected in the canon of literary humour. Like Jelavich and Kuipers, Gillooly discusses the private/ public divide, here in the sense that it has excluded women’s voices from the realms considered public and important. This paper, in turn, highlights the private, traditionally prescribed as the female sphere and considered rather boring, as a major source for irony. Often referring back to their famous counterparts in the late nineteenth century, these equally acclaimed authors of the late twentieth century turn understatement into lethal sharpness but, by emphasizing the absurd features of gender hierarchy and women’s exclusion, shield the blows of reality to their heroines. In sum, by revolving around the problems of inclusion and exclusion, all the essays in this book debate humour’s role in integrating or suppressing voices, not only by being subversive or affirmative, but also by constructing or deconstructing identity, disputing boundaries, and negotiating appearances. The taboos that jokes point to may have changed, from sexuality in Freud’s times to ethnicity today, allowing it only in supposedly non-serious communicative ways. More historical studies would be necessary to show humour’s power in the twentieth century to mark these problems and construct, express, or alter their dynamic. To analyse modern societies, research could use as one perspective their vastly diverging and historically changing willingness to tolerate ambiguity in the form of the comical.

Introduction 17 notes 1 This also applies to the interesting collection by Jan Bremmer and Hermann Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). I would like to thank Levke Harders, Ruth Federspiel, and especially two anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press for their helpful comments. 2 Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann, ‘Death and TwentiethCentury Germany,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Paul Betts et al. (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 1. 3 Hans-Peter Mathis, Napoleon I. im Spiegel der Karikatur: Ein Sammlungskatalog des Napoleon-Museums Arenenberg mit 435 Karikaturen über Napoleon I. (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1998); Thilo König et al., ‘Die Stecher von London: Englische politische Karikatur unter dem Einfluß der französischen Revolution,’ in ‘Nervöse Auffangorgane des inneren und äußeren Lebens.’ Karikaturen, ed. Klaus Herding and Gunter Ott (Gießen: Anabas Verlag, 1980), 58–86. 4 Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch & Simplicissimus 1890–1914 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984), 14–47. 5 Ursula Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin: Von der Märzrevolution bis zu Bismarcks Entlassung. Illustrierte politische Witzblätter einer Metropole 1848–1890 (Cologne: ILV, 1991), 127–9, 177f.; Reinhard Hippen, Das Kabarett der spitzen Feder: Streitzeitschriften (Zurich: pendo-Verlag, 1986), 46. 6 Patrick Merziger, ‘Die Ermächtigung des Publikums im Nationalsozialismus? Leserbeschwerden und NS-Propaganda in den Unterhaltungsmedien – die Satirezeitschrift “Die Brennessel,”’ SOWI 34 (2005): 26–39. 7 For the time around 1800, see especially the essays in Sprachen des Ernstes – Sprachen der Ironie, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). Regarding Schiller, see also: Peter von Matt, ‘Lachen in der Literatur. Eine Überlegung zur Frage, warum Schillers “Glocke” so ernst ist,’ in Peter von Matt, Das Schicksal der Phantasie: Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1994), 91–101; Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Lachende Deutsche (Minden: Bruns, 1910). 8 Jefferson S. Chase, Inciting Laughter: The Development of ‘Jewish Humor’ in 19th Century German Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000). 9 Michael Geyer, ‘The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in Twentieth-Century Germany,’ German Studies Review 15 (1992): 75–110. 10 Martina Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death? “German Humour” in the Two

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18 19

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Martina Kessel World Wars,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss, 197–218, here 199–201. See also Martina Kessel, ‘Gewalt schreiben. “Deutscher Humor” in den Weltkriegen,’ in Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte 1900–1933, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 229–58. Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor: The Canard Enchaîné and World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Jan Rüger, ‘Laughter and War in Berlin,’ History Workshop Journal 67 (2009): 23–43. Wolfgang Natter, Literature at War, 1914–1940: Representing the ‘Time of Greatness’ in Germany (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1999). Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For West Germany, this myth was firmly established by the early postwar joke collections such as Harry Harden, Als wir alle Nazis waren … Notizen eines Zeitgenossen (Öhringen: Residenz-Verlag, 1952/53). Meike Wöhlert, Der politische Witz in der NS-Zeit am Beispiel ausgesuchter SD-Berichte und Gestapo-Akten (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), esp. 81–6. Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale, and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Waldl [pseud. Walter Hofmann], Lacht ihn tot! (Dresden: Nationalsozialistischer Verlag für den Gau Sachsen, 1937), n.p. This is the argument of Monika Pater and Patrick Merziger in this volume. See also Patrick Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und ‘Deutscher Humor.’ Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010). Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch, eds., Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 160, 166. Sylvia Klötzer, Satire und Macht. Film, Zeitung, Kabarett in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 2006), focuses on the dynamics between the government’s desire for entertaining satire and its wish to control the comical. For the East German ‘niche society’ of the 1960s and 1970s when people combined conformity and grumbling, see Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship. Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 139. Regarding The Great Dictator, see Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 266–7.

Introduction 19 22 Niels Kadritzke, ‘Führer befiehl, wir lachen!’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 January 2007, 12. 23 For the recent interdisciplinary, but rarely historical, debate about the legitimacy of comic representation of the Holocaust, see the conference about ‘The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo. Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation,’ University of Hamburg, June 2008. Margrit Frölich, ed., Lachen über Hitler –Auschwitz–Gelächter? Filmkomödie, Satire und Holocaust (Munich: Ed. Text und Kritik, 2003). 24 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale – My Father Bleeds History and Here My Troubles Began (London: Penguin, 2003). See also Deborah R. Geis, ed., Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s ‘Survivor’s Tale’ of the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 25 Irmgard Wilharms, ‘Filmwirtschaft, Filmpolitik und der “Publikumsgeschmack” im Westdeutschland der Nachkriegszeit,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 267–90; Martina Kessel, ‘Keine Heimat für Hybrides. Mamitschka und die Politik der Gefühle im Film der 1950er Jahre,’ Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 38 (2010):183–98. 26 Marc Degen, ‘Wie amerikanische Comic Books die Welt veränderten,’ in Lachen: Über westliche Zivilisation, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer and Kurt Scheel, special issue of: Merkur. Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 52 (2002): 834. 27 Since the 1970s, museums like the Karikatur and Cartoon Museum in Basel, Switzerland, have collected caricatures and comics and thus treat them as aesthetic media worthy of preservation. For the political role of Spanish comics under Franco and during the transition to democracy, see Antonio Martín, Apuntes para una Historia de los Tebeos (Barcelona: Glénat, 2000), 189, and Antonio Altarriba, La España del Tebeo: La Historieta Española de 1940 a 2000 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpa, 2001), 308–14. Thanks to Patrick Merziger for providing these titles. 28 Steve Vineberg, High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 29 Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman introduced the French comic avant-garde of the 1970s featuring artists such as Jacques Tardi, Joost Swarte, and Lorenzo Mattotti to the American public in their magazine Raw: The Graphix Magazine, presenting comics not as expression of an underground counterculture but as art and graphic experiment. Here, Spiegelman also published one of the earliest versions of Maus. Andreas C. Knigge, Comics: 50 Klassiker. Von Lyonel Feininger bis Art Spiegelman (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 2004), 240–2. 30 Jerry Palmer, The Logic of the Absurd: On Film and Television Comedy

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32

33

34

35

36

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Martina Kessel (London: BFI, 1987); George C. Perry, The Life of Python, rev. and updated ed. (London: Pavilion, 2006). For German television in the 1990s, see Joan-Kristin Bleicher, ‘Vom Volkshumor zur Comedy: Streifzüge durch die Humorgeschichte des Fernsehens,’ in Humor in den Medien, ed. Walter Klingler et al. (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2003), 75–85, here 82–3. Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger, eds., Abgestempelt. Judenfeindliche Postkarten (Heidelberg: Umschau/Braus, 1999). Michael Graetz, ‘Vom Text zum Bild. Die antisemitische Karikatur,’ in Ein Leben für die jüdische Kunst. Gedenkband für Hannelore Künzel, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), 163–79; Andrea Hopp, ‘Zur Medialisierung des antisemitischen Stereotyps im Kaiserreich,’ in Antisemitische Geschichtsbilder, ed. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Sieg (Essen: Klartext, 2009), 23–37. See also Peter Jelavich, ‘Performing High and Low: Jews in Modern Theater, Cabaret, Revue, and Film,’ in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 209–35, esp. 216–18. For an overview see James D. Bloom, ‘American Jewish Humor,’ in Comedy: A Geographical and Historical Guide, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Charney (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 93–105. Dennis R. Perry, ‘Hybrid History: The Pequot War and American Indian Humor,’ in Studies in American Humor, new ser. 3 (2000): 25–34; Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Native Art (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999); Arnold Krupat, ‘Native American Trickster Tales,’ in Comedy, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 447–61. Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, ‘Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival,’ in American Humor, ed. Arthur Power Dudden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 97–117; Mel Watkins, On The Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying; The Underground Tradition of African American Humor That Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). The Cosby Show in the 1980s being the exception because it depicted an upper middle-class black family without stereotyping it as deficient. Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. Mcllwain, ‘The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms,’ in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 125–37, here 125. John W. Lowe, ‘African American Humor,’ in Comedy, vol. 1, 34–47, here 44. An overview of stand-up comedy is in Lawrence E. Mintz, ‘Stand-Up Comedy,’ in Comedy, vol. 2, 575–85.

Introduction 21 39 Bleicher, ‘Vom Volkshumor zur Comedy,’ 83. 40 Marianne Flassbeck, Gauklerin der Literatur: Elizabeth von Arnim und der weibliche Humor (Rüsselsheim: Göttert, 2003); Helen Chambers, Humor and Irony in Nineteenth Century German Women’s Writing. Studies in Prose Fiction (Rochester, NY: Cambden House, 2007). American literature studies have covered the twentieth century more often. Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (Jackson: University Press of Mississsippi, 1990). See also Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 41 See Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), on nineteenthcentury America. For the twentieth century, see Helga Kotthoff, ed., Das Gelächter der Geschlechter: Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen und Männern, 2nd rev. ed. (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1996). 42 Pierre Purseigle, ‘Mirroring Societies at War: Pictorial Humour in the British and French Popular Press during the First World War,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 289–328. 43 Examples in Pension Debberitz, ed. Alfred Brie (Berlin: Verlag der Lustigen Blätter, n.d.), 44–5. See also Christine Brocks, Die bunte Welt des Krieges. Bildpostkarten aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2008), 224–6. 44 Atina Grossmann, ‘Sexualität, Körper und das große Unbehagen. Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,’ in Geschichte und Geschlechter. Revision der neueren deutschen Geschichte, ed. Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008), 290–316, here 299. 45 For example, Das Schwarze Korps, ser. 6/2 (1936): 13. 46 Nancy A. Walker and Zita Dresner, ‘Women’s Humor in America,’ in What’s So Funny? Humor in American Culture, ed. Nancy A. Walker (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Ressources, 1998), 172–5. 47 Regina Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humour in British Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 17. 48 Dorothee Wierling, ‘War die DDR eine Frau?’ Berliner Debatte INITIAL 10 (1999): 165–73, here 166.

1 When Are Jewish Jokes No Longer Funny? Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin PETER JELAVICH Jewish comedians have long been a fixture of the mass media in the United States and Canada. The association of Jews with joking is common in many parts of Europe as well – indeed, it commenced in Central Europe in the nineteenth century. But inevitably, the catastrophic fate of European Jews in the twentieth century casts its shadow back upon earlier entertainers and encourages us to examine their performances more closely. Historical inquiry informs us that from the beginning, Jewish jokes were considered problematic by some observers. Before the First World War, Jewish entertainers could tell Jewish jokes on public stages with little opposition, but by the mid-1920s they faced widespread criticism for doing so: by then, for many Jews, Jewish jokes were no longer funny. Although this case will be my focus, it is obvious that many of the issues and conundra I discuss are not specific to Jews: they apply as well to other ethnic comedians who perform publicly, such as people of Hispanic or African descent, or of Islamic faith, in Anglo-American or European societies today. To provide a more general framework for understanding the prevalence and recurrence of these concerns, I will begin by briefly discussing some of the problems and complexities involved in analysing jokes, and then move on to a particularly vexing case: that of self-deprecatory ethnic humour. What does it mean when a group makes jokes about itself? And more problematically: what does it mean when a group which is a minority makes jokes about itself in front of others who do not always have a favourable view of them? Jokes – which can be so light and light-hearted, and which are so ubiquitous – are surprisingly complex phenomena, as scholars and theorists have long observed (and as practising comedians have al-

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ways known). Cognitively, jokes are hard to grasp; and practically, they are hard to control. Jokes are possible because of the instability of language – words, syntax, and what passes for logic – and the ambiguity of human situations. The former provides the form, the latter the content of most jokes, and the results can be explosive. One can attempt to control the outcome of jokes, but like explosions, they can get out of hand. In his study of jokes – a study that is based primarily on Jewish jokes – Sigmund Freud focused on what he called Tendenzwitze: that is, jokes with an ulterior aim or a purpose, as opposed to jokes told purely to savour the art of joking. According to Freud, ‘tendentious jokes’ are aimed at people or things that compel us to exercise renunciation and repression, such as a political authority, a moral imperative, social institutions like marriage, or even reason and logical thought. Freud claimed that ‘tendentious jokes’ ultimately deal with the most basic human drives that are subject to repression: sex and aggression. By telling the joke, we release some of those repressed drives, as do those who laugh with us. Jokes are enjoyable because they are liberating. As with everything else in Freud, the enjoyment of jokes is over-determined. On the one hand, we can laugh at the technique of a joke, its ability to play on the instability of language through puns and homonyms, or by taking metaphors too literally. On the other hand, we can enjoy the breaking of taboos: the belittling of an authority figure, the profanation of a sacred value, the allusion to a whole range of sexual practices that just are not mentioned in polite society. By playing on the instability and ambiguity of language on the one hand, and the ambivalence of sex and aggression on the other, jokes lead us onto a terrain where their meaning is ultimately hard to ascertain. As Freud noted: ‘in the case of a tendentious joke, we are not able by our feelings to determine which part of our pleasure derives from its technique, and which from its standpoint. Thus, strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at.’1 Let us pause to consider the implications of this statement. Just because you laugh at a joke does not necessarily imply that you agree with its assumptions: think of the times that you have laughed (perhaps with a bad conscience) at a joke that was racist or xenophobic or misogynist. You might have laughed simply because the joke was exceedingly well constructed around a pun or a metaphor or an absurd situation. Or, following Freud, you might have laughed because you know that you should not be racist or xenophobic or misogynist, but

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there is a part of you that delights in breaking the taboos of your own value system. Yet that does not mean that you have given up those values by laughing at the joke. One cannot automatically infer the beliefs of the joke-teller or the laugher from the contents of the joke. The opposite can be true as well: just as you can laugh at a well-made joke even if you do not agree with its implications, you can laugh at a rather lame joke if you subscribe whole-heartedly to its gist. Freud gives the example of jokes aimed at authority-figures, such as caricatures: ‘We laugh at them even if they are unsuccessful simply because we count rebellion against authority as a merit.’2 Analysis – and it need not be psychoanalysis – can ascertain which part of the joke (the technique or the content) causes us to laugh. In actual life, however, we do not usually analyse why we are laughing; otherwise, indeed, we would not laugh. But that very slipperiness of joking makes it a powerful, if insidious, vehicle for influencing opinion. Since people can and do laugh at jokes whose implications they do not consciously share, it is conceivable that if they hear enough jokes of a particular tendency, they might slowly and subtly be won over to that opinion. This is especially true in cases where the listener does not have a pre-established opinion on a particular subject. The seductiveness of joking, abetted by the fact that it is a form of release, usually establishes a rapport with the joker. Freud noted that a joke will ‘bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close investigation, just as on other occasions we ourselves have often been bribed by an innocent joke into overestimating the substance of a statement expressed jokingly.’ This dynamic is expressed in the common German phrase, ‘die Lacher auf seine Seite ziehen’ (to pull the laughers over to your side).3 This fact underscores an obvious aspect of joking, namely, that it is a social event. Again, it was Freud who said that the joke is ‘the most social of all the mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure.’4 But like the ambiguity of language and the ambivalence of sex and aggression, the social situation of joking is often two-sided. Sharing jokes creates a sense of community, even if only two people are involved: joke-telling allows you to ‘laugh with’ someone. But the same jokes can be used to ‘laugh at’ someone else, that is, to exclude and denigrate other groups. Indeed, by definition, tendentious jokes imply a triad: the joke-teller, the listener, and the target of the joke. Inasmuch as the breaking of sexual taboos and especially the outlet of aggression can be undertaken at the expense of others, the liberation provided by jokes can

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occur at great cost to the butt of the humour. Sometimes, we might say, the target deserves it: when it is a hypocritical politician or a selfrighteous clergyman or a mendacious spouse. But whole swaths of the humour landscape are aimed at groups of people towards whom the joke-teller feels varying degrees of antipathy. Jokes provide a means of venting aggression on these groups in an indirect way, when the forces of law prevent more direct violence. This includes misogynist jokes as well as ethnic jokes. The fact that jokes can both embody and release vast resources of aggression was demonstrated anew by the violent global responses to caricatures of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper in 2005. In this essay I would like to examine not the more obvious cases of jokes aimed by one group against another, but rather a more complicated subset of ethnic joking, namely, self-deprecatory humour.5 What does it mean when members of an ethnic or religious minority make jokes about themselves? And does it matter whether the audience is limited to members of that group or includes others as well? There are a number of reasons why minorities in general, and Jews in particular, make jokes about themselves. Self-deprecatory humour can be a means of coping with adverse situations: laughing about your troubles, or about the faults that others impute to you, might not improve your condition, but it could make the adversity bearable in the short run. At the far end of this manner of joking we find ‘gallows humour,’ which arises under conditions of danger or persecution, up to and including the extreme conditions of the Shoah. But self-mocking humour can also develop when the external threats have (seemingly) abated, when the minority feels secure enough to engage in selfcriticism, even in public. This is especially true when the corpus of a group’s humour also recognizes the strengths of the community: that is, when self-deprecatory and self-congratulatory jokes intermingle. Again, it was Freud who claimed that the excellence of Jewish jokes is based on the fact that they take account of the faults as well as the virtues of the Jewish people: ‘The jokes made about Jews by foreigners are for the most part brutal comic stories in which a joke is made unnecessary by the fact that Jews are regarded by foreigners as comic figures. The Jewish jokes that originate from Jews admit this too; but they know their real faults as well as the connection between them and their good qualities […] Incidentally, I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.’6

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Various theories have been advanced to explain the perceived importance of jokes – and self-deprecatory jokes in particular – among Jews. To be sure, from biblical times through the early modern era, joke-telling has not been a major part of Jewish tradition (despite humorous passages in the Talmud and other texts). Many, if not most jokes in the standard repertory of Jewish humour probably date to the nineteenth century, and to Central and Eastern Europe. That being the case, analysts of the genesis of modern Jewish humour can point to a number of possible causal factors. Some were endogenous to the Jewish community: traditional ideas and values were being challenged from within, most notably by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, which called into question major tenets of the Bible, the Talmud, and other spiritual texts – and this, in turn, challenged a number of precepts of everyday life. Other causal factors were exogenous, and concerned relations of Jews – as an ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority – to their surrounding gentile communities. Jews in Eastern Europe routinely had command of three languages: Yiddish for everyday life, Hebrew for ritual purposes, and the local vernacular for communication with the outside world. Sometimes the language of officialdom (say, German or Russian) was different from the local vernacular (for example, Polish or Ukrainian). Having to cope with three or four tongues obviously provided excellent training for learning the complexities and fallacies of language, especially if users of the other languages were trying to trip you up. And that was because – and here we finally get to the most obvious point – the surrounding communities almost always felt varying degrees of antipathy to the Jews in their midst. This was a complex situation, and jokes were one means of engaging it. It is obvious that Jews would make fun of their oppressors, and that the others would make jokes about Jews. But why would Jews make fun of themselves? Here endogenous factors played a major role: jokes were one means of negotiating the major clashes over values, family structure, and gender roles brought about by internal challenges to traditional Jewish beliefs and ways of living. When members of ethnic groups make jokes about themselves among themselves, they are doing a number of things: sometimes self-regulation, sometimes selfcriticism – and in cases where differences are irreconcilable, jokes can be a way of laughing off the irritation. That is especially important in groups that were legally or informally ghettoized: in other words, situations where potentially contentious individuals could not simply

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move somewhere else. When people with changing or conflicting values are forced to live together, jokes are a good means of dissipating some of the resulting tensions. But what happens when members of an ethnic minority are integrated into the larger community and begin to tell these same jokes in front of others? For Jews, that too is a relatively recent phenomenon, since it presupposed both assimilation and the rise of modern forms of public entertainment. It came about, and it becomes a debatable and criticizable phenomenon, towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Jewish jokes began to be published in books and humour magazines, and when Jewish entertainers took to vaudeville, revue, and cabaret stages. After 1900, Jewish humorists started to appear in films as well. By then, there had been some significant shifts in the corpus of Jewish jokes, which supplemented the quips and tales that had originated in Eastern Europe. New jokes were added, coming out of Central and Western Europe, that dealt with problems of assimilation, as well as jokes that made fun of the ‘less cultured’ Eastern European Jews. Why were such jokes told publicly, before audiences that often were predominantly gentile? I would argue that often Jewish entertainers themselves were not aware of what they were doing: they did not really know what they were laughing at, as Freud would say. They became more aware of the implications of their quips as they faced sporadic, then mounting protests from within the Jewish community itself. In other words, Jewish self-deprecatory jokes, told in public, were always controversial; and they were modified and at times withheld in response to that criticism. Let me begin with an example that should make clear the difference between private and public, and how jokes in one context are not necessarily funny in another. In the spring of 1901, the young Viennese actor Max Reinhardt, who had moved to Berlin several years earlier, founded the cabaret ‘Schall und Rauch’ (Sound and Smoke) with two of his fellow actors. The first few performances took place in private, before invited audiences of theatre enthusiasts that were predominantly Jewish.7 Reinhardt and his friends performed parodies of theatre that were simultaneously parodies of Jews, and they included scenes that shock us today by the manner in which they employed anti-Semitic stereotypes. For example, in a parody of Schiller’s Don Carlos scripted by Reinhardt, the character Markwitz is described as follows: ‘He is doubtlessly a Hebrew, but does not like to admit it. In addition he has had himself baptized several times, but not to any ap-

28 Peter Jelavich parent advantage. His nose has the boldly curving line of the Chosen People. It is white and huge and sweats constantly. The moustache under this nose resists being forced to look like that of the Kaiser.’ Furthermore, Markwitz considered himself ‘the paradigm of a beautiful Teuton,’ despite the fact that he spoke in a ‘guttural’ fashion and walked with a ‘Jewish’ gait.8 On the most obvious level, this character parodied a converted German-nationalist Jew; and by making fun of Jews who were overeager to assimilate, Reinhardt was exercising one of the functions of self-deprecatory humour, namely, self-regulation of his own community. But his skit also employed some of the most offensive anti-Semitic clichés. The same can be said of the ‘Chorus of Investors’ in Reinhardt’s parody of Aescylus’s Oresteia: ‘They are wellfed and well-dressed men with hats and frock coats and intensively Roman noses. They bow and bend, murmur and sigh, as if before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.’9 Why did Reinhardt do this? One obvious reason comes to mind: by presenting exaggerated representations of some of the more persistent and egregious stereotypes regarding Jewish looks and Jews’ purported worship of Mammon, Reinhardt made the clichés themselves look ridiculous. This might have allowed his Jewish audience to laugh off some of their built-up anxieties over the prevalence of such tropes. It also might help substantiate one rather ironic theory of Jewish self-derogatory humour: namely, that Jews make jokes about themselves to beat the anti-Semites at their own game, to show that they can excel even at that perverse endeavour if they put their minds to it. Be that as it may, it appears that no members of Reinhardt’s predominantly Jewish audience took umbrage at these scenes as long as they were performed privately. But Sound and Smoke went public in the fall of 1901, and already by March 1902 two of its performances were disrupted by several Jewish students. They protested a skit in which the actor Emanuel Reicher, made up to look like ‘an old Polish Jew,’ told anecdotes about a recently deceased rabbi, a righteous man (Zadek).10 The script included a couple of quips involving marriage brokers (Schadchen) which were probably stale even then, as they were already part of what was becoming a standard repertory of Jewish jokes. But most of the scene consisted of a sympathetic recounting of the fictitious rabbi’s humane and generous deeds. Nevertheless, the students seem to have taken umbrage at the telling of Jewish tales in a pseudo-Yiddish dialect, though it is not clear whether they did so because of religious sensitivity or their belief that it was politically

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or socially unwise to toy in public with stereotypes of Jewishness. In any case, Reinhardt seems to have learned his lesson: he promptly pulled the number from his cabaret, and he no longer dealt humorously with Jewish characters in subsequent performances. Indeed, as he matured into a major director of serious drama, he sponsored plays that portrayed Jews in an earnest and sympathetic manner – a relative novelty on Central European stages. In general, though, it seems that such protests against Jewish humour were rare in the late Imperial era, before the outbreak of the First World War. There were apparently a number of reasons why the telling of Jewish jokes, and the portrayal on stage of humorous Jewish characters, was not deemed excessively problematic at that time. One reason had to do with the increasing security that many Jews felt in late Imperial German society. The attempts by the preacher Adolf Stöcker and others to mount a sustained anti-Semitic campaign in the late 1870s seemed to have foundered by the mid-1890s. More importantly, Jewish jokes were acceptable because they belonged to a larger context of entertainment in which a variety of Germanic groups caricatured themselves: not just Jews, but also Bavarians, Swabians, Rhinelanders, Saxons, Prussians, and Austrians. In such a context, there would have been an obvious benefit for Jews to be part of the lineup, since it implied that despite their differences, they were as much a part of Germany’s national mix as any of the other groups marked by distinctive dialects and customs.11 That attitude found its purest expression in the performances of the Gebrüder Herrnfeld Theater, an extremely popular institution in late Imperial Berlin devoted to ethnic comedies written and performed by two Jewish brothers. In all of their self-scripted plays, Donat Herrnfeld played a Jew and his brother Anton took on a Christian role: usually a Bohemian or Czech, but sometimes a Bavarian or a Berliner. The theatre was known as the prime example in Berlin of what was called Jargontheater (jargon theatre), since Donat spoke an artificial dialect that was a conventional marker of Jewishness on stage: basically German, it was liberally peppered with well-known Yiddish and Hebrew words, and employed a modified syntax that was supposed to sound Yiddish. Indeed, the genre was often, though erroneously, referred to as ‘Yiddish theatre.’ The implied message of these skits was unequivocally pluralist. The Herrnfelds made benign fun of Bohemians, Bavarians, Berliners, Saxons, and Jews as well, but they also dramatized how, in the end, these groups could coexist happily and appreciate their dif-

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ferences. Indeed, some of the skits provided sympathetic portrayals of romance and marriage between Jews and gentiles. The Herrnfelds presented Germany as a multicultural nation, and their plays can be seen as contemporary counterparts of the wildly popular, multi-ethnic dialect comedies in the United States, such as Anne Nichols’s Abie’s Irish Rose (a romance between a young Jewish man and a young Irish woman).12 Nevertheless, there was opposition to the Herrnfeld Theater from some Jews. In 1908, the Jüdische Rundschau reprinted an article entitled ‘The Anti-Semitic Herrnfeld Brothers.’13 What worried the author most was the possibility that gentiles in the audience might come to believe that Jews in general were like the ‘dopes’ (Trottel) they saw on stage. To be sure, the Jüdische Rundschau might have had another implicit reason for rejecting the Herrnfeld enterprise: that newspaper was the mouthpiece of Germany’s Zionist movement, and hence it opposed the assimilationist principles implicit in the Herrnfeld brothers’ skits. But without making the point explicitly, the article also seems to imply that there was another, very profound reason for objecting to ethnic comedy: if Jews were presented almost exclusively in humorous roles, then being Jewish in and of itself could come to be seen as something ludicrous and risible. Many jokes had nothing to do with standard topoi of Jewish life or Jewish stereotypes, but rather dealt with general human foibles; yet they were repeatedly told via Jewish characters and in a pseudo-Yiddish dialect. Freud described such jokes as ones in which ‘it is only the setting that is Jewish; the core belongs to humanity in general.’14 The fact that Jewish attributes were retained in jokes where they were not required – in jokes where any ethnic identity, or none at all, would have functioned just as well – might have made Jewishness appear to be a form of clowning. And to the extent that performing Jewishness on stage was conflated with clowning, it had the potential to damage the respect that generations of Jewish citizens had fought to attain. It was the beginning of what Elliott Oring has called the transformation of ‘The People of the Book’ into ‘The People of the Joke.’15 After 1914 the debate over Jewish jokes took on greater urgency. To be sure, the performance of comedy during wartime is a fraught issue for any society. But the situation of Jews was particularly acute: as frustrations mounted over rising casualties and Germany’s inability to win the war, Jews were increasingly targeted as scapegoats and anti-Semitism surged. In response to charges that Jews were shirking military

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service, the army conducted the notorious ‘Judenzählung’ (Jew count) in 1916. When (contrary to the military’s expectations) the census of Jews at the front indicated that they were in fact represented proportionately in the war effort, the army refused to publicize the results.16 In this context of mounting hostility, members of the Jewish community expressed concern about the telling of Jewish jokes. Already in December 1914 Ernst Lissauer – the ultra-German-nationalist and radically assimilationist author of the wildly popular and notorious ‘Song of Hate against England’ (Haßgesang gegen England) – denounced quips about Jews, particularly ones concerning their unfitness for combat: ‘Comedians show up in garish, gaudy, and swanky pubs and tell jokes about Jews who are on the field of battle, Germans and Russians: “A Yid [Jüd] goes to the medical officer.” Someone actually stands up in these times and says: “A Yid goes to the medical officer.” And there are people sitting around faux marble tables who hoot and cheer.’ Lissauer declared that ‘no decent person should set foot in pubs where jokes are told about Jewish soldiers […] no decent person, whether Jew or Christian.’17 Lissauer’s sentiments were not unique: a month later the police received an anonymous letter, signed ‘a decent Jewish woman’ (eine anständige Jüdin), who protested the numbers at one of the cabarets managed by Rudolf Nelson, an outstanding composer of popular songs in the Imperial and Weimar eras. She asked the police: ‘At a time when hundreds of Jewish soldiers are earning the Iron Cross, is it fitting that filthy Jewish tales are told – unfortunately by a person who is himself Jewish?’ She opined that ‘repulsive Jewish jokes […] are a severe insult for decent Jewish women who have husbands on the field of battle.’ Moreover, she deplored the use of ostensibly vulgar Yiddish words like tineff, chutzpah, and ponim.18 Although we cannot be certain about the precise concerns of this self-proclaimed ‘decent Jewish woman,’ we can surmise that they included the fear that Jews in general would be equated with the rather vulgar characters portrayed by the entertainers and that the markers of linguistic difference would brand them as aliens within the German nation at the very time that Jews were making major sacrifices for the wartime effort. While this ‘decent Jewish woman’ was horrified at Jewish comedians performing during wartime, other police reports attest to the popularity of such entertainers. In April 1915, for example, the police reported that Jewish jokes told by Fritz Lachmann and Willy Prager at a cabaret received ‘lively applause’; indeed, Prager’s quips were ‘the evening’s main attraction,’ and he was repeatedly called back on stage to deliver

32 Peter Jelavich encores.19 Perhaps the best index of the success of Jewish humour during the Great War was the fact that large numbers of moviegoers, both Jewish and gentile, were flocking to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, which in many ways were a visual equivalent to the skits of the Herrnfeld brothers.20 Lubitsch had gained fame in January 1914 with Die Firma heiratet (The Firm Gets Married), in which he played a character that he would repeat many times over the next few years: namely, a rather lazy young man from an Eastern European Jewish town who moves to a big city (usually Berlin) and succeeds in the garment trade through a combination of charm, chutzpah, and benign dishonesty. The character was an elaboration of a popular comic Jewish figure, known as ‘der kleine Moritz’: ‘little Moritz’ was an impudent, unconstrained, and uncontrollable boy, in short, a consummate smart aleck. Perhaps the best of Lubitsch’s ethnic-comedy films is Schuhpalast Pinkus (Pinkus’s Shoe Emporium, 1916). There Lubitsch appears as Sally Pinkus, and we follow his life from his schoolboy days through his apprenticeship in shoe stores, until he ends up as the owner of a fashionable shoe salon as well as the husband of a glamorous dancer. Despite the surge of anti-Semitism in 1916, the year of the Judenzählung, Lubitsch pulled no punches about his own Jewishness or his use of Jewish stereotypes. This was a rather daring thing to do, and it might have had a subversive intent. In the middle of the war, German culture was suffused with images of militarism and masculinity: most films and plays glorified men who were brave, noble, muscular, and blond – and such men, in such shows, invariably ‘got the girl’ in the end. Lubitsch completely inverted that paradigm, first and foremost by emphasizing his stereotypical Jewishness: not only is the milieu Jewish, but the camera often fixes on Lubitsch’s short stature, dark features, and wholly non-Teutonic physiognomy. Reversals of ‘noble’ ideals also pervade Schuhpalast Pinkus: rather than being a model pupil, Sally cheats; being a weakling, he has to fake his prowess in gym; he dissembles to get a job or make a sale – but in the end, it is he who ‘gets the girl.’ Lubitsch employed Jewish comic stereotypes to undermine mass-marketed images of Teutonic masculinity. Not surprisingly, a generation later, in the midst of the Third Reich, a film historian expressed his dismay: ‘Today [1935] it seems incomprehensible that movie audiences, during the hard war years, cheered an actor who always played with a brashness so alien to us.’21 While the Nazis retrospectively deplored the popular success of Lubitsch’s ‘brashness,’ some Jewish observers expressed very different

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concerns: they were troubled by the fact that in films like Schuhpalast Pinkus, he employed what might have been considered anti-Semitic stereotypes for humorous purposes. That Lubitsch was aware of such objections is attested by his defensive reply in 1916 to an interviewer who asked him about his preference for ‘films set in a Jewish milieu.’ Lubitsch responded ‘in an excited manner’ that ‘it has often been said that films set in a Jewish milieu are considered offensive. That’s a completely unbelievable standpoint. Should it ever be the case that such a film incurs disapproval, then it is solely due to a type of performance that either does not correspond to the essence of Jewish humour, in which case the actor should steer clear of such roles; or it is excessively exaggerated, but that would harm any type of artistic performance and destroy its effect. Wherever it appears, Jewish humour is sympathetic and artistic, and it plays such a great role everywhere that it would be silly to forgo it on the screen.’22 Lubitsch provided cinematic versions of the humorous and sympathetic characters of Jewish popular theatre, which needed to be seen especially at the height of a nationalist war, when anti-Semitic voices were becoming ever more strident. Lubitsch’s intent might have been admirable, but were his onscreen characterizations strategically wise? That question was posed ever more urgently over the course of the 1920s, as anti-Semitic agitation increased and burst forth in events like the so-called Scheunenviertelpogrom in November 1923: Jews were attacked and their shops sacked in a Berlin neighbourhood largely populated by impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe.23 Simultaneously, however, many Jews, especially those of the middle classes, considered themselves safer than ever, now that Germany was a democratic republic. Such contrasting perceptions led to a sustained debate within Germany’s Jewish community regarding the extent to which they could feel secure. This debate was especially acute within the ranks of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith). This was a decidedly non-Zionist association of Jews who, as their name implied, considered Germany their homeland. Inasmuch as the goal of being accepted simultaneously as Jews and as Germans remained elusive, the group engaged in numerous self-defence projects, which involved monitoring and (if possible) conducting legal proceedings against anti-Semitic agitators. From the perspective of many Centalverein members, Jewish entertainers were a galling phenomenon, since their jokes upheld stereotypes of difference between German Jews and gentiles – stereotypes

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that seemed to belong to the canon of anti-Semitism as well. The Centralverein routinely monitored depictions of Jews (by Jews and gentiles alike) in the arts and media. That scrutiny became more acute after November 1925, when the CV-Zeitung, the weekly newspaper of the association, published an article that complained of the jokes heard on cabaret stages and published in humour magazines and joke books. It is interesting to note what the author, Alfred Wiener, did not find offensive. He began by asserting that Jews should not be overly sensitive to slights; he even said that they should not take umbrage at those people misinformed by ‘centuries-long, but one-sided experience’ who use the words ‘Jew’ and ‘merchant’ (Händler) interchangeably, as long as it is done in a neutral, non-offensive manner. He claimed that ‘no one’ would argue that Jews should be excluded from ridicule, since the Jew was ‘a character of our times’ (ein Typ unserer Zeit) as much as the lieutenants or students caricatured in the humour magazines. Indeed, the author went on to defend a whole range of Jewish comic stereotypes: only cringing cowards (Duckmäuser), he claimed, would complain about jokes over ‘Jewish commercial agility, the cunning of Little Moritz or the occasional parvenu-like behavior of Herr Neureich.’24 So if Wiener was not upset by clichés of Jews as sharp dealers, sassy boys, and uncultured nouveaux-riches, what did bother him? He proceeded to lambaste an unnamed Berlin cabaret for performing a skit, set in the home of a Viennese-Jewish businessman, in which the young daughter enjoys the lascivious advances of various suitors. The critic protested vehemently against this depiction of a ‘morally corrupt’ (moralisch-verlumpte) family, in which ‘such Schweinereien in Jewish trappings are passed off as characteristics of a Jewish home.’ He was especially galled that ‘Jewish artists and Jewish cabaret owners’ performed the work before a public, ‘in part Jewish,’ that laughed uproariously. The author proceeded to note that this was just one example of several objectionable performances and that he (and by implication the Centralverein) expected such works to disappear from the repertory: ‘If this warning does not suffice, then we will press our standpoint more emphatically.’ This ‘warning’ evidently went unheeded, and after collecting evidence against cabarets for several months, the Centralverein did indeed hit back. On the evening of 22 April 1926, it held two simultaneous protest meetings against Jewish entertainers. A total of some 1,200 citizens attended the two different venues, and several hundred

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were turned away at one of the sites due to lack of space. Speakers included prominent officials of the Centralverein, who discussed ‘the manner in which certain comedians actually foster anti-Semitism.’25 Other speakers included representatives of a Jewish women’s association, a youth group, and a veterans’ organization. The assemblies passed a resolution protesting ‘the crude insults to and witless caricature of Jewish practices in a large number of theatres and cabarets of Berlin. No Jew who has a sense of decency and honour should patronize such pseudo-art.’ The subsequent issue of the CV-Zeitung described the meeting and spelled out many of the concerns. The lead article, like that by Wiener six months earlier, began by claiming that Jews should not be excluded from humorous portrayal, but it proceeded to list a wider range of topics that should remain off-limits. It deplored jokes about Jewish religious beliefs and practices, and also jokes about differences between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Jews. But most of the criticism was aimed at stereotypes that suggested that Jews had a ‘thin veneer of cultivation, which evaporated in the first breeze’ to reveal a Jargon-spouting, uncouth character, epitomized by ‘Little Moritz.’ Unlike Wiener, who regarded that stock character as an acceptable comic figure, the editorial noted: ‘When “Little Moritz” turns out to be in school a loud-mouthed, unchildlike, totally unconstrained and morally deficient young Jewish man; when the essence of this humour resides in having a Jewish smart aleck contradict all notions of children’s moral constraint, decency, and naiveté – then this is no longer humour, wit, or comedy, but rather a crude distortion of Jewish types, which exist neither in Eastern Europe nor here with us.’26 The editorial attempted to explain the gravity of the issue by noting how such jokes fed anti-Semitic prejudices. The comic stereotypes depicted characters who were at most ‘exceptional’ among Jews, and often non-existent: the editorial claimed that ‘Jewish audiences generally know very well that the famous “Little Moritz” does not exist at all.’ But such stereotypes were so prevalent on comic stages that they made gentile audiences believe that they were the rule. Such jokes thus tended ‘to stigmatize an entire people, to augment and deepen already existing prejudices, especially when they are confirmed by Jewish mouths.’ The latter fear was echoed by an article that appeared in the Berliner Börsen-Courier, a liberal newspaper, which contended that Jewish enactment of negative stereotypes allowed the anti-Semites to say: ‘That’s the way they are, and they even brag about it!’27

36 Peter Jelavich Such concerns were expressed in increasingly explicit terms over the ensuing months, as the Centralverein took direct aim at specific stages and performers. In December 1926 the CV-Zeitung cited at length an article (entitled ‘Every Jew His Own Anti-Semite!’) that had appeared in the left-liberal Weltbühne, which attacked the self-styled ‘Professor’ Wiesenthal, a comedian from Vienna performing on Berlin’s cabaret stages. His Jargon-laced monologues seemed ‘to transform all of the racists’ libels, slurs and obscenities […] into funny punch-lines and songs, always at the expense of the “Yid” [der ‘Jud’]: his craftiness, his urge to haggle, his craven nature and his cowardice. All that was missing to complete the repertory was a happy song about ritual murder.’28 A year later, the CV-Zeitung criticized the performances of Willy Prager and Paul O’Montis, two stalwarts of Berlin’s cabarets (recall that Prager’s Jewish quips had been a hit during the First World War). The observer asserted that gentile members of the audience smiled lamely at most numbers, but they clapped loudly when they heard jokes about Jews: ‘many Christian members of the audience seemed to enjoy the fact that the caricatures of Jewish nature, Jewish morals, and Jewish behaviour depicted in the racist yellow press [in der völkischen Hetzpresse] were now spotlighted “true to life” in front of their very eyes.’29 A month later, the CV-Zeitung published the letter of a businessman who travelled several times a year to Berlin, but who stopped going to cabarets ‘because I am always enraged when I see how the Christian public is amused by Jewish jokes, i.e. at our expense.’30 Such contentions must of course be read with caution: how was it possible to assess accurately the religious background (Christian or Jewish) of audience members, let alone the meaning of their laughter or applause? But regardless of the evidence, it is clear that between 1925 and 1927, the criticism of Jewish comedians escalated to the point where they were accused of aiding the cause of radical anti-Semitism. To what extent were these charges justified? Since a response to that question depends on assessments of taste, the role of humour, and the danger posed by anti-Semitism at that time – a danger that is, of course, magnified by historical hindsight – it is difficult to answer. Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct, however speculatively, the concerns voiced by the critics of professional Jewish humorists. Two of the most controversial topics that might have played into the hands of the anti-Semites were Jewish obsession with moneymaking (often through less than honest means) and sexual impropriety (especially adultery). To be sure, one could say that the bulk of jokes of any peo-

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ple, including those of majority cultures, deal with sexual misconduct as well as human foibles such as avarice and dishonesty. But it also is hard to dismiss the concerns of Jewish self-defence groups, particularly within the context of Germany in the 1920s, where there was a growing rightwing-racist (völkisch) movement that accused Jews of being two things in particular: financial despoilers of the German nation and sexual predators upon gentile women. Needless to say, there was a tremendous gulf between the comedic and the racist discourses: Jewish tellers of jokes, including ones dealing with financial and sexual improprieties, stood far afield from an ideology that accused Jews of systematic larceny and trafficking of women. The problem is that the two discourses might not have seemed so distant to many gentiles. That was clearly the case with völkisch anti-Semites: we have seen some of the critics’ fears that some self-deprecatory jokes could be used as ‘evidence’ of anti-Semitic stereotypes, inasmuch as Jews themselves ‘admitted’ the faults of which they were accused. But there was also the danger that the prevalence of such jokes could influence gentiles who, though not völkisch, were unsympathetic or even indifferent toward Jews. In October 1931 the CV-Zeitung noted with alarm that Germania – the flagship newspaper of the (Catholic) Center Party, which ‘cannot be suspected of anti-Semitism,’ according to the Centralverein – contended that the latest revue by Friedrich Hollaender might make ‘a biased goy somewhat anti-Semitic.’31 Recall Freud’s gloss on the German phrase ‘die Lacher auf seine Seite ziehen’ (to pull the laughers over to your side): jokes have a strong potential to sway opinion. Another complex of concerns voiced by the Centralverein revolved around the potential of Jewish jokes to be divisive, to foster conflicts within the Jewish community as well as between Jews and gentiles. The prevalence of jokes against Eastern European Jews, which made fun of their supposed lack of culture and hygiene, caused great dismay. Indeed, many of the apparently self-deprecatory jokes among Jews were not self-deprecatory in a strict sense: in the German context, they were told by socially and culturally assimilated Jews against the unassimilated, still Yiddish-speaking Jews from the East.32 The editorial accompanying the report on the protest meetings of April 1926 was particularly incensed at comedians who ‘make jokes about the cultural differences between Eastern and Western Jews.’ It even referred fondly to the defunct Herrnfeld Theater (Donat had died in 1916): whatever their faults, the Herrnfelds had never depicted Jews as

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‘scoundrels’ (Lumpen).33 At the same time, the Centralverein worried that Jewish jokes could deepen the gulf between Jews and gentiles. Here the concern was not limited to reinforcement of anti-Semitic stereotypes; it also involved the potential of so-called ‘goyim jokes,’ which made fun of gentiles, to alienate the Christian public. As noted above, Freud believed that the strength of Jewish humour resided in the fact that it included both self-deprecatory and self-congratulatory jokes, and the latter often took the form of tales about Jewish superiority to gentiles. Under normal conditions, most gentiles would (and do) find such jokes funny. But in an era of mounting anti-Semitism, ‘goyim jokes’ provided ammunition for segregating Jews and gentiles, since (it was argued) the Jews perceived themselves as a people apart, and their denigration of ‘goyim’ invited German Christians to reciprocate with like invective. This issue was raised in an article that appeared in the CV-Zeitung in December 1927, which cited a letter written by a concerned citizen to a cabaret director. After criticizing ‘cabaret performers who, though themselves Jewish, have no feel for the necessary tact and thus abet the anti-Semites’ distorted picture of Jews,’ the letter noted: ‘These people apparently do not realize, for example, the role that the concept “goy” plays in anti-Semitic agitation, and they do not know what efforts it has taken to counter the racists’ attacks against the “goy” concept [die völkischen Angriffe gegen den Begriff ‘Goi’].’ The letter concluded by contending that ‘all attempts at self-defence are again and again frustrated by this type of humor.’34 There might have been some validity to this concern. For example, in an article reporting on the Centralverein’s protest meetings of April 1926, the Tägliche Rundschau, an ultraconservative newspaper, concurred that Jewish entertainers should stop making fun of Jews; but it proceeded to complain that ‘we others’ were offended when those same humorists joked about ‘the national and religious attitudes and institutions of Christians and Germans [Christen und Germanen].’35 The report implied that the Centralverein deplored jokes at the expense of Jews but had no objections to Jews telling jokes against gentiles. That was, of course, a canard, but it reflected a widespread belief in anti-Semitic circles that ‘goyish’ gentiles were victims of Jewish discrimination. In its criticism of Jewish humorists’ jokes about Jews as well as gentiles, the Tägliche Rundschau contended: ‘according to our observations, the conferencier Robitschek currently holds the record in both areas.’ Kurt Robitschek directed the ‘Kabarett der Komiker’ (Cabaret

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of Comedians, also known as ‘Kadeko’) in Berlin, which was the most successful and (with its 950 seats) the largest of the cabarets of the Weimar era.36 He did indeed infuriate the political right. Already at the opening of his venture in December 1924, he presented Quo vadis? a mock-operetta that was one of the earliest parodies of the Nazi movement: its portrayal of Nero made light of Hitler, and it included a swastika-bedecked character named ‘Gojus.’ In 1928 an anti-Semitic newspaper complained about Robitschek’s ‘stale jokes about Hugenberg, Hitler, [and] Mussolini.’37 But Robitschek’s relations with Jewish groups, especially the Centralverein, were very strained as well. In fact, he was summoned to one of the protest meetings of April 1926, along with Kurt Gerron, a famous cabaret singer, and the director of another cabaret, the Charlott-Casino.38 Addressing the assembly, Robitschek attempted to defend his use of Jewish humour, and he spelled out his standpoint in a subsequent missive to the CV-Zeitung. He agreed that jokes and skits that offended religious sensibilities had no place in cabaret, but he also pleaded for indulgence. Noting that cabaret was an evolving art form, which in the recent past had been characterized by nudity, chauvinism, and ‘stupid clowning,’ Robitschek asserted that attempts to improve and innovate it would inevitably lead to transgressing some bounds. ‘But – for God’s sake – no petty censorship! Wit and satire have to be allowed, even if here and there an individual gets badly hurt. There are no norms to determine where permissible satire ends and tastelessness begins. They need to be discussed on a caseby-case basis. So: let’s first discuss, and then act!’39 In the ensuing months, such discussions seem to have led nowhere. The CV-Zeitung kept up its criticism of Robitschek and some of the humorists that appeared on his stage. Finally, in December 1927 Robitschek sent a letter to Artur Schweriner, the legal adviser of the Centralverein, which was so insulting that Schweriner filed libel charges against Robitschek.40 Since the Centralverein was known for repeatedly taking anti-Semitic agitators to court on grounds of libel and defamation, the move may have made a symbolic equation of Robitschek with the Jews’ greatest enemies. The case was ended a month later by a gentlemen’s agreement, when Robitschek issued a public apology and claimed that he had not intended to insult Schweriner.41 Did Robitschek deserve such harsh criticism? It is hard to answer that question, since we do not have a complete record of all of the jokes he told on stage. But some indication of his own repertory and that of other comedians at his cabaret can be gleaned from two collec-

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tions of jokes, both published in 1924, one year before the beginning of the Centralverein protests. Jüdische Miniaturen (Jewish Miniatures) was edited by Paul Nikolaus, who performed comic monologues at the Kadeko. Die einsame Träne: Das Buch der guten Witze (The Solitary Teardrop: The Book of Good Jokes) was edited by Robitschek and Paul Morgan, another regular entertainer at that venue; indeed, the two had co-written the Quo vadis? parody. Morgan and Robitschek prefaced their jokebook by stating that ‘the predominant type of humor in this collection […] is Jewish.’ They proceeded to note (rather defensively, like Lubitsch in his interview of 1916): ‘There always will be a few people up in arms, people who perceive derision of the [Jewish] nation and religion in these harmless jokes.’42 Likewise, in the epilogue to the second edition of his collection, Nikolaus asserted that the first edition had ‘met with the silly reproach [den albernen Vorwurf] of being anti-Semitic from certain quarters which, in the interim, have realized that anti-Semitism is stoked by completely different people.’43 But were these jokes actually ‘harmless,’ and was it ‘silly’ to call them anti-Semitic? Many of the jokes in the two collections belonged to a standard repertory of Jewish quips: indeed, almost all of the jokes that Freud analysed in his book of 1905 were reprinted in these later anthologies as well. But it does appear that many of the jokes were skewed in a direction that made the members of the Centralverein understandably concerned. A significant percentage of jokes in both anthologies are misogynist: that is, they are jokes about Jewish husbands who wish that their wives were dead, or who celebrate when their wives die; furthermore, Jewish women are assumed to be ugly. (The converse does not hold true: there are no jokes about wives wishing that their husbands were dead, nor are there quips wherein beautiful Jewish women play a role.) Such misogynist jokes total 16 out of 136 (12 per cent) in Nikolaus’s anthology, and 23 out of 303 (8 per cent) in that of Morgan and Robitschek.44 Another significant category deals with adultery and other forms of sexual misconduct: 7 per cent in Nikolaus’s work, 6 per cent in the other one. There are also numerous jokes about the supposed Jewish obsession with business and moneymaking, many of which are rather benign, though others tend to imply Jewish avarice and stinginess; a few of them deal with crime, cheating, theft, and insurance fraud. The stinginess jokes constitute 6 per cent of Nikolaus’s anthology and 3 per cent of the other work; the crime and fraud jokes total 10 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. There also are a number of jokes about the uncleanliness of Eastern European Jews

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(7 per cent and 2 per cent). And there are a mere handful of jokes that used the word ‘goy’: Nikolaus has a total of 3, Morgan and Robitschek only 4, thus not nearly as many as the Tägliche Rundschau implied. An equally small number of jokes against non-Jews are aimed specifically against anti-Semites. In sum, if we look at the joke books through the eyes of an imagined member of the Centralverein – one whom Robitschek would have considered overly fussy, indeed sensitive to a maddening degree – then we can conclude that some 42 per cent of the jokes in Nikolaus’s volume are problematic, and 23 per cent in that of Robitschek and Morgan. Beyond the printed text, both volumes contain a number of visual caricatures – drawn by Paul Simmel, a very popular cartoonist – that employ standard stereotypes of Jewish physiognomies (see figs. 1.1–1.3). Although the images display everyday emotions with which one can sympathize – feelings like puzzlement, annoyance, or embarrassment, in contrast to, say, the lecherous stares or rapacious sneers of cartoon Jews in Nazi publications – the seemingly insouciant use of stereotypical visual markers of Jewishness might well have distressed some contemporary Jewish readers.45 It is thus apparent that critics of Robitschek, Morgan, Nikolaus, and their colleagues had reasons for concern: many of their jokes did, in fact, focus on Jewish obsession with money, or on misogyny and sexual improprieties. In less threatening times, the jokes told by Nikolaus, Robitschek, and Morgan would have blended in to the larger landscape of humour, as they had during the Imperial era. But by the 1920s, times were no longer normal for German Jews (if they ever had been), and the tendencies of some of those jokes came perilously close to anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish rapacity, both financial and sexual. In that context, Jewish jokes were no longer funny to many Jews. Since this evidence is rather damning, one must ask: what could be said in defence of the comedians? An obvious response would be that self-deprecatory humour was only one facet of their repertories. Indeed, some of their numbers were highly sympathetic to their fellow Jews, but even these works were sometimes criticized by the Centralverein. Just as we shake our heads today at many of the jokes hostile to women or Eastern European Jews, most of us would probably be baffled by the strong opposition shown to ‘Kaddisch,’ a song scripted by Robitschek and performed by Paul O’Montis, one of the singers specifically attacked by the Centralverein. The moving work, which describes a Jewish widow’s grief at the loss of her husband as a soldier

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1.1 Anti-Semitism: In the zoo a parrot squawks ‘Yid yid!’ David Blum replies: ‘You should talk: with a nose like that!’ From Paul Nikolaus, Jüdische Miniaturen, with illustrations by Paul Simmel (Hannover: Paul Steegemann Verlag, 1924), 94–5.

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1.2 Gross: Two men pass by a manicure salon. ‘Check out the shiksel!’ ‘Don’t get near her! She gave me pubic lice and before that she cut off my fingernails, so I can’t scratch myself.’ From Paul Nikolaus, Jüdische Miniaturen, with illustrations by Paul Simmel (Hannover: Paul Steegemann Verlag, 1924), 68–9.

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1.3 The Epitaph: A man sees a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery with the inscription: here lies moritz kortischoner, a successful merchant and an honest man. He sighs and comments: ‘Terrible! Such a small grave and three people buried there!’ From Kurt Robitschek and Paul Morgan, Die einsame Träne: Das Buch der guten Witze, with illustrations by Paul Simmel (Berlin: Drei Masken Verlag, 1924), 17, 19.

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during the Great War, was obviously a response to the canard that Jews shirked their patriotic duty.46 But the song was highly controversial, most likely because some people took umbrage at the reference to such a solemn prayer in the profane context of a cabaret. Robitschek responded to that objection in his missive to the Centralverein: ‘Just let cabarets perform songs and numbers that deal with serious – even religious – themes concerning Jews. The much-contested song “Kaddisch” belongs there.’47 Indeed, it is quite possible that protests came from people who knew only the title, but not the song itself. According to an account of the Centralverein’s meeting at which Robitschek personally appeared, ‘when he admitted to being the author of a song that had been disparaged by Centralverein members, the confession caused a storm of indignation. But in the end Robitschek explained that the content of the poem was a glorification of German Jews, and he thereby won over the assembly.’48 The relative rarity of such serious and sympathetic numbers, however, only underscored that self-deprecatory jokes were the norm for Jewish comedians. Probably the strongest defence that could be made for such jokes concerned freedom of speech – the standpoint voiced by Robitschek when he told the Centralverein: ‘no petty censorship! Wit and satire have to be allowed.’ That view echoed a crucial issue: now that Germany was a democracy, should its citizens not practise one of its basic premises, namely freedom of expression? Not to do so, to engage in pre-emptive self-censorship, would concede ground to the forces of intolerance. By making jokes about themselves, Jews were not only exercising a precious right but also demonstrating that they felt securely at home in the institutions of the new republic. The telling of such jokes was a sign of strength; to refrain from doing so out of fear would be a sign of weakness, or even defeat. And this view was tied to another one, the point made by Nikolaus when he wrote that ‘anti-Semitism is stoked by completely different people.’ According to this argument, anti-Semitic jokes are not a cause, and not even an accomplice, of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites will hate Jews regardless of whether or not Jews tell jokes about themselves; by refraining from telling such jokes, Jews will not make any dent in anti-Semitism. That viewpoint was undoubtedly correct: it need hardly be said that the opinions and the success of the Nazis were in no way influenced by Jewish entertainers’ self-deprecatory humour. Once the Nazis came to power, Jewish entertainers were particularly at risk, given their great public visibility. Robitschek and Hollaender

46 Peter Jelavich were relatively lucky, inasmuch as they managed to reach the United States. To be sure, Hollaender’s attempt to revive his Berlin cabaret in Los Angeles failed after several months, but he soon enjoyed a successful career as a composer of music for Hollywood films. Robitschek had sporadic success with a revived Kadeko in New York during the war, but generally he made his living as a vaudeville producer (under the name ‘Ken Robey’). By contrast, horrific fates awaited most of the other entertainers who remained on the European continent. Paul Nikolaus committed suicide in Zurich as early as March 1933; Paul O’Montis did so seven years later in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By then, Paul Morgan had already died in Buchenwald in 1938. Kurt Gerron was interned in Terezín (Theresienstadt), the ‘model camp’ that the Nazis showed off to win the approval of the International Red Cross; there he organized the cabaret Karussell (Carousel), before he too was sent to his death in Auschwitz. It was within the context of Terezín, where Jews from all over Europe were forced to live in barely survivable conditions, that the entertainers finally renounced one of their most problematic themes in the Weimar era: joking references to Eastern European Jews. Numerous cabaret numbers performed in that camp deplored such prejudices and called for group solidarity. Leo Strauss, the major lyricist of the Carousel, scripted an ironic dialogue between a new arrival to the camp and a long-term inmate, wherein the first complaint of the novice is that she is suddenly surrounded by ‘Polish Semites.’ In response, her interlocutor wryly comments on people who try to hide their Jewishness even in the context of Theresienstadt.49 As conferencier, Strauss would tell the following joke: ‘A gentleman who lives in the same room with me said to me today: “I’m really suffering from a great injustice. Never in my life have I socialized with Jews – and now I’m forced to live in a room with so many Jews.” I replied to him: “And I suffer from an even greater injustice. In my whole life I have socialized only with Jews – and now I’m forced to live in a room full of anti-Semites.”’50 While Strauss indirectly appealed for tolerance by underscoring the absurdity of animosities among Jewish prisoners, Manfred Greiffenhagen, the other major lyricist at the Carousel, wrote a song that directly admonished the internees – be they Czech, German, Austrian, Dutch, or Danish citizens – to overcome their national differences: ‘For we all are Jews, and only Jews’ (Denn Juden, und nur Juden, sind wir alle).51 The extremity of the Shoah resulted in the deaths of numerous Jew-

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ish entertainers, along with millions of their people. But the historical singularity of the ‘final solution’ does not mean that the controversies surrounding Jewish entertainers before 1933 were likewise unique. Self-deprecatory humour among any ethnic minority, at any time, will seem problematic to a greater or lesser number of observers, depending on their assessment of the dangers faced by the community in question. It is highly unlikely that such jokes generate or increase the aggressively hostile feelings of racists: such people will hate the minorities no matter what they say about themselves. But such jokes might well have a tendency to reflect and sustain divisions and prejudices within the ethnic communities themselves. And even in the best of conditions, the mass media’s conflation of a minority’s image with comedy might be an ambivalent development: in the United States, for example, it is not just Jews, but also African Americans and Hispanics who might be regarded increasingly as ‘people of the joke.’ Being viewed with humour is certainly better than being viewed with hatred, but it too can be demeaning, in less overt ways. An awareness of such issues does not, however, force us to conclude that self-deprecatory humour should cease, since it can play many positive roles, such as mediating conflicts within a community or fostering favourable sentiments among other groups. Naturally, it should not be the only mode of self-presentation: serious (and, yes, often humourless) self-defence groups like the Centralverein and today’s equivalents are at least as necessary. But just as humour is an ineradicable aspect of human nature, jokes – however problematic – will invariably have a place in minorities’ constant negotiations with dominant cultures. notes 1 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1963), 102. 2 Ibid., 105. 3 Ibid., 103. 4 Ibid., 179. 5 For varying perspectives on the subject of Jewish humour and selfdeprecatory jokes, which have informed my comments in the following paragraphs, see Dan Ben-Amos, ‘The “Myth” of Jewish Humor,’ Western Folklore 32 (1973): 112–31; Elliott Oring, ‘The People of the Joke: On the Conceptualization of a Jewish Humor,’ Western Folklore 42 (1983): 261–7;

48

6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16

17

Peter Jelavich Avner Ziv, ‘Psycho-social Aspects of Jewish Humor in Israel and in the Diaspora,’ in Jewish Humor, ed. Ziv (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 47–71. Freud, Jokes, 111–12. For an account of Reinhardt’s cabaret, see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 62–84. Max Reinhardt, Schall und Rauch (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1901), 79. Ibid., 129. The protest is mentioned in a police report of 21 March 1902, in Landesarchiv Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep. 30 Berlin C, Pol. Präs. Tit. 74, Th 804, f. 245. The archived script of the scene is entitled ‘Reb Hersch Veilchenbaum. Improvisirte Scene,’ ibid., Th 814, f. 120–3. Reicher’s make-up is described in ‘Das “Kleine Theater,”’ Berliner Börsen-Courier, 22 February 1902. On the notion that Jews were one ‘tribe’ (Stamm) out of several that composed the German nation, see Michael Brenner, ‘Religion, Nation oder Stamm: zum Wandel der Selbtsdefinition unter deutschen Juden,’ in Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2001), 587–601; Till van Rahden, ‘Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850 to 1933,’ in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 27–48. On the Herrnfelds’ theatre, see Peter Sprengel, Populäres jüdisches Theater in Berlin von 1877 bis 1933 (Berlin: Haude and Spener, 1997), 62–98; Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 125–97. ‘Die antisemitischen Gebrüder Herrnfeld,’ Jüdische Rundschau, 28 August 1908, 346–7; reprinted from Die Standarte. Freud, Jokes, 49. Oring, ‘The People of the Joke,’ 261. See Werner Angress, ‘The German Army’s “Judenzählung” of 1916: Genesis – Consequences – Significance,’ Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978): 117–37. Ernst Lissauer, ‘Kriegspredigt,’ Der kleine Blaue, 8 December 1914. For Lissauer’s conflicted attitudes to his Germanness and Jewishness, which were severely strained during the war, see Elisabeth Albanis, ‘Ostracised for Loyalty: Ernst Lissauer’s Propaganda Writing and Its Reception,’ Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 195–224. For an account of Jewish performers and entertainers during the war, see Martin Baumeister, Kriegs-

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19 20

21

22 23

24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

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theater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultur 1914–1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2005), 98-106. Anonymous letter of 14 January 1915, concerning Rudolf Nelson’s cabaret Sanssouci, in Landesarchiv Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep. 30, Berlin C Pol. Präs. Tit. 74, Th 1514, f. 1–2. Police report of 19 April 1905, on the Metropolkabarett, in Landesarchiv Berlin, Pr. Br. Rep. 30, Berlin C Pol. Präs. Tit. 74, Th 2693, f. 129–132r. For the relationship between the Herrnfelds and Lubitsch, see Irene Stratenwerth, ‘Vorspiel auf dem Theater: Vom Possenspiel der Brüder Herrnfeld zu den Lubitsch-Komödien im Kino,’ in Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, ed. Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Henschel, 2004), 147–65. Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30–1, citing Oskar Kalbus, Vom Wesen deutscher Filmkunst (1935). Julius Urgiss, ‘Künstlerprofile: Ernst Lubitsch,’ Der Kinematograph, 30 August 1916. See David Clay Large, ‘“Out with the Ostjuden”: The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923,’ in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 123–40. Alfred Wiener, ‘Kabaretts, Witzbücher, heitere Wochenblätter und die “jüdische Witwe,”’ CV-Zeitung, 13 November 1925. The ‘cabaret campaign’ of the Centralverein has been discussed in Hannelore Riss, Ansätze zu einer Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Berlin 1889–1936 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 161–74. ‘Gegen die Auswüchse des Kabaretts,’ Vossische Zeitung, 23 April 1926. ‘Gegen die Verzerrung des jüdischen Wesens,’ CV-Zeitung, 30 April 1926. Emil Faktor, ‘Das Mauscheln,’ Berliner Börsen-Courier, 23 April 1926. Siegmund Feldmann, ‘Jeder Jude sein eigner Antisemit!,’ Die Weltbühne 22/50 (14 December 1926): 936, cited in ‘Eine letzte Mahnung! Immer noch Würdelosigkeit in Berliner Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung, 31 December 1926. Artur Schweriner, ‘Kabaretts und Film: Rückfälle ins Unwürdige in Berliner Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung, 9 December 1927. ‘Das Echo unseres Kampfes gegen würdelose Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung, 6 January 1928. ‘Weg mit dem “Spuk” im “Tingel-Tangel,”’ in CV-Zeitung, 2 October 1931. Dan Ben-Amos goes so far as to argue that no Jewish jokes are, strictly speaking, self-deprecatory, since they make fun of Jewish characters from

50

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46

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Peter Jelavich whom the joke-teller wishes to be disassociated: ‘It becomes apparent that within the communicative event of joke telling in the Jewish society, there is no social identification between the ridiculer and the ridiculed. The narrator is not the butt of his story […] Rather, joking serves as a vehicle for verbal aggression toward those from whom the narrator distinguishes himself unequivocally.’ Ben-Amos, ‘The “Myth” of Jewish Humor,’ 123. ‘Gegen die Verzerrung des jüdischen Wesens,’ CV-Zeitung, 30 April 1926. Schweriner, ‘Kabaretts und Film,’ CV-Zeitung, 9 December 1927. ‘Juden gegen das jüdelnde Kabarett. Eine Protestkundgebung,’ Tägliche Rundschau, 24 April 1926. The word Germanen carried strong völkisch overtones, unlike more neutral words like Deutsche. The ‘Kadeko’ is discussed in Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 198–204. ‘Robitscheks Glück und Ende?’ Die Wahrheit, 6 October 1928. Reported in ‘Gegen Auswüchse des Kabaretts,’ Vossische Zeitung, 23 April 1926. ‘Der Standpunkt der Künstler,’ CV-Zeitung, 30 April 1926. ‘Das Echo unseres Kampfes gegen würdelose Kabaretts,’ CV-Zeitung, 6 January 1928. ‘Die leidige Kabarettfrage: Vergleich Artur Schweriners mit Kurt Robitschek,’ CV-Zeitung, 27 January 1928. Paul Morgan and Kurt Robitschek, Die einsame Träne: Das Buch der guten Witze (Berlin: Drei Masken Verlag, 1924), 7. Paul Nikolaus, Jüdische Miniaturen: Schnurren und Schwänke, 2nd ed. (Hannover: Paul Steegemann Verlag, 1925), 167. Such categorizations are of course subjective; in my tallies, I have tried to adopt the viewpoint of a member of the Centralverein hostile to the cabarets; hence these figures are ‘maximal.’ A person less sensitive to such issues would have a lower count, and someone like Robitschek would of course have argued that none of the jokes are problematic, let alone dangerous. This is true even today: when I purchased a copy of Jüdische Miniaturen from a book dealer in Berlin, he assumed (based on the illustrations) that it was an anti-Semitic work and hence wanted to ascertain that I was buying it for scholarly purposes before he would sell it to me. Paul O’Montis can be heard performing the song in a recording of 1928, available on the following compact disc set: Populäre jüdische Künstler: Berlin, Hamburg, München: Musik & Entertainment 1903–1933 (Trikont US-292). ‘Der Standpunkt der Künstler,’ CV-Zeitung, 30 April 1926.

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48 ‘Jargon im Kabarett. Sturmszenen in einer jüdischen Versammlung,’ Neue Berliner Zeitung – Das 12 Uhr Blatt, 23 April 1926. 49 Leo Strauss, ‘Theresienstädter Fragen,’ in Und die Musik spielt dazu: Chansons und Satiren aus dem KZ Theresienstadt, ed. Ulrike Migdal (Munich: Piper, 1986), 72. For a discussion of cabaret performances in the Terezín camp, see Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 273–82. 50 ‘Aus den Theresienstädter Conférencen von Leo Strauss,’ typescript in the archives of Pamatnik Terezín, Herrmann collection, no. 4092/1. 51 Manfred Greiffenhagen, ‘Die Ochsen,’ in Migdal, ed., Und die Musik, 106.

2 Creole Cartoons MARK WINOKUR

The thesis of this paper is simple; it pushes the standard critical assertion that animation ‘serves to question and challenge the received knowledges which govern the physical laws and normative socio cultural orthodoxies of the “real world”’ in asserting that the ‘challenge’ includes specific ‘received knowledges’ about race and ethnicity.1 Animation technology enables an uncanny fluidity of identity whose potential for racial (and, though not the subject of this paper, gender) play is seized upon by some early animators. Succeeding technological innovations in animation result in different kinds of racial representation, all of which nevertheless appear as a kind of Creolization, or racial ambiguity. From the inception of American animation to the films of Richard Linklater, many cartoon figures are racially ambiguous, or Creole. Animation technology affords a space for racial play in which the status and race/ethnicity of the character and the intention of the technology are often undecidable. When critics attend to the cartoon narratives and simple visuals, or to the biographies of the filmmakers, as the most significant ‘conditions of production,’ their standard assertion about black-inspired characters like Warner Brothers’ Bosko is that they are simply racist representations – a sort of minstrel blackface – offered up by white ethnics in order to become white themselves. As the dominant line of criticism about filmic cross-race representation, the blackface thesis suggests that the attempt by one race/ethnicity to imitate another simply reinforces the power differential between the races. This is the thesis of works as diverse as Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions and Michael Rogin’s Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.2 The most brilliant and complex articulation of

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this argument, contained in the latter text, suggests that white ethnics – especially new-immigrant Jews in Hollywood – presented the Jew in blackface in order finally to reinforce a sense of the Jew’s whiteness, thereby guaranteeing his acceptance into a previously anti-Semitic American culture.3 If the Jew plays (and so satirizes and parodies) black, he can’t be black; rather, he (and, implicitly, other white, newimmigrant ethnics) demonstrates his own whiteness by his ability to remove his black face. The Jew thus profits from his whiteness at the expense of African America. Blackface becomes a fin-de-siècle strategy for white ethnics to overcome American nativism. Such accusations about the white appropriation of black images are true enough as far as they go. It is of course important to find those nodal moments in which the past determines the problems and injustices of the present. However, the inference – that the only or even primary relationship between white and black ethnicity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was one of representational exploitation of African America – seems to me a vast historical and representational simplification, first, because, while such arguments assume that the Irish, Russian, and Jewish immigrants might have countered nativist oppression by donning blackface, the emphasis is on the white ethnic ‘having overcome’ (white ethnics have always already overcome nativism) rather than on the moment of oppression. Second, this position tends to ignore the fact that blackface is not the only model for the merging of racial presentation. (It is not even, in its most complex iteration, the whole of Rogin’s argument.) We gloss over the actual difficulties of the white ethnic, as documented by, for example, The Octopus, The Jungle, and fin-de-siècle urban muckraking. While I will only explore one alternative to blackface, namely animation Creolism, other non-blackface nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture entertainments about racial interactions include ‘the congresses’ and parades of nations by P.T. Barnum; Wild West Shows; and plays and films explicitly about racial mixing: Birth of a Nation, Within Our Gates, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.4 Third, and perhaps most important, totalizing arguments tend to treat racism as a static phenomenon rather than as one inflected by changing populations, politics, ideologies, and, for the purposes of this paper, technologies. So, let me suggest that, while American animation perpetuates African-American racial stereotypes, it is also from the beginning playing with other ethnic stereotypes as well, some overt, others not. Abie the

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Agent is Jewish; Happy Hooligan is (at least etymologically) Irish; The Katzenjammer Kids are German; Krazy Kat is German and/or Jewish; Bugs Bunny is Brooklyn – itself code for several, if ambiguous, ethnic identities; and so on. Further, American animation uses the novelties of its technology to play with ethnic categories in ways that, while often racist, are also attempts to represent ethnic and racial diversity by playing with the various ethnic categories in the cartoon line. Thinking beyond the notion of blackface as the single or even primary trope for interethnic representation, Teresa Zackodnik discusses the instability of mulatto identity that characterizes much recent criticism and history: ‘the “margins” of race become bodily manifest in the figure of the mulatto, such that this figure is repeatedly called to function as a racial borderland that delimits both whiteness and blackness.’5 Rethinking the notion that the coloured body is an object of contestation, I would like to consider the Creole rather than the mulatto or any other term connoting racial or ethnic ambiguity because, while critically less examined, the ‘Creole’ is much more linguistically ambiguous than ‘mulatto,’ much more a product of self-ascription, and so more interestingly flexible. The term, for example, can be a source of pride rather than simply guilt and shame. Though of somewhat later coinage (its various meanings evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) the word ‘Creole’ is originally Portuguese. It comes to English as a French corruption of the Spanish corruption of the Portuguese ‘crioulo,’ which is itself from the Latin ‘creare,’ ‘to beget.’6 The current meanings of ‘Creole’ are even more confusing than its derivation. It means both blacks born in the Americas, Caribbean, or West Indies, and whites born in the new world rather than in Europe. To Louisiana whites, for example, it has meant racially white; to Louisiana blacks it has implied miscegenation.7 It can also mean ‘French-speaking blacks in the southwestern region of Louisiana,’ but also ‘a person of racially mixed heritage’ or a scion of the former white elite.8 In other words, while Creolism is always defined by race, the Creole may be black, white, or mixed race. Depending on context, being ‘pure’ Creole may mean having either completely black or completely white ancestry. Without referring for a moment to the perfectly legitimate question of who initiates these meanings – white or black culture – and the relevance of that question to the question of racism in representation, I would like simply to assert at this point that Creolism offers a space for ambiguity in racial representation. The only

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constant in definition across cultures is a multi-tiered, self-contradictory ambiguity: ‘Creole’ suggests immigration in a previous generation that, in the Creole population’s difference from the surrounding population, is itself never completed. The attention called to even the native-born Creole’s status as native still and always calls attention to the Creole’s immigrant parentage. The term foregrounds a dynamic only implicit in the notion of hyphenated Americanism, but explicit in such terms as ‘Nisei’ and ‘Sansei,’ which define the particular relation of the native-born generations to the immigrant generation: the presence of the old country/continent in the new, the frisson of atavism in modernity. In the Americas, the Creole is always both at home and not at home, here and abroad. So, putting aside the notion of blackface in order to explore other spectacles of race, I would like to think about Creolism as, for a moment, Homoousian, a merging of black and ethnic white identity in a manner that, at least for a moment, destabilizes our sense of what these terms mean. Ideally, Creolism leaves its surveyor in a heightened state that Keats, in discussing humour and wit, calls ‘negative capability,’ loosely speaking, the willingness to remain suspended in indeterminacy and ambiguity.9 Is this Creole play still racist in the sense that hierarchy never completely disappears, and that the black and other racial images are in the end exploited? Of course it is. Still, it affords a variety of representations not available to the dramas of either D.W. Griffith or Oscar Micheaux. It makes a difference that many of these animations are authorized or made by ethnic filmmakers: the Jewish Warner Brothers and Fleischer Brothers especially. American animation is often a paradoxically uncanny pastoral in which for a while the participants pretend that the usual rules are suspended, even though the audience perfectly understands that it will be returned to its hierarchical, power-determining space. In contrast to most general discussions of American animation, I shall discuss the Disney company only by way of opposition, and only because it is critically ubiquitous, and then only very reluctantly. I am trying to find an alternative genealogy for a medium mostly discussed through a single figure: Walt Disney. For example, the controversy over whether Walt Disney was or was not overtly racist and anti-Semitic seems to me irrelevant in the face of his largest stylistic contribution to American culture: a normative white America. The increasing realism in Disney’s films, as his main claim to innovation and invention,

56 Mark Winokur simply militates toward an unambiguous representation of a centreversus-periphery America. When measured against the uncanny representations by other studios, the absence of overt ethnicity in the Walt Disney-era films is not benign: it is self-evidently suppressive and repressive. The attempts in the last two decades by the Disney Company to correct these failings are admirable but constitute essentially the pursuit of the same agenda, the normalizing of America, by different means. They are not a part of the early story of animation in which I am interested. A different story – an alternative genealogy – might notice that the Disney studio did not invent any of the important early animation technologies: cel animation, rotoscoping, rotographing, cartoon sound synchronization, held drawings, cycles, repeats, or the entire panoply of animation techniques. Several were invented at the Bray and the Fleischer studios, or even earlier. The first sound cartoon was not Steamboat Willie (1928) but Max Fleischer’s ‘Song Cartunes,’ developed with Lee De Forest from 1924, and resulting in the 1926 My Old Kentucky Home. The first colour cartoon was not Disney’s Flowers and Trees (1932) or The Three Little Pigs (1933), but Ted Eshbaugh’s two-strip Technicolor Goofy Goat Antics (1931).10 If you discount Disney’s stretch for a greater degree of realist illusionism, his contribution to animation is actually quite minimal. This striving for realism is the striving for a master narrative, hence the emphasis on standard fairy tales and stories which is much more pronounced at Disney than at any other animation studio. It is also more explicitly ideological than anything else. Disney is more famous than other early animators not because he is inventive, but because he is able to impose this narrative whiteness on American culture in the live-action forms of The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Hearings, Mouseketeer television, and Disneyland and its variants. As if lauding Disney, Michael Barrier, a Disney devotee, correctly asserts about other filmmakers that their success lay elsewhere than in the excellence with which other cartoonists portrayed a naturalistic, linear, three-dimensional vision of the world.11 In contrast, the decision by other studios to play with ethnic markers ultimately guaranteed the ascendancy of the Disney version: ‘It was exactly this inability to lose all trace of ethnicity and vulgarity which prevented the Fleischer cartoons from becoming as popular as Disney’s.’12 In the United States, ‘vulgar’ always connotes race as well as class; it is also always code for non-white. Because I am trying to create a different animation lineage than the ‘Disney version’ most

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often represented in discussions of race, I should observe that I am avoiding the overt and simplified representations of ethnicity such as the Chuck Jones Inki series, or Warner Brothers’ Clean Pastures and Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (both 1937).13 While even these films are racially more complex than we usually acknowledge (in the latter film, the very white Little Eva begins as nasty and temperamental, a version of the woman slave-owner in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), their images of race and ethnicity seem more static than the examples I would like to discuss.14 Finally, because Disney has been so much read as to have been fetishized, I would instead like to concentrate on relatively ‘minor’ figures as exemplars whose racism is at the very least overt, manifest, and interesting: Winsor McCay, Pat Sullivan, and Max Fleischer, all of whom play with this Homoousian and ambiguous Creole animation. Example 1: Winsor McCay and Fluid Animation The earliest European animation was done in France and England by Émile Cohl (French), and Arthur Cooper and W.R. Booth (both British). While Cohl’s very fluid animation represents ethnicity once – the Chinese figure in The Hasher’s Delirium (1910) – the two British filmmakers do not (at least overtly) display ethnicity at all. Britain’s earliest animations may be typified by Booth’s The ? Motorist (1906), which is about a British couple who, while eccentric, appear conventionally Anglo-Saxon.15 In contrast, one of the most famous names in the early history of U.S. film immediately implicates the early history of animation in the politics of race and ethnicity in a manner that suggests a Creole suspension of conviction about racial distinction. James Stuart Blackton is responsible not only for the earliest American animation, but for the two first examples of animation as ethnicity, specifically Irish, or Irish-American: The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). Before Blackton worked for Thomas Edison and with Winsor McCay, he starred in a vaudeville act called ‘Lightning Sketches’ in which he drew various comic figures – principally ethnic stereotypes – very quickly. Blackton’s film of Lightning Sketches (1907) ends with a play on Cohen and coon: two racist stereotypes superimposed on each other. As another interesting figure, Edwin S. Porter – Edison’s technical film adviser – is also responsible for ethnicity in animation in Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902).16 All of

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these early stop-motion animations play with Jewish stereotypes, or with the Irish and Irish-American stereotype of the ‘bhoy,’ cocky and hard-drinking, with his hat worn jauntily on the side of his head, and a cheap cigar perpetually at the side of a mouth that emits ‘blarney’ and smoke. Humour resides in ethnic stereotyping paired with technological novelty. In Porter’s Fun in a Bakery Shop, the Irishman evolves from what I believe is a Frenchman, while in Humorous Phases, the presenter – Blackton – takes on the hat and cigar of his drawing. On the one hand, the Irish characterization in Humorous Phases is traditionally racist because it portrays traditional racial stereotypes: Irish temper and alcoholism, for example. On the other hand, the fluidity of exchange from character to character in Fun in a Bakery Shop suggests in a more benign if cliché fashion, not that one person is simply impersonating another, but that all the types are literally made from the same clay, which itself has no particular ethnic identification. These early stopmotion and claymation animations represent an acid vision of melting-pot ideology which, while racist, is unconsciously progressive. Despite the best efforts of Blackton as director, the racism of the static stereotyping is belied by the kineticism of the animation process: the various types blend into one another, and into the artist as well. No such blending occurs in the identity of Winsor McCay’s Flip, an Irish-Catholic American, and his much more famous comic-strip companion – the Anglo-Saxon Little Nemo. Flip, Nemo, and an African figure known simply as ‘The Little Imp’ appeared in comic strips at approximately the same time that Blackton and Porter were working; his animated Little Nemo appeared in 1911.17 What differentiates Blackton’s and Porter’s images from McCay’s Irish-derived Flip in the film of Little Nemo is that, while Blackton’s and Porter’s stop-motion animation equations of Irish bhoys, Africans, and Jews demonstrate a fluid transition from one ethnicity/nationality to another, and then to the artist/narrator, characters in at least McCay’s film are visually discrete: Nemo is optically separate from both Flip and the ‘Jungle Imp.’ The fluidity of animation technology becomes the occasion not for Blackton’s melding of stereotypes but for a visible differentiation between Nemo, the Irish/Black Flip, and the third figure, the ‘Jungle Imp.’ McCay creates a spectacle of control over Flip and the Imp both as animator and in the person of the very Anglo-Saxon Nemo, who controls even the optics of the other characters. McCay replaces Porter’s and Blackton’s Creolism with traditional racial categories.

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2.1 Frame capture from Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902).

2.2 Frame capture from The Enchanted Drawing (1900).

2.3 Frame capture from Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906).

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2.4 Detail from Thomas Nast, ‘The Champion of the Fenians,’ Harper’s Weekly, 21 October 1876.

2.5 Detail from Winsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Wonderland,’ New York Herald, 16 December 1906.

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Little Nemo (1911) gets reproduced over and over, both commercially, and illegally, on international peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. I think that part of the contemporary attraction for this film has to do with the variant racism it presents, and a curious Schadenfreude it provokes. It is a cartoon vision of gentleman-colonialism, with the frame story exercising a hegemonic control over the cartoon characters. In the live-action frame story, four gentlemen clad in evening dress play cards at their club. One man – McCay – agrees to make four thousand drawings that will animate one month from the date of the meeting. This origin story/frame narrative presumes knowledge of a standard narrative device: the ‘gentleman’s bet.’ (Such a bet – for dinner – is actually made in McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur [1914] when Winsor McCay bets George McManus a dinner for the party that he can make the Dinosaurus [sic] live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons.)18 The bet echoes the negotiation that catapults Phileas Fogg from a whist game at the Reform Club into an orbit around the world in eighty days, in a novel that simultaneously satirizes and celebrates the difference between the cultured Western Europeans and the various orientalized cultures that Fogg and his valet encounter.19 The literary gentleman’s bet of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost always has something to do with race, time, and/or masculinity (‘honour’).20 McCay’s realistic frame story, then, is already referring us back to a fantasy that, except perhaps for 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (whose Nemo travels through his own dreamscape), is the most orientalizing of all Verne’s novels.21 Though in both texts gentlemen are satirized – in one, Fogg is the tourist who circumnavigates the globe gazing only at his watch, while in the other, John Bunny’s facial expressions and bulk undercut the seriousness of the proceedings – both sets of gentlemen are made the objects of our identification. They are the eyes through which we are going to see the toons, colonials, and fuzzy-wuzzies. The controlling gaze is, inevitably, masculine and Anglo-American. The animated characters created by McCay later in the film are exaggerated versions of blackness, Anglo whiteness, and ethnic whiteness. After some intervening comic business in which the heroically individualistic nature of McCay’s animation process is foregrounded, Little Nemo’s narrative cuts to one month later. If the opening sequence suggests Phileas Fogg and the imperial gaze, the last sequence – the animated portion – is about the racial spectacle created by that gaze. We are introduced to three figures: Little Nemo himself, flanked by the Imp and Flip. While at first glance Nemo and the Imp appear easily

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2.6 H. Strickland Constable, ‘Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View,’ 1899.

dismissed as a racial type and a racial stereotype, Flip is Creole but not fluid. The first cartoon image to appear in the animation sequence, he is an Irishman in a Pagliacci-style commedia outfit. In one sense he is a double threat: two versions of the Catholic immigrant. Further, the clown outfit is also reminiscent of pajamas, a late nineteenth-century import from India, and quite in keeping with European orientalizing.22 Unlike the Blackton figures, however, he does not move fluidly from one type to the next. However, even more significant than his position as a double-barrelled Catholic and a Hindu is Flip’s status as a mixed-race or Creole figure: he stands ambiguously between the Imp and Nemo. On the one hand his skin is dark. On the other hand it is green. On the one hand his face is contoured like the classic and cliché Irishman. On the other, the lips are exaggerated in size in the same manner as minstrel blackface comic. It might be apropos to point out here that in the pseudo-anthropology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Irishman was explicitly represented as a sort of missing link between the black and the white races, as for example in the Harper’s cartoon shown in figure 2.6.23 McCay’s creolization of Flip as a black Irishman (itself a racially ambiguous term once used in the Irish-American community) is racist in

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2.7 Frame capture from Little Nemo (1911).

at least two ways: first because it assumes that what makes Flip comic is his resemblance to both the comic Irishman and the comic minstrel black man. More importantly, however, that comedy retains a sense of anthropological hierarchy: Nemo is most human; Flip second, and the Imp, who, in the comic strips is barely verbal, third and last. The cartoon showcases a difference in the graphics that make up, on the one side, the Imp and Flip, and, on the other, Nemo. Nemo is an art nouveau figure, while Flip and the Imp are in fact cartoon exaggerations. But the most striking visual difference between Nemo and the other characters occurs as a momentary optical trick, an anamorphic squeezing of the Imp and Flip controlled by Nemo as if by a magician. As the comedy in the Blackton films depends on an imbrication of special effect and racial stereotyping, so the most ‘alive’ moment of the McCay film occurs as a special optical effect in which Nemo controls our view of the racial others.

64 Mark Winokur Example 2: The Hurd-Bray Process and Ethnic Structure in Cel Animation, or the Chinkaninny Jewbhoy A billion children, white and yellow and black – a billion adults – will mourn the passing of Pat – and the Cat.24

McCay’s draftsmanship and material conditions of production were not adopted by the animation industry, though McCay’s fantasizing of those conditions as idiosyncratically spontaneous and individualistic would be repeated again and again by later animators, in a manner that would become very familiar to Hollywood in succeeding decades, even in other film genres.25 In reality, animation became dependent in part on the creativity and competent administration of an assembly-line process, the most important and standardized component of which is probably the cel.26 The purpose of cel animation is to create a single generic background that will mesh with the foreground movements of the characters, thereby saving the time and labour of redrawing the background for each animation illustration. Simply put, the background must dimensionalize the illustration without wasting labour. This is the economy of figure and ground. Animated Creolism as I am defining it will move from an identification of several ethnicities in one character to a more fundamental collapse of figure and ground, which becomes a collapse of ‘home and not at home, here and abroad.’ Invented and first deployed in the 1910s and 1920s, cel animation arose when academic representation theory – the beginnings of European structuralism – was beginning to understand art as a tension between opposing elements, as the artist playing against the limitations of the medium, and as different aspects of the medium playing against each other. This was the time of Russian formalism, Rudolph Arnheim, Fernand de Saussure, and Sergei Eisenstein.27 The invention of cel animation was structurally congruent with this particular way of understanding art, perhaps because the animation medium and formal theorists were each, in different ways, responding to the exigencies of the assembly line. As practised in the United States, cel animation embodies the idea of tension between foreground and background, between the goal of an illusionist’s naturalism, and the industrial need to simplify for the sake of mass reproduction. One extreme of this tension is the work of Winsor McCay: individual and complete drawings made by the artist in which almost as much atten-

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tion is paid to the ground as to the figure. The other extreme comes later: Hanna-Barbera’s factory-produced limited animation. Somewhere in between these two extremes, the Felix cartoons of the 1920s play out in racial terms the tension between figure and ground raised by cel technology. The most popular of all pre-Disney animation, the Felix cartoons routinely collapse the tension between background and foreground in films that show Felix in foreign lands and with different races. The transformative comedy that characterizes Felix’s highlighted moments often does three things simultaneously: it collapses foreground and background; it suggests that such collapses are doubly eccentric in an already-eccentric world; and it connects this aesthetic to race and ethnicity by suggesting that our notion of racial otherness as the ground against which whiteness plays itself out is part of the way Americans experience the world in the twentieth century. A typical moment occurs in Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923), in which Felix finds himself in Egypt being chased by the ancient locals.28 He runs through a monumentally still landscape of pyramids until he reaches the Sphinx. Pouring pepper into his nose, Felix gets the Sphinx to sneeze, the force of which sends his pursuers tumbling. (See figure 2.8.) Until Felix notices the Sphinx, it is simply another part of a generically, sketchily, and typically picturesque foreign background cel. Felix’s action foregrounds it for us, making this exotic background familiar, accessible, and exploitable. This kind of transformation of the landscape was developing at about the same time in live-action comedy film – in Charles Chaplin’s films, for example. Like the Felix cartoons, live-action comedies like Modern Times (1936), in which the background is foregrounded, are about foreignness, new immigration, and the immigration of African America from the rural south to industrial northern cities; the comic transformations refer back to the way in which blacks and white immigrants have to encounter a newly industrialized landscape.29 Such transformative comedy informs those most famous moments in Felix when he detaches his tail, using it for something other than a simple prehensile appendage. But while Chaplin and other slapstick comedians typically transform the stuff of the high industrial machine in this individual fashion – one device at a time – the moment from Felix Gets Broadcasted reflexively refers, not exactly to either the machinery or even the ground on which that machinery is based, but to the possibility

66 Mark Winokur

2.8 Frame capture from Felix Gets Broadcasted (1923).

of the conception of both the ground and the machinery; it refers to the graphic line needed to draw both fore- and background, base and superstructure. Like the introduction of other effects by Blackton and McCay, the introduction of cel animation enables a reconception of the body or space around the racial and ethnic other. Cel technology reconceives the line used to draw both the landscape and the objects in the landscape. In other words, there exists a structuralist tension in the Felix films between, on the one hand, the normative narrative and pictorial representations of racial and ethnic stereotypes and, on the other hand, the interrogation of these stereotypes by the technology that enables them through a denial of the kinds of binaries that, like foreground and background, are themselves grounding stereotypes, or stereotypes of grounding. This technique in which Felix gives up a portion of himself as when his tail becomes a Chaplinesque cane in Felix in Hollywood (1923) (figure 2.9) in order to interact with a foreign background is, even beyond the wise-guy attitude that marks him

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2.9 Frame capture from Felix in Hollywood (1923).

as an immigrant arriviste, an attempt to negotiate a relationship between ethnic white immigrant America and other signs of alienness.30 (Both Felix creators were children of immigrants: Pat Sullivan was the son of Irish and Australian immigrants, Otto Messmer of German immigrants.)31 Cel economy results in several typical ‘golden-era’ structural figures besides Felix. Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Bosko, Bimbo, and Flip the Frog are different versions of the Creole cartoon character in which ethnicity is ambiguous in part because of a constant negotiation with the character’s background cel. While looking whiter all the time, the next generation of major-studio cartoon characters – Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry – have these Creole characteristics grafted onto them as well. Cel animation does not mean the disappearance of the earlier, Homoousian combining of several ethnicities in one character. However, in the era of cel animation, the meaning of these ethnic superimpositions changes. On the one hand, these characters are (as Henry T.

68 Mark Winokur Sampson reminds us) racist visions of blackness: they are all childish, libidinous, destructive, easily frightened, carefree, all-singing, and alldancing.32 They are often associated with a simple, rural, sometimes idyllic southern (Steamboat Willie) tradition. Their graphics are sometimes overtly suggestive of blackface: Warner Brothers’ Bosko has greasepaint-style thick lips, and (like blackface performers) Mickey wears white gloves. In the middle-late Jim Crow era – the 1920s to the 1950s – organizations like the NAACP made the overt representation of blackface minstrelsy unacceptable. As a consequence of this political action, cartoons preserved the minstrel representation, often in an almost pristine form. With its representation of a carefully nostalgized, naturalized, and hierarchicalized southern steamboat, and its celebration of sound as simply music, Steamboat Willie is a terrific example of this minstrel preservation. But on the other hand, these characters are not simply ‘toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies and bucks,’ not simply blackface minstrel characters.33 The perpetuation of a complex version of blackface becomes even more pronounced with the introduction of a new technology into the animation industry: sound. Perhaps one of the best examples of the presence of an alternative tradition is Bosko, one of the earliest talking cartoon stars, whose early blackface denotations are most visible (figure 2.10). He is a Warner Brothers creation, produced by the same studio that produced The Jazz Singer (1927).34 His early accent is often noticeably black and southern: the Warner cartoon tagline – ’That’s All, Folks’ – was at first pronounced by Bosko ‘Dat’s All Folks.’ But, from his first film, a demo called Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929) in which Bosko carries on a sort of minstrel conversation with his creator, Rudolf Ising, there is something peculiar in the racial valence in the otherwise standard minstrel structure of Interlocutor-Mr. Bones.35 On the one hand, this new character is treated in an extraordinarily condescending fashion by the live cartoonist/Ising/Interlocutor. This is Hollywood reflexivity and self-referentiality at its most reactionary. But, while Bosko is continuously black, he also demonstrates in a selfconsciously blackface manner – for example by imitating Al Jolson’s performance of ‘Sonny Boy’ – a self-referentiality that suggests that Bosko is not a racist presentation of blackness but a racist re-presentation. Further, this blackface character then performs a broad imitation of a Jewish dancer (smashing down his hat and face, dancing oddly like a Russian Cossack, and singing one word: ‘yoi’), and an Irish hoofer whistling ‘Sidewalks of New York,’ an old tune about urban

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2.10 Frame capture from Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929).

plurality used by Alfred E. Smith in his 1924 presidential campaign. In other words, the blackface Bosko is from the beginning inflected by white-ethnic characteristics that are also drawn – in 1929, not in 1899 – in a condescending manner. That is to say that, even after the time when white ethnics were supposed to have successfully assimilated, leapfrogging African Americans, they were still the objects of xenophobic parody. Bosko’s Creolism – his ability to contain multitudes of ethnic types – represents a variety of racial impostures. Further, Bosko’s minstrel accent is not evenly sustained throughout the run of the cartoons. In later films, Bosko and Honey (Bosko’s love interest) both speak a kind of accent-neutral English, in voices less identifiable by race than by age. Like many such early comic figures their voices are often high-pitched and slow, like children reciting lessons. The Tin Pan Alley–style tunes ally them with white urban ethnics. Later, Bugs Bunny’s accent – Brooklynese with all its attendant idioms (‘Hey, bud’) – will be even more suggestive of white ethnicity.

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These characters are in short racially ambiguous over time as both black and white stereotypes. In his brief but comprehensive introduction to the history of black figures in American animation, Sampson points to Sammy Johnsin as the first black star of a cartoon series, citing Warner Brothers’ Bosko as the second, and the first of the sound era.36 Sammy is recognizably black to his contemporary reviewers (Moving Picture World, 1916: ‘Animated funny pictures … showing the adventures of a small pickaninny’).37 About the inauguration of the Bosko series, however, Sampson asserts something very odd for an otherwise refreshingly polemical writer: ‘reviewers were at first unsure of the ethnic or racial identity of Bosko and Honey or whether they were human.’38 (This despite the fact that Hugh Harman registered him as ‘Negro’ with the patent office.)39 And, indeed, the reviewers he cites do not refer to the characters in typically racial terms as pickaninnies or mulattoes. In moving from white cartoonist to ‘Negro’ cartoon figure to Jewish to Irish, to linguistically unidentifiable, Bosko moves from a simple racist representation of one race to a more ambiguously racialized/racist Creole representation. Bosko vacillates between white ethnic, pickaninny, and white. Sometimes Bosko’s and Honey’s hair is nappy; sometimes it is not. Sometimes Bosko and Honey speak with an exaggerated southern accent (‘Don’t crah, Bosko; Ah still loves ya’); at other times their accents are less identifiably regional. Most interesting, Bosko’s southern voice is articulated in a normal tenor range (The Talk-Ink Kid and Sinkin’ in the Bathtub [1930]), while the accent-neutral voice is articulated in the childish falsetto we also associate with Mickey Mouse. That is to say that, while both voices are associated with a kind of childishness, one voice is racially inflected while the other – the falsetto – is like the Beach Boys’ voices, unconsciously but suggestively queer. Sometimes Bosko’s movements are identifiably Chaplinesque, as when, arms glued to his sides, his hands nervously and simultaneously tap his thighs. (See for example the end of Big Man of the North [1931].) Occasionally Bosko and/or a character in a Bosko film has an identifiably Jewish accent, as in ‘The Booze Hangs High,’ in which Bosko and a cow dance the hora, while the background music is done in the minor key and instrumentation of a klezmer band. Generally speaking, the songs, which are always a conspicuous feature of the early Bosko features and not as standardized as in the later Warner Brothers cartoons, are sometimes reminiscent of minstrelsy and sometimes not.

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The very first released cartoon – Sinkin’ in the Bathtub – contains the songs ‘Singing in the Bathtub,’ ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ (written by Joe Burke, an Irish accordionist), and ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ (lyrics credited to Jaan Kenbrovin, the Scandinavian pseudonym for three writers), hardly tunes associated with minstrelsy. The title song is not only not associated with minstrelsy, it is introduced in a Warner production Show of Shows (1929) by Winnie Lightner, a white, lightcomedy Broadway comedienne. The same is true for another 1931 Bosko feature, Ups ’N Downs, which features the Warner tune (originally Broadway) ‘Don’t Hold Everything’ (from Hold Everything, 1930). Example 3: Fleischer’s Rotoscope and the Racial Surreal Media criticism frequently uses Sigmund Freud’s 1935 work, ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad,’ one of his many metaphors for the relationship between consciousness and memory.40 A child’s toy, the pad is a dual-layer writing tablet, the top layer of which is a sheet of clear celluloid, the bottom layer of which is a gray sheet of paper which receives a visible impression when the celluloid is written on by a stylus. When the celluloid paper is raised and separated from the gray bottom layer, the writing on the bottom layer disappears, except for a barely visible indentation – a trace. Freud’s point is that, while we believe consciousness and memory to be archival and total, they are in fact like the traces left on the writing pad: discontinuous, barely visible, and ambiguous. It is difficult to believe that, with its end description of the mind as a sort of editing machine – an apparatus that gains impressions that are repeatedly interrupted and replaced by subsequent perceptions in order to attain the illusion of a sense of continuous time – ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad’ was not influenced by the idea of cinema, which also uses celluloid to leave a trace of the (chemical) pressure exerted on it. Today, the mystic writing pad is further useful as a metaphor to describe our relationship to film, which is an aging technology whose representations are often the only photographic traces of otherwise dead worlds – like, for example, fin-desiècle urban life or the movements of dead actors – the memories of which otherwise decay with the speed of contemporary technological development.41 Rotoscoping – an animation technique invented by Max and David Fleischer – works in some respects like the mystic writing pad. Rotoscoping traces over a series of frames from a live-action film sequence

72 Mark Winokur in order to create an animation duplicate, giving the viewer an eerie sense that the animated sequence is both photographically real and phantasmic, interpreting the original photograph in the process of effacing it. In one sense, rotoscoping works in the opposite direction of the mystic writing pad; while the pad’s initial impression is made by the writer over a blank sheet of paper, rotoscoping is more literally a tracing over a pre-existent image. In this regard, however – in the sense that it is more truly as much tracing as a trace and so a further remove from the thing-in-itself than even the mystic writing pad – it is an even more exemplary representation of the existence/non-existence of the trace than the writing pad itself. The ambiguity of the rotoscoped figure – photographed/drawn, existent/non-existent, real/unreal – may also be described as alive/ not alive, which is to say uncanny. For Freud, ‘an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.’42 Robert Spadoni has already spoken of the way in which a different early film technology – sound – was also uncanny; early audiences experienced sound as if the figures onscreen were ghosts, traces of the living in a way that silent cinema was not.43 In part because of its infrequency before the era of digital animation (the technique was for the most part cost-prohibitive), rotoscoping can be similarly distinguished from the rest of animation. Rotoscoped Fleischer characters contain most of the dynamics Freud describes as uncanny: doubling, haunting, and anatomizing (‘[d]ismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist … feet which dance by themselves … all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity’).44 The English translation of ‘das Unheimliche’ describes the uncanny as an atavistic belief whose cognate is intimately related to cartooning: ‘Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings.’45 For Freud, the uncanny ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.’46 Rotoscoping is the breathing of life into (animating, anima) the simulacrum of life. The tension between alive and not alive is intensified by the fact that the Fleischers’ earliest rotoscoped figure, Koko the Clown, is a parody of humanity animated by cinematography. While our cul-

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ture reinforces the sense that traditional animation begins with circles and polygons, Fleischer’s rotoscoping forces you to observe the tension between photographed and drawn representations.47 The image is recognizable as human but also as heavily interpreted. Rotoscoping does something that few other forms of representation can. It makes human movement – not simply the human image – indexical in the Peircean sense: it becomes a moving sign genetically related to the moving human form.48 The connectedness and irreconcilability of the homely and the unheimlich is present both in Creole blackness/whiteness and in rotoscoped live-action/animation in such a way that rotoscoping may be seen as a technology of Creolism. More simply: rotoscoping is itself Creole. While the earlier examples of Creolism to which I have referred contain a technological component (animation itself, cel animation, sound), they tend to be characterological, narrative, and/or thematic. By contrast, rotoscoping is structural-industrial: Creolism is present in the structure and the production of its animation. Produced in an animation industry already interested in Creole representation, rotoscoping itself produces Creolism, further throwing its uncanniness into relief. Like Creolism and many of the subjects of animation, rotoscoping is (especially for the Fleischers) about ethnic/racial ambiguity and the uncanny. For both Creolism and rotoscoping ethnic oppression equals ethnic/racial obfuscation equals unhomeliness. Put another way, the medium itself – seen as both the mode of production and as the technology of that mode – is complicit in the production of ambiguous racial definition. As P.T. Barnum equated ethnics and monsters, so the Fleischer studio equates the cel-animation figure with various kinds of ethnic otherness, and the rotoscoped figure with an ambiguous whiteness. The first Fleischer animated character, Koko the Clown, is also the first rotoscoped cartoon, and he is immersed in ethnicity. The clown’s originator is Jewish Max Fleischer; the original model is his brother Dave. One of the clown’s origins is Irish whiteface. Unlike Disney, Fleischer hired women and African Americans in creative capacities. Like other silent cartoon characters, Koko frequently plays or plays off of other stereotypical ethnic types: Indians, Chinese, and so on. We saw earlier that the Irishman and the African were seen as ontogenetically connected.49 The choice of the whiteface clown for the first rotoscope foregrounds the way in which black and ethnic white stereotypes converged in American animation at the level of technique

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and technology. In an article on nineteenth-century whiteface, James P. Byrne asserts that ‘whiteface and blackface were not only associated in theatricality; in a more profound sense, they both replicated similar stereotypes based on racist readings of black physiognomy.’50 Byrne further argues that these categories were fungible: ‘This temporal association of Irish and black minstrel shows would lead to a syncretism and even suffusion of stereotypical tropes between both styles, and for a brief period, although driven by different ideologies, these two theatrical styles would become almost synonymous, allowing actors to move easily between representations of the staged Irishman and the staged Negro, the Paddy and the Darkie, the Irish whiteface and the blackface.’51 As if to emphasize the Creole tendency of rotoscoping to render race visually ambiguous, Fleischer makes several films in which he traces the movements of two of the leading black figures of the day: Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong. The more visibly racist tracing occurs in the Armstrong film. However, the only way to see an early Louis Armstrong perform the 1931 Sam Theard song ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You’ is to watch the 1932 Fleischer cartoon I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.52 These rather remarkable films are also some of the earliest cinematic recordings of very famous and now very standard jazz tunes and artists. In other words, these cartoons are foundational moments both in the recording of African American jazz and in rotoscope technology. During these moments, the Fleischers reconceive traditional racist portrayals as Creole representation. However, this rather complex racialized modernism is not often discussed because the cartoons are, of course, also self-evidently racist. The live-action head of Louis Armstrong in I’ll Be Glad is replaced (rather than actually rotoscoped) by an animated demon’s head pursuing Betty Boop, presumably with the intent to rape, maim, kill, boil, eat, and commit other jungle savageries. While they are introduced as visual figure/ground games like those in the Felix films, the film’s ‘jungle bunny’ cannibals are visibly stereotypical. Betty Boop’s Brooklyn accent is by contrast celebratory of white, new-immigrant ethnicity. However, the lyrics of Armstrong’s version of ‘I’ll Be Glad’ are his own; he changes Theard’s original lyrics to include such lines as: ‘You bought my wife a bottle of Coca Cola,/So you could play on her Victrola.’ The line is a self-conscious reference to recording technology, and jibes with the rest of the self-conscious reflexivity of the Fleischer film.

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While there are strong similarities between I’ll Be Glad and the three Fleischer films starring Cab Calloway, the actual rotoscoping in the three Fleischer–Cab Calloway collaborations – Minnie the Moocher, The Old Man of the Mountain, and Snow White (figures 2.11–2.13) – provides even more interesting racial ambiguity.53 The narrative structure of the first in the series – Minnie the Moocher – opens as I’ll Be Glad does: the star directs his band in a live sequence, after which the animated sequences are shown. But the move from the non-rotoscoped Armstrong to the rotoscoped Calloway is a movement away from stereotype and toward ambiguity. The figures in the Armstrong-Fleischer film are visibly racial and racist: the menacing head of an aborigine turns into Armstrong’s head; the band’s drummer becomes the cannibal cook stirring a pot. In contrast, the rotoscoped figures in the Calloway-Fleischer films are not quite so stereotypical. The cannibals are replaced by a ghostly walrus and the ‘old [white] man of the mountain,’ both based on Calloway’s own performance. As the rotoscoping of Calloway is moving away from racial stereotyping, it is attributing the movements and sounds of jazz to Calloway. For example, in Minnie the Moocher, rotoscoped over Calloway is a sort of white ghost figure with the face and tusks of a walrus. Like the Armstrong animation figure, he is menacing; unlike the Armstrong figure he has comic dialogue. In an aside Minnie/Betty asks the threatening figure: ‘Whatcha gonna do, man,’ to which the ghost-walrus answers: ‘I’m gonna do the best I can.’ This moment is layered in ways that are almost impossible to enumerate. On the one hand, the moment is racist because, like Birth of a Nation, it associates blackness with a satirized superstitiousness. On the other hand, unlike Birth – in which African Americans are scared and superstitious – the Calloway figure is the (white) ghost. On the one hand, the film is racist because, making Calloway a ghost, it is typing a black figure as monstrous. On the other hand, the uncanny monstrousness is itself undercut by the paratextual fame of the jazz music and by the self-conscious comic dialogue. The racist monstrousness is further undercut by the vision of Calloway himself at the beginning, visibly co-inventing modern recorded jazz. On the one hand, Minnie the Moocher might be seen as a kind of minstrelsy. On the other hand, it is hard to define simply as minstrelsy a performance and performer that are seen as foundational moments in the history of jazz. Further, it is an odd sort of minstrelsy in which the black player is visibly white.

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2.11 Cab Calloway frame capture from Minnie the Moocher (1932).

2.12 Ghost walrus frame capture from Minnie the Moocher (1932).

2.13 Frame capture from The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).

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Fleischer rotoscoping tends to ‘unhome’ the animated character, creating tension between the medium of animation and the movements of realistic photography; then, between the rotoscoped figure and the hand-drawn cel; and, finally, between the rotoscoped character and photographed background and characters. (Fleischer characters almost never appear in a rotoscoped environment.) Rotoscoping becomes a technical innovation tied to a racialized feeling of rootlessness that, while operating within a racist studio system, is itself an experiment in deforming the traces of ethnicity and race as a way of playing with those traces. The significance of finding Creolism in early animation technology is in part that one may talk about its perseverance throughout the history of American animation. Thus, for example, the evolution of Disney rotoscoping suggests an anti-minor sensibility; it establishes a kitschy vision of whiteness as an ideal norm to be adopted by whiteflight suburbanites and their children. In contrast, rotoscoping that follows Fleischer will tend to be absorbed with ethnic representation as play, in films as obvious as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and its analogies between Toontown and Coontown, and as subtle as the character coloration in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).54 In its successive attempts to reimagine immigration, race, and ethnicity, much American animation posits a complicated relationship between alterity and emerging cinematic technologies that is not simply racist, but is rather a series of attempts at strategies of ethnic amelioration, synthesis, inclusion, exclusion, and containment. And, while this technological imbrication is most visible in low-comedy animation precisely because comic film genres tend to evade the kind of scrutiny that high-profile dramatic films attract, it gets reduplicated in other specialized film technologies that rarely get discussed in terms of race: modelling, optical effects, or early sound and colour experiments. My largest conclusion, which I would suggest only tentatively here, and for which the notion of Creole animation has been a sort of stalking horse, is that race and ethnicity are imbricated, not just in theme, character, and narration, but in the technologies of film representation. The conditions of production help to shape not just the narrative but also the medium that shapes the narrative and, in turn, the conditions of production. For a variety of reasons, the pre-Hollywood and early Hollywood film industries were deeply invested in discourses about race. The transmutation of that discourse into film involved the

78 Mark Winokur invention of thousands of technologies and devices – from the Moviola to the boom microphone to the rotoscope – all of whose creations did not simply reflect the inevitable course of Enlightenment science, but at least in part reflected contemporaneous discourses about race, gender, class, and nation. If science is a discourse, then so is technology; if material culture is discursive, then so are the machines that produce that culture. If the medium is the message, then so is the hardware. notes 1 Paul Wells, Animation and America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 5. 2 Ethnic Notions, directed by Marlon Riggs (Berkeley, CA: California Newsreel, 1987); Michael Rogin, Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 3 In order to avoid confusion with recent immigration, I should explain that ‘new immigration’ refers to the large group of immigrants who came to America between about 1880 and 1920. 4 Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith (1915); Within Our Gates, directed by Oscar Micheaux (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920); and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, productions in 1903, 1910, 1913, 1914, 1918, and 1927. 5 Teresa Zackodnik, ‘Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity,’ American Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2001): 424. 6 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 7 Jacques Henry and Carl Bankston, ‘Propositions for a Structuralist Analysis of Creolism,’ Current Anthropology 39, no. 4 (1998): 563. 8 Ibid., 559. 9 John Keats, The Life and Writing of John Keats, ed. Lord Houghton (London: Edward Moxon, 1867), 75. 10 Steamboat Willie (1928), Flowers and Trees (1932), and The Three Little Pigs (1933), all directed by Walt Disney (Walt Disney Productions); My Old Kentucky Home, directed by Dave Fleischer (Out of the Inkwell Films, 1926); Goofy Goat Antics, directed by Ted Eshbaugh (Van Beuren Studios, 1931). 11 For example: ‘For [Tex] Avery’s purposes, the quality of the animation was close to irrelevant.’ Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 351. 12 Amelia S. Holberg, ‘Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star,’ American Jewish History 87, no. 4 (1999): 307. 13 Clean Pastures, directed by Fritz Freleng (Leon Schlesinger Studios, 1937);

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and Uncle Tom’s Bungalow, directed by Tex Avery (Leon Schlesinger Studios, 1937). Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself: With Related Documents (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009). The Hasher’s Delirium/Le songe d’un garçon de café, directed by Émile Cohl (France, 1910). For typical examples of early British animation see Matches: An Appeal, directed by Arthur Cooper (UK, 1899); The Enchanted Toymaker, directed by Arthur Cooper (UK, 1904); The Hand of the Artist, directed by Walter R. Booth (UK, 1906); and The ? Motorist, directed by Walter R. Booth (UK, 1906). The Enchanted Drawing, directed by J. Stuart Blackton (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1900); Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (Vitagraph Company of America, 1906); Lightning Sketches, directed by J. Stuart Blackton (Vitagraph Company of America, 1907); and Fun in a Bakery Shop, directed by Edwin S. Porter (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1902). Little Nemo premiered in cartoon strips in 1905. Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 21. The animation of Little Nemo first appeared as Winsor McCay The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, Photographed by the Vitagraph Co of America, directed by Winsor McCay and J. Stuart Blackton (Vitagraph Company of America, 1911), on Landmarks of Early Film, vol. 1 (DVD, Image Entertainment, 1997). Gertie the Dinosaur, directed by Winsor McCay (Fox Film Corporation, 1914). Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, trans. William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; originally published as Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1873). The ‘gentleman’s bet’ is a variant of the more overtly political ‘gentleman’s agreement.’ See for example the 1947 Laura Z. Hobson novel Gentleman’s Agreement or the 1907 immigration agreement between Japan and the United States. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: Completely Restored and Annotated, trans. Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1993; originally published as Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869). Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (London: John Murray, 1903), 748. Cited in George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 146.

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24 Obituary for Pat Sullivan, co-creator of Felix the Cat, in Smith’s Weekly, 25 February 1933. 25 For example, in the musical, whose ‘myth of spontaneity’ has been famously recounted by Jane Feuer in ‘The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 2, no. 3 (August 1977): 313–26. 26 For information about the importance of animation unions, see, for example, Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 27 See, for example, Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957; originally published as Film als Kunst, 1932); Fernand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1998; originally published as Cours de linguistique générale, 1916); and Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1969; essays written between 1928 and 1945). 28 Felix Gets Broadcasted, directed by Otto Messmer (Pat Sullivan Cartoons, 1923). 29 See Mark Winokur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 30 Felix in Hollywood, directed by Otto Messmer (Pat Sullivan Cartoons, 1923). 31 On Sullivan’s origins see Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 29. On Messmer’s origins see Douglas C. McGill, ‘Obituary: Otto Messmer Is Dead at 91; Created “Felix the Cat” Films,’ New York Times, 29 October 1983, 32. 32 Henry T. Sampson, That’s Enough Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900–1960 (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998). 33 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Crossroad, 1988). 34 The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland (Warner Brothers, 1927). 35 Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, directed by Hugh Harman (Leon Schlesinger Studios, 1929). 36 Sampson, That’s Enough Folks, 3. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Ibid., 12. 39 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 155. 40 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,’ trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 227–32.

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41 The exception to this notion of the cinema as photographic trace would be such avant-garde non-representational filmmakers as Stan Brakhage, who is nevertheless interested in a different kind of trace on the celluloid itself. 42 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny,”’ trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, vol. 17 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1955), 244. 43 Robert Spadoni, ‘The Uncanny Body of Early Sound Film,’ The Velvet Light Trap 51 (2003): 4–16. 44 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny,”’ 244. 45 Ibid., 240. 46 Ibid., 226 (italics mine). 47 For a typical example of the rhetoric of the polygon, see Preston Blair, Cartoon Animation (Osceola, WI: Walter Foster, 1994). 48 ‘Those whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed indices or signs.’ Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1965), 558. 49 As were Africans and Jews. See, for example, Sander Gilman, ‘Dangerous Liaisons,’ Transition 64 (1994): 45: ‘The difference of the Jew was in the flesh, stamped in the nose and the color of their skin. Jews bore the sign of the black, “the African character of the Jew, his muzzle-shaped mouth and face removing him from certain other races,” as the British scientist Robert Knox noted at mid-nineteenth century.’ 50 James P. Byrne, ‘The Genesis of Whiteface in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture,’ MELUS 29, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 134. 51 Ibid., 138. 52 I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, directed by Dave Fleischer (Fleischer Studios, 1932). 53 Minnie the Moocher (1932), The Old Man of the Mountain, and Snow White (both 1933), directed by Dave Fleischer (Fleischer Studios). 54 Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Amblin Entertainment, 1988); Waking Life, directed by Richard Linklater (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2001); and A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater (Warner Independent Pictures, 2006).

3 Talking War, Debating Unity: Order, Conflict, and Exclusion in ‘German Humour’ in the First World War MARTINA KESSEL The production of humour was a vast industry in Germany during the First World War. Joke collections, satirical journals, and funny postcards were best-sellers in contemporary popular culture. Furthermore, a lot of them projected a particular brand of ‘German humour’ as one of those cultural traits that supposedly set German culture apart from Western civilization, associating it with harmony, truth, and German ‘Gemüt’ (i.e. soul and ‘true’ feeling). If mentioned at all by historians, humour in war times has so far been mostly understood as subversive or affirmative. But the sheer amount of humorous products, their ubiquitous and repetitive presence, and the never-ending debates between producers, censors, and consumers about the permissible suggest that their meaning goes beyond being just entertainment or an outlet for frustration. In this essay, humour is understood as an important means of communication, not only during the war but also about its impact, that tried to make sense of rapid social changes and helped to articulate fears, hope, and anger.1 Addressed to both soldiers and civilians, humour in the First World War circled around the dimensions of order, conflict, and exclusion. First of all, this article argues that humour presented as ‘German’ served as a prescriptive narrative of order during the First World War. Drawing on a tradition that reached back into the nineteenth century, humour producers used it to express both the sense of national unity and the willingness to fight. Projecting an ordered society, joke collections and humorous postcards also functioned as narrative and visual devices to articulate how criticism could be voiced. Secondly, however, conflicts between censorship authorities and producers about the content and the boundaries of what could be said and in

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what form never stopped during the war, centring on the question of what exactly constituted permissible humour. Especially after 1916 when the debate about war aims erupted again, and acrimoniously so, ironical postcards criticizing the authorities’ shortcomings at the home front could never be controlled, and their sarcasm splintered the facade of national unity. Still, their irony mostly addressed a temporary political problem only, in the sense of a government that did not deliver on its promises any more. At the same time, humour transported and reinforced a more deep-seated exclusive tendency that could be understood as glue to a people’s community coming apart. Uncannily, and with lasting effect, jokes throughout the war carried an anti-Semitic undercurrent that bolstered an exclusive definition of national unity. Given the semantic history of the notion of German humour in the nineteenth century, its career after 1914 becomes less surprising. Since around 1800, the arena of the supposedly non-serious, as one could call it, was heavily debated. While Friedrich Schlegel espoused a sense of irony as the necessary self-reflectivity needed by the modern subject, writers like Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte developed the concept of a particular German seriousness that could be clad as non-alienating cheerfulness and contrasted with supposedly non-German satire.2 During the nineteenth century, German intellectuals increasingly cast satire as ‘zersetzend,’ a term whose English translation as ‘subversive’ does not really catch its harsh meaning, rather implying something that radically and completely decomposes social order and stability. In contrast, they projected a humorous narrative as a story that supposedly also pointed out a flaw in society, just like satire, but did not end on that note. Rather, German humour supposedly finished with a conciliatory smile that united everybody involved. To put it pointedly: A story or a joke in their eyes only then qualified as humorous when the protagonists in the story and/or the protagonists telling the story ended by harmoniously accepting German society as it was, underwriting at the same time their own place within that particular social order. Accordingly, the philosophical and aesthetic discourse of the nineteenth century translated the notion of German humour into the cheerful acceptance of the given society with all its flaws, a commentary on the world that supposedly only pointed lovingly to the shortcomings of mankind in general,3 instead of criticizing politics and society.

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To be sure, such German humour was never dominant in the humour production of the nineteenth century, as many forms of witty amusement of all political directions were established since the revolution of 1848, be it satirical journals or popular theatre.4 Still, it also never disappeared. Instead, it served as a term of difference that organized the humorous perceptions of society in polarized ways, just like the identity discourse in general, with the goal of stigmatizing any serious political or social criticism in the guise of satire. Defined that way, the notion of German humour could function as a concept of order, constructed in binary form and variously directed against the French, the Jews, opposing political parties, or women who wanted to participate in modern society on an equal footing with men. And it did work as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Members of the (mostly Protestant) elite used the term and its connotations to draw boundaries, both between German culture and other national entities and within their own culture, by labelling witty social critics like Heinrich Heine as non-German and denouncing their satirical sociopolitical criticism as both unjustified and aesthetically wanting.5 Furthermore, in the arena of the supposedly non-serious where authors fought about the legitimacy of their respective narrative, such humour producers claimed that only their script spoke the truth about reality. While conservative German intellectuals connected German humour with truth, real art, and deep-seated seriousness, ending in a harmonious picture of jovial social bonding, they accused satirists of lacking depth, telling the wrong story about German history, and failing aesthetic standards. During the wars of unification, such a narrative of German culture became closely connected with war. Humorous Bilderbogen – series of pictures with funny captions6 – and booklets gathering humorous stories from newspapers of all German regions told the wars in such fashion. While projecting the Germans, particularly in the war of 1870–1, as a laughing community of winners, the stories conveyed at the same time the message that the Germans achieved their new unity through war, not only politically, but also internally in terms of culture, religion, or dialect. Jokes, poems, and funny songs described, for example, how Catholic Bavarians realized through fighting with the Prussians that they had more in common with their Protestant German fellow countrymen than with the Catholic French. The image of the humorous German soldier turned into a symbol for the particular narrative that offered unity as the legacy of war – i.e., the kind of

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catastrophic nationalism that defined war as the source for inner and outer unity.7 The entertainment sector with cabaret, satirical journals, and caricature rapidly expanded in Imperial Germany, in cities like Berlin often with Jewish artists at the forefront of metropolitan entertainment.8 Still, the fight about what constituted acceptable humour continued, with the implication that this decision was political by necessity, and often with an anti-Semitic bent.9 Conservative authors like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck projected the paternalistic and nationalistic version of humour in his anthology of ‘great texts’ Lachende Deutsche (Laughing Germans) in 1910.10 Therefore, in 1914, the notion could be picked up as a well-established cultural narrative that served perfectly both to illustrate and to call for the imagined people’s community. At the same time, it always had to contend with various forms of witty entertainment. The rise of popular culture in Germany had met with strong resistance from the middle classes, for whom it mirrored the decline of culture in general.11 To be sure, other forms of popular entertainment were by no means automatically more democratic than paternalistic German humour, and most satirical journals had vouched for a strong foreign policy all along. Still, the humour scene was broad and varied, it transported conflicting political meanings, and authorities during the war were continuously confronted with the question of how to deal with witty criticism. Beyond the immediate question of whether the seriousness of war allowed for amusement, answered affirmatively if the amusement honoured the war,12 the use of joke collections to project German unity and to bolster public morale involved upgrading the status of funny entertainment in the cultural hierarchy. And exactly because humour figured so prominently among the means of communications, it proved almost impossible to control. The First World War engendered a veritable media explosion. More people than ever before started to write themselves: letters to and from the front, trench journals, war literature, or the approximately 3 million affirmative war poems produced during the first eight months of the war alone.13 Humorous entertainment figured as an extremely important element within this market. All satirical journals supported the war effort, even the social democratic Der wahre Jakob.14 More importantly, perhaps, none of these journals openly backed away from their support until the end of the war.15 The publisher of the journal

86 Martina Kessel Die lustigen Blätter started the series Tornister-Humor (Humour for the Knapsack) that regularly issued joke books until 1919. Humorous postcards became a huge market phenomenon, in addition to countless caricatures denigrating the enemies and urging the Germans to hold out.16 Many famous journalists, intellectuals, and artists joined in the ‘humour and war’ business. In 1915, for example, Thomas Theodor Heine, Eduard Thöny, und Ludwig Thoma, well-known members of the Simplicissimus, the Munich flagship among satiricial journals, published their infamous Gott strafe England (God punish England)17 and then continued to produce material for the Foreign Office, to be distributed as propaganda abroad.18 Such products clearly matched reading habits, as most soldiers preferred light entertainment. In front libraries, humour books were the category lent out most often, while Goethe and Schiller remained on the shelves.19 Furthermore, these libraries often did not suffice to answer the wishes of German soldiers, and reading material sent from home had to fill the gap. Here again, humorous texts were the favourite among soldiers.20 Finally, among the billions of postcards sold, humorous motifs topped the list. Preprinted cards with humorous scripts or pictures were the means of communication most often used by soldiers,21 who often lacked the time, energy, or words to describe their experiences. Buying habits did not necessarily tell about people’s attitudes toward the war. They could have to do with the availability of particular cards, thus with a market phenomenon. But the motifs’ availability until defeat in turn pointed to their continuing marketing value. And they also told about the form a lot of communication about the war took. Accordingly, when social groups like the Organization of South German Catholic Workers Associations tried to engage the population for the war, they trusted the effectiveness of humorous entertainment more than serious exhortation. In 1918, the organization supported the production of a film comedy urging the public to sign war bonds. The choice indicated the preference for light entertainment in general and reflected, still after four years of war, the population’s mobilization beyond the structures of military and civilian authorities.22 Media humour could acquire manifold meanings.23 It definitely helped people to cope and to relieve the strains of war through diversion.24 But it also asserted the possibility of order in a tumbling world. Not surprisingly, joke books touched only in a veiled manner on experiences like fear, pain, and death, while explicitly picking up the many

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secondary deprivations people suffered in terms of weather, food, or other commodities. More striking were the extremely traditional and conventional aesthetics. When printed jokes mentioned the concrete fighting at all, they were framed in a nineteenth-century mode, just like film comedies during the war. But conventional aesthetics should not be cast aside with the thesis that the First World War saw the birth of modern, ironic culture.25 Jay Winter’s argument that modern culture only helped to articulate the alienation the war engendered while people turned to traditional cultural forms in order to find comfort in times of grieving26 can also be applied here. At the same time, these products must be understood as a part of popular light entertainment that was on a secular rise, also because it answered specific needs. Umberto Eco convincingly argued that products like serial fiction offered repetitive, quasi a-historical plots whose sheer predictability answered psychic needs in a society of vast changes.27 In times of war, exactly the jokes’ conventionality could help to envision normalcy. Recalling experiences from peace times, as they often did, they projected the continuity of a bygone world that would come back if the war was won. At the same time, by picking up over and over again the same experiences of deprivation, they offered ways of how to talk about the unspeakable.28 Finally, many jokes were repetitive, but far from diminishing their importance, this repetitiveness could help those who lacked words or imagination to participate in the everyday communication about the war.29 It is difficult to distinguish forms of humour that called for nationalistic drive or assured social order from caricatures or jokes that carried potentially conflicting meanings. A lot of authors, however, and certainly those who projected their work explicitly as German humour, left no doubt regarding their intention. Dozens of joke books like The Joke-Sergeant (Der Witze-Feldwebel) or At Home Again (Wieder bei Muttern), published in the series Humour for the Knapsack, depicted dutiful Germans at the front and at home, finding inner strength through affirmative humour and thus proving their superiority over their enemies.30 This series in particular conveyed the class bias of a lot of humour production. It portrayed soldiers as jovial infantrymen, maybe not overly intelligent, but street-wise, good-natured, and ready to give their lives for their country with a smile on their face. Though at times querulous, such a humorous soldier and his equally workingclass wife never questioned his position in the army but affirmed the cohesion of his group.

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Such humour also served as a concept of order by trying to channel criticism. Funny stories dealt with deprivations, offering to understand, to explain, and to articulate the disrupting experiences. Editors gave great room for jokes concerning the complaints of disgruntled soldiers or civilians, and they claimed authenticity by insisting to offer the true expression of the people’s opinion. In doing so, they projected in subtle ways exactly those semantic and communicative structures that did allow for criticism. A typical example were discussions between two soldiers, Hans and Franz (the male duo as a standard comic feature since the nineteenth century), who complained heavily about the inadequate food they received but snickered at the same time about English hopes of winning the war.31 They ridiculed Kitchener for apparently wanting to cover the whole of northern France with newspapers because his new armies existed only on paper. At the same time, they christened the bread they received as ‘brand “German front”’ because it was impossible to break. Regarding a completely rotten food ration, they suggested that it had been sent in 1870 but delivered only now.32 In similar fashion, Hans and Franz voiced most other shortcomings on the German side but mastered all of them, jovially undaunted in their task to win the war. Such stories accordingly framed the possible content and the limits of dissent by projecting soldiers who complained all the time about this and that but never questioned the war and their duty to fight.33 In short, soldiers were allowed to criticize most aspects of their harsh lives as long as they confirmed at the same time their willingness to fight. Research about desertion has shown that daily complaints about the terrible life in the trenches could indeed be a coping strategy that stopped thoughts about leaving one’s position.34 Jokes projected the communicative situations in which complaints were considered legitimate or even desired in order to prevent more radical reactions. The ideal soldier could well be frustrated about water in the trenches as long as he commented on it only by exclaiming: ‘By gosh, I wasn’t drafted to the navy!’35 Furthermore, it was not only important what the joke-tellers in these stories criticized. Just as important was with whom they laughed. Soldiers among themselves were allowed more leeway for criticism as long as they did not convey their impressions home – as it was exactly the circulation of dissatisfaction between front and home front that worried the authorities after 1916. It has been pointed out many times that propaganda can only be successful when it ties in with people’s mental dispositions. This type

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of popular culture, understood as propaganda only in the sense of being an arena organized by producers and consumers alike who in turn negotiated identity and belonging,36 was so successful because it resonated with forms of entertainment and communication in the German lifestyle. A well-known ritual among soldiers were the so-called Bierzeitungen (literally: beer journals), comic newspapers they drew up themselves to celebrate for example the end of their training, just like pupils did at the end of school. Such journals recalled in humorous rhymes specific incidents or made harmless fun of various members of the group. The authors’ artistic engagement served more than one function. It could entertain on a particular occasion, mark an important rite of passage, or pay tribute to a particular holiday such as Christmas. Furthermore, and perhaps most important, it confirmed the group’s identity and solidarity, both by emphasizing that its particular military task was central to the war effort and by proclaiming almost invariably on the first page that everybody who was made fun of had to take it in good stride – in fact, had to act in good, humorous fashion. One journal included a poem in nine verses, addressed to a fictitious comrade stationed in Turkey who was beset by all the problems an ordinary soldier could encounter. The verses pinpointed the depressing experiences with slow bureaucracy, lack of supplies, unexpected attacks, and insufficient equipment, ending invariably in the punch line that he should still do his duty humorously, even if a bullet should find him: ‘Die with humour, that’s your duty, and don’t grieve.’37 As long as soldiers did not question the war in general, humour could even deal with conflicts within the army quite openly. After 1916, the rifts in a nationalized and yet ever more segmented war society grew sharply. Due to the impossible demands of the Third High Command in terms of production, frictions arose between front and home front that fuelled the stab-in-the-back-legend, that is, the notion that civilian society back home had let down the soldiers at the front.38 While civilians were mostly concerned with the lack of supplies, soldiers reacted bitterly to one of the most grieving problems of the German army, namely the sharp differences in terms of food, leave, and danger that existed between ranks and soldiers.39 The power of humour as a means of communication became apparent when soldiers ironically attacked those behind the lines who in their eyes shirked their duty. A poem included in a letter home graphically described the Etappenschweine (swine behind the lines), as the men in the commu-

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nication zones were called in anger. The first two verses highlighted the fat life and corrupted morale of men in the rear, insinuating that they slept with French women and thus typically drawing on the symbolic power of presenting gender and sexuality as degrading a particular position. Then the amateur poet attacked the other men for being cowards: Wer packt beim geringsten Geschieße den Koffer Wer zittert vor einem Durchbruch von Joffre, wer schwindelt die tollsten Latrinengerüchte, und macht unsere frohe Stimmung zunichte, durch Schwarzseherei und Gegreine? Das sind die Etappenschweine!40 (Who packs his things when the first bullet rings Who fears a breakthrough by Joffre, who creates the worst rumours and destroys our cheerful attitude by pessimism and whining? Those swine behind the lines!)

The author concludes by emphasizing that he and his comrades in the trenches would not want to exchange a single one of their ‘proud memories’ for the ‘stupid life’ in the rear – because only such ‘proud memories’ promised the nation’s love and fidelity. Again, such a poem would be tolerated despite its aggressiveness because it expressed the soldiers’ fighting spirit. It even answered the demand of those officious trench journals that had tried to influence soldiers’ conversations with people at home, urging them to counter armchair politicians with ‘the humour of the first front line.’41 Soldiers’ experiences of comradeship often did not correspond to its official celebration. But some of them proudly asserted their courage in similar form as published humour, even if in grimmer form. Thus, when the rosy picture of cheerful soldiers, so prominent in the early war years, was criticized, the proponents of German humour could easily placate their critics. Early reviews had charged that humour publications were too optimistic and one-sided, demanding that later editions would have to add more sombre notes in order to tell the ‘objective truth’ about the war.42 Such criticism, however, also affirmed humour’s communicative role. Humour producers in

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turn pointed to its semantic tradition and its symbolic meaning of superiority compared with Allied ways of dealing with war. In their eyes, the German form of humour had all along been the only truthful representation of the war. As a reviewer in the Berliner Tageblatt in 1916 argued in the classical binary way, the French would never attain the serious depth of German ‘soul [Gemüt] and humour.’ German soldiers, so he assured his audience, would neither hate nor brag but simply do their duty and still have time for a hearty laugh.43 Not surprisingly, German authors aggressively discredited the French funny trench journals, which often asserted the same, as culturally inferior.44 At the same time, after 1916, they pointed more often to the serious origins of German laughter. In 1916 Paul Oskar Höcker, the Berlin playwright who as editor of the official front journal Liller Kriegszeitung was a major player in war humour, explained the connection between the serious and the comical. He urged soldiers to keep laughing despite the war’s tragedies because it would harden them against others and themselves.45 In his famous essay on laughter published before the war, Henri Bergson had pointed out that laughter could prevent compassion, or, to put it another way, that laughing about others only worked when compassion was silenced.46 In this war, German intellectuals insisted on a laughter that could help to stifle soldiers’ realization of the similar plight on all sides. Truly controlling soldiers’ laughter, however, was quite a different story. On the one hand, by joking about their fate, soldiers re-interpreted their surroundings in an optimistic vein. Joking thus helped them to overcome fear. Those who could make fun of deadly danger were perceived by others as having ‘grown up’ into real comrades, and they were told: ‘Now you are big.’47 The poems in soldiers’ journals quoted above projected such soldierly comradeship. On the other hand, though, soldiers’ jokes quickly crossed the line to irony and satire. The longer the war lasted, the more black humour transpired. Soldiers transformed German patriotic songs into satirical parodies mocking the war and its hardships. Minenwerfer (mortars) became Marmeladeneimer (jam buckets), referring to that ever-present replacement of nourishing fat.48 It therefore came as no surprise that the Third High Command under Hindenburg, who started the program of ‘Patriotic Instruction’ in 1916–17, made sure that the often quite sarcastic trench journals drawn up by soldiers themselves disappeared, leaving primarily officious front journals such as the Liller Kriegszeitung staffed by people like Höcker.49

92 Martina Kessel Irony helped soldiers to vent frustration, but for censors to let that pass, soldiers had to inflect it with the notion of duty. Duty was indeed one of those mental dispositions that made so many of them hold out in this war,50 and whether listeners interpreted poems or caricatures as humorous, satirical, or bitter, to fulfil one’s duty was central for the formulation of acceptable humour. Authorities were quick to confiscate any product whose irony might possibly implode the notion of duty. Able cartoonists among the soldiers did so when they commented ironically upon drill training. Soldiers often complained about drill, which took up their time in the rear. Funny postcards showed soldiers doing forward bends and press-ups, carrying the inscription that soldiers would get backbone (which in German could also mean courage) only by such drill in time-controlled discipline: ‘Ein starkes Rückgrat kriegst du nur vom Armebeugen nach der Uhr’ (A strong backbone you will get only by doing press-ups like clock-work).51 They were immediately censored, leaving open the question of how many had seen and interpreted them as a particularly ridiculous feature of army life after the experiences in the trenches (see figure 3.1). But next to the fissures that soldiers’ irony let appear in the imagined community of cheerful and dutiful soldiers, other jokes, openly anti-Semitic, in yet quite a different way belied the image of an all-inclusive nation. Exactly because military duty featured so prominently in these ubiqitous little narratives, jokes throughout the war made it overly clear that some Germans could do their duty beyond call and still be excluded, playing with traditional anti-Semitic prejudice without fear of censorship. For sure, all the sharp divisions in German society were debated in humour all the time. Especially after 1916, jokes about farmers cheating the urban population, about affluent members of the upper classes taking advantage of public services they did not need, and about gender roles going topsy-turvy abounded. But since the beginning of the war and ever more aggressively since 1915, when conflicts in German society belied the obsessive talk about inner unity, anti-Semitic jokes and caricatures projected an essentially different difference, drawing on an imaginary that had all along tried to keep Jewish and German history apart. The racist vocabulary that degraded German Jews to national aliens had been elaborated before the war,52 and connecting Jewish and foreign satire as cold and unfairly critical, thereby constructing ‘Jewish’ as always and intrinsically ‘foreign,’ had been a defining feature of the

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3.1 Censored postcard from the First World War. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv München, M Kr Bildsammlung, 97.

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meta-discourse on German humour. Furthermore, anti-Semitic stereotypes had been intensively visualized in Imperial Germany,53 and the wartime media drew on this visual memory. Humour during the First World War regularly associated German Jews and Jews from abroad, and thus reinforced their projection as alien enemies within. The Simplicissimus, the Munich flagship among humorous journals, continuously represented the Allies through bodily stereotyping as ‘Jewish,’ especially the Russians, thus combining anti-Semitism with cultural hierarchy,54 and the Italians after they entered the war on the Allied side, thus connecting the notion of being ‘Jewish’ with the notion of betrayal.55 The fusion of anti-Semitism and the German ‘thinking in enemies,’ as one might call the tendency to think binaries organizing identity immediately in terms of war, and the corresponding language of treachery, which was not only important during this war but continued to organize political semantics after the defeat of 1918,56 unobtrusively entered daily social knowledge through humour that defined enemies as Jewish and thus Jews as enemies. Furthermore, jokes excluded Jewish Germans from the community of fighters. As a favourite topic, caricatures featured German Jews as shirking their military duty, instead reaping profit at home. Such motives appeared before and after 1916, when the military authorities authorized the notorious ‘Judenzählung’ (Jew-count) and thereby gave in to false accusations from the non-Jewish population that Jewish Germans did not fight enough.57 For example, Der gemütliche Sachse, a funny periodical from Saxony, carried a picture joke in 1915 with the caption ‘Er muß es wissen’ (He must know it). It showed a Jew who comes running to shop owner Oskar Baruch to tell him of yet another big German victory, whereupon Baruch only replies: ‘Why, they should win as they don’t have much else to do.’58 Both are clad in traditional Jewish clothing and wear traditional hair, implying Eastern European Jews, with whom most German Jews could not identify. When criticized, anti-Semites in Germany typically emphasized that they were only talking about Eastern European Jews. So, on the one hand, collapsing internal and external enemies in the notion of ‘Jewish’ allowed contrasting being ‘Jewish’ with the possibility of national and cultural belonging. On the other hand, as the idea of fighting was essential for the definition of German male subjectivity,59 excluding Jewish Germans from the cheerful picture of German soldiers fighting and laughing heroically for their country meant to deny their belonging in terms of subjectivity.

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And finally, such stories were associated with a different kind of violence than all other differences in German society at this point. They tied in with quasi-official publications, such as a collection of letters from the front edited by Reinhold Zellmann in 1916. Entitled Serious and Cheerful Episodes from the World War: A Collection of Letters from the Front, the collection was supposed to bolster morale by demonstrating soldiers’ good humour. Reprinted again in 1917, it did not include letters by Jewish Germans but instead ‘true’ stories about Eastern European Jews. In two comparatively long and rabidly antiSemitic letters, Adolf Stein, later one of Hugenberg’s spokesmen during the Weimar Republic, depicted the occupation of Lodz, describing with violent energy how Jewish shop owners supposedly had tried to betray upright German soldiers. His aggressive style combined all negative stereotypes about Jews, from dirt and lice to meanness and corruption. But he also left no doubt about the brutality of the German reaction, describing in detail how they used intimidation and physical violence to rob the Jews’ possessions without paying at all.60 Regarding the home front, the discursive boundaries of permissible humour seemed at first to be drawn wider than with regard to military issues. At the same time, the authorities were unable to control a discourse they themselves urged on. Funny postcards circulated throughout the country, ranging in content from militaristic support of the war to demands of peace. Of course, the latter was forbidden, but all motives seem to have been produced throughout the war, and over and over again all sorts of cards were confiscated, militaristic, pacifist, or otherwise. Again, though, anti-Semitic jokes usually passed, in this context bolstering the accusation of Jewish Germans as war profiteers. The periodical Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter carried a typical one-liner in 1916 with the caption ‘Fitting term,’ insinuating again that German Jews not only did not suffer like everybody else during the war but actually profited: ‘Look, how arrogant the family Meyersohn is coming along there! – Indeed – quite a ‘Protzession’!’61 The play of words only works in German, ‘Protz’ meaning to show off one’s money tastelessly and ‘procession’ being changed to ‘Protzession.’ The narrowing of the scope for Jewish entertainers making self-ironical fun of ‘Jewish-ness,’ which Peter Jelavich describes in this volume, was also due to the effortless publication of jokes like these. While censors were highly sensitive to the possible ambiguities of all sorts of caricatures and jokes, they accepted an anti-Semitic clarity, which in this case ex-

96 Martina Kessel cluded Jewish Germans from the community of those who suffered at home. This undercurrent of exclusion through humour, proclaiming Jewish non-suffering, was important because the most prominent humour topics for the home front were the population’s suffering and the government’s failure to satisfy people’s needs. In the later war years, a typical postcard announcing ‘The death of our last loaf of bread’ circulated repeatedly in various versions. Designed like a typical obituary notice, one of them read: Only this way: Deeply distressed and very hungry we sadly announce that our last loaf of bread, only 5 days old, has been eaten this morning. The bereaved family asks for twice 500 gr bread ration cards. (We also accept ‘war rolls,’ even if they are black, as usual.) The bereaved family: Father Georg Hunger. Mother: Marie Hunger, b. Starved. Aunts: Nanny Skinniness and Kuni Lack-of-Flour. Uncle: Lack-of-Meat.62

The postcard was produced by the publishing house of Christian Stahl in Munich. Postcards posed the problem for censors that they could be reprinted indefinitely as long as the original plates existed. After several warnings had failed, the Munich censors confiscated the whole set of plates and formats in January 1918 in order to stop the reprinting.63 Not surprisingly, a stylistically identical postcard passed with flying colours, an obituary notice for Italy and the Italian-German coalition, published by Dammerhuber in Munich after Italy declared war.64 Censors had already in 1916 received notice that food shortages must not be made fun of, and Karl Valentin was ordered off stage for six weeks because he had compared the living conditions of average people with the comfortable life of the Bavarian king.65 The obituary notice’s sarcasm was too close for comfort as it did not end on an affirmative, jovial note. At a time when hunger was an everyday experience and strikes loomed large, such comments threatened to whip up protests. Still, publishers simply continued to publish such cards, which sold well. Stahl, for one, was quite accustomed to dealing with censorship authorities. In October 1917, another postcard printed by his firm was sent to Alsace. The inscription also satirized the failure of the rationing politics, recommending that the starving population should fry the meat card with the butter card in an oven heated with the coal card. The opulent meal should be rounded off by tipping the

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bread card into the combined coffee-milk card. Despite such luxury, the verse continued, everybody had so much money left that they all could sign war bonds.66 The censors in St Ludwig in Alsace confiscated the card with the argument that it satirized war bonds. Stahl was called to appear in the War Ministry, the card was forbidden in Bavaria, but the businessman immediately filed an objection67 and continued printing. Such disputes between censors and publishers had characterized the situation since August 1914. Defining what was acceptable was never resolved because it also depended on the war’s development. Criticism of the food situation, which worsened despite or rather due to the ever-increasing bureaucratization, had been rampant since 1915.68 In contrast to military decisions, the reorganization of the home front by the Third High Command in 1916 figured prominently in printed jokes. The new mayor of Berlin, Adolf Wermuth, had to suffer the title ‘Höchstkommandierender in den Brotmarken,’ a play of words that again only works in German. ‘Oberkommandierender in den Marken’ (Supreme Commander in the Mark) was the correct title for the military superstructure, but he was called ‘Supreme Commander in bread ration cards.’69 In this case, it is very likely that publishers picked up and quickly legitimized the latest invention of the Berliner Schnauze, the legendary Berlin wit. Wermuth in turn complained that the population never acknowledged how much the administration actually achieved but only mocked its shortcomings.70 While authorities became more wary of soldiers’ trench journals, Jan Rüger has shown how the urban authorities relented in their grip on metropolitan popular culture in 1916 and allowed individual artists to make fun of prominent people on stage, explicitly including Hindenburg among the persons stand-up comedians were allowed to parody.71 However, with regard to the military hero the boundaries of the permissible became particularly clear. At least until the summer of 1918, it was close to impossible to satirize him legitimately as a military commander. His success at the Eastern front was celebrated by the population and by journalists alike, in poems and humorous editions without a trace of irony but emphasizing his good-natured closeness to ‘the people.’72 In picture jokes regarding the home front, however, a uniformed butcher was already in 1916 given his characteristic hair and whiskers. Standing behind the counter in a shop bursting with meat and sausages, the extremely well-fed man warbled obligingly to an elegant young woman: ‘From now on, you will be served prompt-

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ly!’73 Although very few might have transferred the butcher image to the front at this point when the Hindenburg myth had deeply taken hold, still the joke could satirise the government’s (broken) promises in general, point out that the military were not able to guarantee the food supply, or indicate how much the rationing politics, fuelling the black market, only served the needs of the rich. Next to this picture joke, another drawing with a 30-line-verse criticized that numerous signs posted at a house offered eggs, but only the tiniest, almost invisible and written in pencil, told the truth, namely: ‘Eggs sold out!’74 While local authorities obviously had to tolerate greater derision regarding the situation at the home front,75 printed matter also tried to convey communicative rules for such criticism. For example, it could be important how newspapers arranged humorous commentaries, meaning literally that it might make a difference what kind of jokes were printed together on a page. Der Brummer: Lustige KriegsBlätter, another typical journal made up of jokes and humorous stories, in 1916 carried the picture joke of a French soldier who pulled a wheelbarrow with some trash and explained to an officer that this garbage was all the Germans had left over from a whole French company. On the same page, a verse entitled After Heine reformulated one of Heine’s most famous poems, ‘Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten’ (I don’t know what it could mean). Heine’s poem, picking up a ballad by Clemens Brentano from 1801, described the Loreley, a mythical female figure above the Rhine who lured skippers with her beautiful voice closer to the banks only to have them destroyed by the treacherous waters. The poem became immensely popular in German culture, and it was often parodied. This particular parody described how all the shops used to be full in former days and now were all empty, due to the High Command’s fixing of prices.76 In effect, it could imply how the population had been lured by the hollow promises of a government unable or unwilling to deliver. Heine definitely did not belong to the pantheon of affirmative German humour but was an icon of satire’s critical tradition. But the verse had the same character as a dozen others that appeared in Humour in the Knapsack, and they were obviously acceptable as long as they appeared with stories that celebrated the superiority and endurance of the German soldiers. In turn, such a combination also suggested that civilians might complain as long as they held out just like soldiers. The debates about the permissible also occurred among the authorities themselves, who repeatedly disagreed about what they should let

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pass. Postcards complaining about shortages or the hoarding problem kept censors busy because producers could always hope to be lucky. The Kriegspresseamt in Berlin, for example, argued in 1916 that a lot of cards commented in a ‘harmless way’ on the shortages, and that while such cards should not be reprinted, it would be economically too harsh on the firms to confiscate those that were ready to be sold.77 In other cases, as with Stahl’s ration card inscription, the censors came too late, after the cards had already been advertised in shop windows, sold, and sent. In other instances, publishers shrewdly passed on the responsibility to the population, by pointing to consumers whom they could not control. When the Bavarian military authorities in August 1916 criticized the printing firm Andelfinger and Company for a card with the inscription ‘Abstinence is fun,’ the publisher promised not to print the text any more. In the same letter, however, he argued that he could not be held responsible when buyers imprinted his harmless cards with all sorts of text.78 Finally, the authorities sometimes flatly admitted to being unable to control people’s emotions and simply hoped that some thorny issue would be outlived by events. Particularly after 1916, the war society bristled with informal communication, circulating wild scenarios regarding the food situation. For example, in 1917 the rumour circulated that 30,000 rotten eggs had been buried on the Marsfeld in Munich.79 The Munich publisher Silberstein promptly issued a postcard with a sarcastic poem about the Marsfeld scandal, ending with the suggestion that the responsible person should hang. While the Munich police wanted to confiscate all copies already circulating, war minister von Hellingrath stopped them with the realistic assessment that, given the unusually high number of cards already sold, it would be either impossible or simply useless.80 Postcards in a sense travelled on their own. They could be and were produced by individuals, and they could be amended by hand. They carried an even wider range of opinions than printed jokes, including forbidden demands for peace or sarcastic commentaries about the emptiness of official peace talk. It is important to emphasize, however, that cards rejecting the war in clearly political terms were the exception. Also, postcards criticizing the bad living conditions were by no means the only variant. Without being able to quantify, it can still be said that censors confiscated at least as many patriotic and militaristic postcards as products that dealt critically with the deprivations. The reasons for confiscation were manifold, either because the cards continued to denigrate the Allies and thereby also belittled the German

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war effort, because they gave too much information about a particular area of fighting, or because they showed destroyed houses or dead horses after a battle.81 All these messages were passed on in humorous guise. Far from implying that it is therefore impossible to systematize the meaning of humour, it is in fact exactly their multitude and their huge variety that point to an underlying message: humour turned into one of the most effective means to talk about war and the war society. The notion of German humour, ergo the connection between talking in a supposedly humorous vein and projecting a united German nation, had been forged in the nineteenth century. The corresponding perception that German unity was won through war had carried enormous weight since 1870–1. The idea of Burgfrieden relied on this correlation, and humour coded as German supplied it with a powerful language. Ubiquitous and repetitive, it offered semantics and images that at the same time promised the restoration of the old order and allowed criticism of what was perceived as current disorder. The boundaries of the permissible, however, remained disputed to the end, revealing continued conflicts in German society that centred on differering definitions of what it meant to be a nation. In humorous poems, soldiers asserted their own courage and attacked those Germans whom they considered cowards, while others satirized military drill and shortcomings in the army. Civilians called for militaristic aggression and criticized the authorities for not supplying them with the necessary means of holding out. While sometimes transporting radical criticism, such humour most often served to pinpoint particular grievances, not reservations about politics in general. Still, censors took no risks, but, at least on the home front, their efforts regularly came too late. Anti-Semitism, however, was a different story. The more disunity in German society became obvious and uncontrollable, the more the radical exclusion showed, turning the attack on ‘Jewishness’ into a defining and negative measure of non-belonging. Hurtful jokes implied that Jewish Germans still were not and might never be part of the Volksgemeinschaft in arms, as jokes excluded them from both the imagined community of cheerful fighters at the front and the mocking community of sufferers at home. This inner exclusion, transported through a paternalistic narrative of German society defined as German humour and presented as the only legitimate story about war, was an uncanny legacy of the war. The fight over the war’s meaning in the late Weimar Republic would be won by those who once again

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used humour to define war against inner and outer enemies as the source for unity. notes 1 Martina Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death? “German Humor” in the Two World Wars,’ in Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann (New York: Routledge, 2008), 197–218. For a similar approach, see Jan Rüger, ‘Laughter and War in Berlin,’ History Workshop Journal 67 (2009): 23–43. 2 Karl Heinz Bohrer, ed., Sprachen der Ironie – Sprachen des Ernstes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Hermann Bausinger, ‘Lachkultur,’ in Vom Lachen: Einem Phänomen auf der Spur, ed. Thomas Vogel (Tübingen: Attempto-Verlag, 1992), 9–23. 3 Bernd-Jürgen Warneken, ‘Der sozialkritische Witz als Forschungsproblem,’ Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 74 (1978): 20–39. 4 Ursula E. Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin: Von der Märzrevolution bis zu Bismarcks Entlassung. Illustrierte politische Witzblätter einer Metropole 1848–1890 (Cologne: Informationspresse Leske, 1991); Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Martin Baumeister, Kriegstheater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultur 1914–1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2005). 5 Jefferson S. Chase, Inciting Laughter: The Development of ‘Jewish Humor’ in Nineteenth Century German Culture ( Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2000). 6 For their aggressive character, see Reinhard Hippen, Das Kabarett der spitzen Feder (Zurich: Pendo Verlag, 1986), 48. The connection between war and humour did not start only then, but it intensified markedly. 7 Martina Kessel, ‘Gelächter, Männlichkeit und soziale Ordnung. “Deutscher Humor” und Krieg 1870–1918,’ in Kulturgeschichte: Fragestellungen, Konzepte, Annäherungen, ed. Christina Lutter et al. (Wien: Studienverlag, 2004), 97–116, here 102–7. For an impressive analysis of German war culture, see Michael Geyer, ‘The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in Twentieth-Century Germany,’ German Studies Review 15 (1992): 75–110. 8 Peter Jelavich, ‘Performing High and Low: Jews in Modern Theater, Cabaret, Revue, and Film,’ in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890– 1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 208–35. 9 Koch, Der Teufel in Berlin, 189.

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10 Artur Moeller van den Bruck, Lachende Deutsche: Vom HumoristischHeroischen, Grünwald und Rembrandt, Sachs und Grimmelshausen, Jean Paul und Hoffmann, Böcklin und Liliencron, lachende Ewigkeit (Minden: Bruns, 1910). 11 Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkuultur 1850–1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997). 12 Baumeister, Kriegstheater, esp. 67ff. 13 Thomas Taterka, ‘“Der deutsche Krieg im Deutschen Gedicht.” Die deutsche Weltkriegslyrik und ihr treuer Begleiter Julius Bab,’ Krieg und Literatur 5 (1999): 5–20; Siegfried Quandt and Horst Schichtel, eds., Der Erste Weltkrieg als Kommunikationsereignis (Gießen: Justus-Liebig-Universität, 1993); Nicolas Beaupré, ‘Frontliteratur des Ersten Weltkrieges. Entstehung eines literarischen Phänomens im Kontext des Krieges (Deutschland, Frankreich, 1914–1920),’ Krieg und Literatur 9 (2003): 69–84. 14 Eberhard Demm, ‘Propaganda and Caricature in the First World War,’ Journal of Contemporary History 28 (1993): 163–92, esp. 167ff.; Niels Weise, Der ‘lustige’ Krieg: Propaganda in deutschen Witzblättern 1914–1918 (Rahden: Marie Leidorf Verlag, 2004). Weise still advances a traditional notion of propaganda as an exclusively top-down affair. 15 In France, the Canard Enchaîné could establish itself after 1915 as a critical voice toward the war, see Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor: The Canard Enchaîné and World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 16 A collection of German and Allied caricatures in Eberhard Demm, ed., Der Erste Weltkrieg in der Karikatur (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1988). 17 Gott strafe England: Kampfschrift in Bild und Wort (Munich: Simplicissimus, 1915). 18 Weise, Der ‘lustige’ Krieg, 85. 19 Wolfgang Natter, Literature at War 1914–1940: Representing the ‘Time of Greatness’ in Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 154–5. 20 Joachim S. Heise, ‘“Ein Gruß den Unsrigen!” Betriebliche Kriegszeitschriften deutscher Unternehmen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Forschungsstand, neue Positionen, Bibliographie,’ Krieg und Literatur 2 (1996): 93–123, here 95. 21 Sigrid Metken, ‘“Ich hab’ diese Karte im Schützengraben geschrieben …” Bildpostkarten im Ersten Weltkrieg,’ in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges, ed. Rainer Rother (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1994), 137–48, here 140. Some firms even established an outlet in the occupied territories in France. For this point and statistics, see Otto May, ‘Postkarten als Träger von Mentalität und Propaganda,’ in Bildungs – und kulturgeschichtliche Bildforschung, ed. Rudolf Keck (Baltmannsweiler:

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Schneider-Verlag Hohengehren, 2006), 140–58. See also Christine Brocks, Die bunte Welt des Krieges: Bildpostkarten aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg 1914– 1918 (Essen: Klartext, 2008). Martin Baumeister, ‘“L’effet de réel”: Zum Verhältnis von Film und Krieg 1914 bis 1918,’ in Krieg und Militär im Film des 20 Jahrhunderts, ed. Bernhard Chiari (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), 245–68, here 259f. Pierre Purseigle, ‘Mirroring Societies at War: Pictorial Humour in the British and French Popular Press during the First World War,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 289–328, esp. 326; Jean-Yves Le Naour, ‘Laughter and Tears in the Great War: The Need for Laughter / The Guilt of Humour,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 265–75, esp. 268. See also Kessel, ‘Gelächter, Männlichkeit und soziale Ordnung.’ Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007), 390. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Black Swan, 1990). Jay Winter, ‘The Great War and the Persistence of Tradition: Languages of Grief, Bereavement and Mourning,’ in War, Violence, and the Modern Condition, ed. Bernd Hüppauf (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1997), 33–45. Umberto Eco, ‘Der Mythos vom Supermann,’ in Umberto Eco, Apokalyptiker und Integrierte: Zur kritischen Kritik der Massenkultur, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 187–232, esp. 212f. For a more detailed argument, see Martina Kessel, ‘Gewalt schreiben. “Deutscher Humor” in den Weltkriegen,’ in Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte 1900–1933, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 229–58, and Kessel, ‘Laughing about Death?’ Hermann Bausinger, ‘Ironisch-witzige Elemente in der heutigen Alltagskommunikation,’ in Hermann Bausinger, Der blinde Hund: Anmerkungen zur Alltagskultur (Tübingen: Verlag Schwäbisches Tageblatt, 1991), 243–56, here 252. Der Witze-Feldwebel. Ein bunter Strauß Kasernenhofblüten, zusammengefegt von Artur Lokesch (= Tornister-Humor, vol. 18) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1915]). Wieder bei Muttern: Feldgrauer Heimatsfilm, gekurbelt von Alfred Brief (=Tornister-Humor, vol. 19) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1915]). The explicit claim of superiority was made by Hanns Floerke, Deutsches Wesen im Spiegel der Zeiten (Berlin: Reichl, 1916), 95–8. Schipper Hans und Schipper Franz. Urberliner Humor im Feld und daheim, erlauscht von Georg Mühlen-Schulte (= Tornister-Humor, vol. 8) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1916]), 34. Ibid., 20, 21–2.

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33 For further examples, see Kessel, ‘Gewalt schreiben,’ 237–8. 34 Christoph Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten. Desertion und Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996); Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Verweigerungsformen von Frontsoldaten in der deutschen Armee 1914–1918,’ in Gewalt im Krieg: Ausübung, Erfahrung und Verweigerung von Gewalt in Kriegen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Andreas Gestrich (Münster: Lit, 1996), 99–122. 35 Der gemütliche Sachse 20, no. 6 (1915): n.p. (p. 14). 36 Scott Spector, ‘Was the Third Reich Movie-Made? Interdisciplinarity and the Refraiming of “Ideology,”’American Historical Review 106 (2001): 460–84. 37 Bundesarchiv, Militärarchiv Freiburg, MSG 2/1918, poem: ‘Gräme dich nicht in der Türkei,’ apparently from 1917. 38 Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration: Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003), 71. 39 Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 130–65; Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, 67. For the growing differences among politicians and intellectuals, see also Steffen Bründel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat: Die ‘Ideen von 1914’ und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2003). On the shifting balance of power at the home front: Volker Ullrich, ‘Kriegsalltag. Zur inneren Revolutionierung der Wilhelminischen Gesellschaft,’ in Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (Munich: Piper, 1994), 603–21; Wilhelm Deist, ‘The German Army, the Authoritarian Nation-State and Total War,’ in State, Society and Mobilisation in Europe during the First World War, ed. John Horne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 164. 40 Bundesarchiv, Militärarchiv Freiburg, MSG 2/930, poem in a letter from the front, First World War (1 H 46/2). 41 Bernd Ulrich, Die Augenzeugen. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs – und Nachkriegszeit 1914–1933 (Essen: Klartext, 1997), 66. 42 Ibid., 118. 43 Review of Heinrich Zille, Vadding in Frankreich (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, 1915), in Berliner Tageblatt, reprinted on the last page of Heinrich Zille, Vadding in Ost und West (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, 1916). 44 For French trench journals see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War (repr., Oxford: Berg, 1995). For German criticism of French

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45 46 47

48 49

50 51 52

53

54 55 56

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journals: Unser Kronprinz. W(itzige) T(ornister=)B(erichte) von Ihm und seiner Armee, ed. Alfred Brie (= Tornister-Humor, vol. 13) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1915]), 60–2. Das lustige Buechel der Liller Kriegszeitung (Lille: Verlag der Liller Kriegszeitung, May 1916), 5. Henri Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Alcan, 1900). Alex Watson, ‘Self-deception and Survival: Mental Coping Strategies at the Western Front, 1914–18,’ Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006): 247–68, here 254, and Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Watson emphasizes the similarities between British and German ways of coping. Watson, ‘Self-deception,’ 254. Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003). Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis – Kriegserfahrung 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998). Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M Kr Bildsammlung, 97. Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 209. With further literature: Andrea Hopp, ‘Zur Medialisierung des antisemitischen Stereotyps im Kaiserreich,’ in Antisemitische Geschichtsbilder, ed. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Sieg (Essen: Klartext, 2009), 23–37. Simplicissimus 21, no. 9 (5 May 1916): 107. Simplicissimus 20, no. 12 (22 June 1915): 143. Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, ‘Terror in Germany 1918–19: Visual Commentaries on Rosa Luxemburg’s Assassination,’ in Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, ed. Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 127–66. On anti-Semitism during the war and the momentous meaning of the Judenzählung, see Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971). See also Werner Bergmann and Juliane Wetzel, ‘Antisemitismus im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg: Ein Forschungsüberblick,‘ in Erster Weltkrieg. Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich:

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60 61 62 63

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65

66 67

68

69

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Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 437–67, esp. 439–48. See also the essay by Peter Jelavich in this volume. Der gemütliche Sachse 20, no. 5 (1915): 11. For the time up to 1914 see Martina Kessel, ‘The “Whole Man”: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth Century Germany,’ Gender and History 15 (2003): 1–31. Reinhold Zellmann, Ernstes und Heiteres aus dem Weltkriege. Eine Sammlung von Feldpostbriefen (Leipzig: Xenien-Verlag, 1917), 52–4, 56–7. Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter, no. 119 (1916): 7. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M Kr Bildsammlung, 3439. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13 345/1, No. 392 P 5., Stellvertretendes Generalkommando I. beim Armeekommando, Munich, 17.1.1918, Stahl. Stefan Kestler, Die deutsche Auslandsaufklärung und das Bild der Ententemächte im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Propagandaveröffentlichungen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994), 179. Gary Stark, ‘All Quiet on the Home Front. Popular Entertainments, Censorship, and Civilian Morale in Germany, 1914–1918,’ in Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, ed. Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee (Providence: Berghahn, 1995), 57–80, here 72–3. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M KR Bildsammlung, 3433, Poststempel Munich, 4.10.1917. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13 345/1, I 16663, Durch das A.O.K. B (IIIb), 9.10.1917, dem Stellv. Generalkommando des I. K.B. Armeekorps, Munich; Nr. 168461, A./17. Erlaß des K. Bayer. Kriegsministeriums. Chickering, Great War and Urban Life, 390; Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning, Politics, Identity, and Food in World War I Berlin (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1992); Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, 26–53. Uns kann keiner. Feine Kosthappen aus der Kriegsküche, gehamstert von Alfred Brie (=Tornister-Humor, vol. 30) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d.[1916]), 50. Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden, 28. Rüger, ‘Laughter and War in Berlin.’ Members of the House of Hohenzollern were not to be parodied, just like Frederick the Great. As just one example: Hindenburg-Anekdoten. Unser Hindenburg im Spiegel des Humors. Nebst vielen feldgrauen Schnurren aus dem Osten. Ein zweiter Tornister voll Humor eingepackt von Felix Schloemp (=Tornister-

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73 74 75 76

77 78

79

80

81

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Humor, vol. 2) (Berlin: Lustige Blätter, n.d. [1915]). See also Chickering, Great War and Urban Life, 389; Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25–6. ‘Alles da!’ in Uns kann keiner, 35. ‘Sechs Schilder,’ in Uns kann keiner, 34. Chickering, Great War and Urban Life, 390. Der Brummer: Lustige Kriegs-Blätter, no. 97 (1916): 3. ‘Nach Heine: Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, geh ich durch die Straßen einmal, die Läden der Schlachter, vor Zeiten so voll, sind plötzlich so kahl! Die Schaufenster leer sich erweisen von allem was einst wir drin sah’n – Und das hat mit seinen Höchstpreisen das Oberkommando getan!’ Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13 345/1, Kriegspresseamt Oberzensurstelle Berlin, Nr. 12204 O.Z., 25.8.1916. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13/345/1, C. Andelfinger & Co. an das Kriegs-Ministerium, Munich, Armee-Abteilung I, Pressereferat, 9.8.1916. Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 243. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv, M Kr 13/345/1, Nr. 134438. A., Kriegsministerium an das K. Staatsministerium des Innern, Munich, 26.8.1917. Examples in Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv Munich, M Kr Bildsammlung.

4 Producing a Cheerful Public: Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism MONIKA PATER Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice!1

In this poem Bertolt Brecht describes how simple and harmless words turn out treacherous or at least problematic in the Third Reich because they might signal silent assent or compliance with issues not to be spoken about. The bulk of entertainment shows offered by German broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s were made up of harmless utterings and jokes. This paper will consider these seemingly apolitical radio programs, usually described as bright or cheerful in the radio guides of the time. Cheerfulness, however, is not the prominent feature that comes to mind when thinking about radio during National Socialism. These broadcasts and the overall schedule structure that developed during the 1930s were part of an overall understanding of propaganda voiced by Joseph Goebbels and Eugen Hadamovsky, head of the national radio production (Reichssendeleiter), that gave priority to diversion and entertainment. However, this understanding of propaganda was met with unflinching resistance, for example by Alfred Rosenberg, proponent of the idea of a ‘truly German’ aka ‘Aryan’ culture which was not to be tainted by popular mass culture. But for several reasons – discussed below – the concept of entertainment as the precondition for keeping listeners tuned in prevailed so that entertainment programs, especially those offering music, expanded gradually but steadily until they became the focal point of the war schedule.2 Usually, this strategy was seen as successful as there was a high support of the Nazi regime until the second half of the war.3

Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 109 But this overestimates the power of the media and underestimates the role of the general social conditions. Crucial for the acceptance of National Socialism were the experiences of the German populace in the last years of the Weimar Republic and the transition period that lasted until June 1934, times that were characterized by political and economic instability.4 The experiences of this period, which seemed like an almost everlasting crisis, resulted in the desire for a ‘normal life’ in stable and ordered conditions, which was characteristic for the general spirit during the early 1930s.5 The necessary basis for a normal (i.e., somewhat more secure) life was a decrease in unemployment rates and poverty. As employment gradually grew, so did hopes for a stable and acceptable standard of living.6 The National Socialist concepts of entertainment, voiced by Joseph Goebbels as Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda as early as 1934, tied in with these wishes for a normal life. This concept could not immediately be put into practice. In the first two years, heavily ideological broadcasts – be it talks, radio plays, or entertainment – dominated the schedule.7 Cheerfulness became a central feature in the descriptions of actual radio programs from the end of 1934 onwards. Unfortunately, only a few tapes of humorous broadcasts have survived,8 but they can still serve as a typical example of how popular culture was framed by the regime while still meeting ‘the people’s’ expectations and desires. However, ‘the people’ must be recognized as a problematic concept in the context of the Third Reich. Broadcasts were aimed at those defined as belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community); hence, in the entertainment shows of the 1930s, only a few traces remain of those excluded from this community. Peter Reichel and Kaspar Maase have pointed to the dual nature of the Third Reich, referring to its delicate balance between terror and agreement. Both demonstrate the role of leisure and entertainment in stabilizing National Socialism.9 Radio entertainment clearly belonged to the bright and fascinating side in the 1930s, aiming to produce if not commitment then at least a kind of passive agreement and acquiescence. By definition, exclusion, followed by terror, only leaked through in these broadcasts, perhaps as a kind of reminder that it was advisable not to cross the line to unacceptable behaviour. However, after 1933, people defined as ‘undesirable’ were not only almost immediately removed from the broadcasting workforce but also, albeit more gradually, excluded from the audience. If indeed horror and idyll were produced in combination as the psychologist Peter Brückner ar-

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gues in his recollections,10 it is necessary to consider them in relation to each other to investigate how they were linked. How was the German broadcasting audience of the 1930s redefined on the basis of the racist concept of the Volksgemeinschaft to exclude ‘undesirables’ and how did that redefinition influence the program? How did programs designed to convey a particular mood contribute to the construction of the ordinary, the everyday, and how did this in turn help to achieve a consensus among those belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft? The chapter first describes broadcast-related measures of exclusion, considering workforce, broadcast content, and the audience. Second, it discusses measures of inclusion by looking at the development of the overall program structure with a focus on humorous shows and light entertainment, in particular the popular radio show Merry Saturday Afternoon by the Reichssender Cologne. Seemingly apolitical and insignificant, the program structure as well as the radio show are on a functional level strikingly similar to the program offered by the BBC in the 1930s. The developments in British broadcasting are used as a frame of reference to be able to differentiate between ideologically induced programs, specific to National Socialism, and output which owes more to the characteristics of broadcasting, such as its cyclical and serial character, daily occurrence, and sociability,11 non-specific to the political system. Light radio entertainment can be considered as popular culture from above that wants to provide a sense of belonging to a clearly defined part of the German population. In this paper, popular culture is understood as an ambiguous term as it was imposed on audience members who nevertheless used the media’s output to make sense of their own experiences. Listeners felt entitled to broadcasts that related to some extent to their lives and accordingly rejected programs which did not live up to these expectations. Those in charge of developing programs had to take these expectations into account. By referring to the development of British broadcasting routines, this chapter tries to assess to what extent conditions of listening actually influenced the schedule. It suggests that radio entertainment and its functions in German society of the 1930s can be better explained by looking at the conditions defined by media technology. Looking at how this technology was used and made sense of in a modern, industrialized society appears more significant than discussing it mainly as an essential part of the overarching propaganda efforts of National Socialism.12

Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 111 Listening to the radio competed with other, more established and mundane, engagements of everyday life and was not yet a widespread activity in the German pre-war society, but it still contributed to listeners’ sense of leading a ‘normal life.’ Listening to the wireless integrated ordinary citizens into the National Socialist society by allowing them to settle into their familiar surroundings while others were facing terror. In view of the extraordinary experiences of these ‘others,’ it is not surprising that light entertainment, be it film or radio, became the focus of historiography rather late. Clearly, the terror needed explaining first.13 Mechanisms of Exclusion The dismissal of employees from broadcasting stations started in March 1933, after the Reichstag elections. People were discriminated against on account of their ethnic and political ‘undesirability.’ There are no reliable data regarding all broadcasting stations during that time.14 However, the figures from the Cologne station suggest that between 13 to 20 per cent of all employees were dismissed until the summer of 1933. Top managerial positions as well as low-level assistants and technicians were replaced by committed National Socialists, thereby ensuring control of radio production within the first year.15 Not only party members profited from the dismissals, but also national-conservatives like Günter Eich took the opportunity to start a career in broadcasting.16 By discussing individual fates, Daniela Münkel shows that the range of the possible offences which could lead to dismissal was constantly growing during the Third Reich. In the years after 1933, broadcast employees continued to be discharged due to non-conformist behaviour.17 The ascent of National Socialism also involved drastic changes in the program structures. Constant modifications were accompanied by transmissions of political speeches and party meetings, whereas cultural or educational shows were reduced considerably.18 In hindsight, a Jewish worker described the effect of the continuous propagandist barrage: it was a message that did not address him and he felt that he did not belong any more.19 Such feelings probably intensified in the following years. The more indirect consequences of the Nazi takeover were also significant, leading to a decrease in cultural and educational programs, which constituted a clear contrast to the Weimar schedule.20

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Furthermore, with the intention of developing new forms of ‘völkische’ entertainment (i.e., from the German folk and culture) in compliance with the people,21 listeners were asked to contribute to the shows, for instance by submitting traditional folk songs, jokes, riddles, or funny stories from their lives.22 This combination of letters, riddles, and the chance of winning small prizes if the riddles were solved correctly appealed very strongly to listeners, as the example of the popular series Das interessiert auch Dich! (This will interest you too!), broadcast by the Leipzig station, demonstrated. Part of this regular show was called ‘From the Listener: The Best Jokes of the Month.’ It also included riddles posted by listeners which rounded off each transmission. The average number of listeners’ letters to this series allegedly amounted to 10,000 per month.23 The benchmark used to evaluate cultural products such as folk songs or jokes, for instance, was marked by the attributes ‘arteigen’ (meaning here, racially adequate) and ‘artfremd’ (not adequate).24 Hence, radio makers defined what was to be considered typically German on the radio as well as in other cultural spheres. As a consequence, they determined who belonged to ‘the people’ and who did not. Radio shows such as this one excluded the discriminated in subtle ways. Dedicated opponents of the system or those defined as racially or socially ‘undesirable’ were probably less able to contribute merry events from their daily lives or traditional songs due to the discriminating everyday circumstances they were exposed to and/or were forced to live in. In turn, by constructing a particular cultural community this kind of series provided those considered part of the Volksgemeinschaft with a feeling of belonging and identity. However, this is a generic feature of media output and not specific to National Socialism’s broadcasting. Morley describes similar mechanisms of power in present-day programs: ‘By the very way (and to the very extent that) a programme signals to members of some groups that it is designed for them and functions as an effective invitation to their participation in social life, it will necessarily signal to members of other groups that it is not for them and indeed, that they are not among the invitees to its particular forum of sociability.’25 Hence, targeting an imagined audience with certain properties can in itself result in the exclusion of others who do not share these properties or cultural background. Yet, specific to NS Germany was the extent of exclusion, and the mainly anti-Semitic criteria of exclusion. Anti-Semitism was openly evident in the weekly transmitted series

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Wir treiben Familienforschung (Doing family research), which had an advisory character and was broadcasted from 1934 until 1941. More openly than entertainment shows, the series demonstrated the mechanisms of exclusion by inclusion. At stake here was the proof of ‘Aryan’ descent. The series’ purported ‘inexhaustibility’ was seen as a result of the listeners’ diverse and many contributions.26 In developing the series, German folklore (‘Volkstum’) played an important role.27 Broadcasts with an entertaining and/or advisory character supported those that openly advocated exclusion. This applied, for instance, to the lecture Rasse und Volk – Artung und Leistung (Race and people – kind and achievement), which was broadcast on 18 August 1936, by the Berlin station, and other lectures on questions of race aired in the same time slot. These lectures and the show Doing Family Research were characteristic for the early years of NS programming. With a few exceptions, one of them being Doing Family Research, the number of openly racist shows declined in the following years. In addition, Jews were gradually excluded from the radio audience. Uta C. Schmidt points out that as early as 1936, Jewish radio salesmen were kept from selling wireless sets. Furthermore, those considered to be of ‘non-Aryan’ descent were not viewed as relevant listeners as they could not apply to be exempted from paying broadcasting fees.28 This exclusion from the audience was finalized when the Reichssicherheitshauptamt decreed in September 1939 that ‘Jews’ had to hand in their radio sets, thereby cutting them off effectively from foreign broadcasts.29 The decree was followed by a regulation which required the seller of wireless sets to register each purchase by name and address, forestalling Jews from buying a new set after submitting their old one to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.30 The Development of Broadcasting Programs and Their Use: The Wireless as a Companion The development and standardization of entertainment programs were embedded in the discourse about the Volksgemeinschaft, and they were based on the exclusion of those defined as not belonging. The attempts to orchestrate the Volksgemeinschaft were part of everyday life in Germany in the 1930s, and culture makers saw broadcasting as an instrument to further the community.31 Hence, it was vitally important that the number of wireless sets increased and that people turned on the radio and stayed tuned. Comparable to the develop-

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ment in other industrialized countries, the number of wireless sets multiplied quickly during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1942, there existed a radio set in approximately every second German household.32 In 1933–4, the overt propagandistic character of the program did not motivate people to listen. Quickly, it became obvious that listeners could not be forced to switch on the radio. However, as it was so important to keep people listening, Goebbels underlined the necessity of entertaining a hard-working population via the wireless. From 1935 onward, radio stations introduced a number of new shows, embedded in a discourse about spending leisure time with and through broadcasting.33 However, one should be careful not to take this discourse too seriously as that might lead to reproducing NS views concerning the success of their propaganda34 and to disregarding the agency of the listeners. Although the aim was clearly defined as increasing the performance and the commitment of the workforce (constructed as male) and their wives, the daily schedule owed more to the conditions of production and reception than to the propaganda aims of the ministry of propaganda. Taking into account the circumstances of listening, the Deutschlandsender (DS, German broadcasting station) developed a program schedule including standardized formats based on the tacit knowledge of daily routines. Thus, the wireless was now being turned into a companion for the whole day. The recurring daily schedule included first the early morning shows, to cheer people up on their way to work, then the factory break shows and the Serenade to the Housewife, followed by a lunch break show called Sundries from 2 until 3 (Allerlei von 2 bis 3), which offered music and almost no talk during the time people were expected to hold their siestas. The time slot from 3 to 5:30 p.m. addressed women and children, while the daily show And Now Is Evening Leisure intended to offer ‘merry spirits and good entertainment at a time when the worker tiredly returns from work.’ This series was primarily composed of music and variety shows.35 Here, leisure time was presented as complementing work. The program schedule was, moreover, deeply gendered, particularly the notion of the male working day with its clearly marked beginning and end, and the ceaseless work of the housewife organized the schedule. Again, however, that was not specific to Germany. In fact, in many industrialized countries, the emergence of the wireless as a mass medium was connected to addressing housewives as radio consumers, with special attention given to programs considered rel-

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evant.36 But the specific ideological nature of the German schedule became evident when the NS Frauenschaft in vain demanded programs for working women.37 This is the only example so far discovered where the ideological aims (in this case the reproduction of traditional gender roles) were more important than the attempt to reach out to a specific group in the audience. The program schedule, addressing a family audience, changed very little between 1935 and 1939. Any deviation from the scheme was due to exceptional political events such as the annexation of Austria in 1938.38 The structure’s relative stability indicated the development of routines in production and reception. ‘“How to do broadcasting,” in all respects, had to be discovered,’39 and the solution to the problem of how best to fill the available air time was found more or less at the same time in Germany and Britain. The answer was serial production and fixed schedules. The recurring and recursive daily structure was developed alongside a weekly structure which also reflected the desire to organize a fixed schedule. The names of the variety shows Blue Monday (broadcast from Breslau)40 and Merry Saturday Afternoon from Cologne already showed their function of entertaining and consoling their audience on particular days of the week. The attribute ‘recursive’ points to the feature of serial production as a means of ensuring predictability. The format, and with it the presenter(s), the signature tunes, and standardized openings and closings, remained unaltered. At the same time, applying a program format allowed for variations which were in turn expected by the audience, and were also part of the promise to entertain and please.41 This program structure encouraged the use of the wireless as a companion throughout the whole day. It is difficult to say to what extent this became daily practice in the 1930s. However, unpublished letters from listeners stored in the archives of the Station Cologne (WDR) indicate that the mentioned examples, offering music and carefree, cheerful talk, were accepted quite well. The letters suggest that at least the early morning shows with their time check announcements became increasingly important to the daily routine of radio listeners: Every morning my eldest leaves merrily for school; he tells me ‘Mami, the radioman has said it’s time to go to school, therefore I have to go now.’ They like to listen to the jokes Mr Rauher makes. So, early in the morning the wireless brings some cheerfulness into our home.42

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Another listener wrote: Thank God we have got our old wireless back as in former years. Each of us leaves the house early now to arrive in the office on time, and the children are not late for school anymore. Our Mr Rauher sees to that.43

Apparently, the time check announcements became even more important during the war, as people were tired because of the nightly air raids and needed a reminder of the exact time and the incentive of cheerful music to get them going.44 Therefore, at least the early morning shows met the requirements of some of their listeners and quickly became part of a daily routine. The statement ‘Thank God we have got our old wireless back as in former years’ also indicates that at least this particular listener had come to expect this kind of service by 1934 and expressed his annoyance at a perceived break in routines (probably referring to 1933). It appears that the new medium became closely entwined with the everyday routines of its audience. Moores refers to this as ‘dailiness,’ a concept which points to the ‘ritual function and emotional significance [of recurring practices] in the day-to-day cultures’ of listeners.45 Indeed, the early morning shows from Cologne helped listeners to structure their everyday social surroundings, thereby providing them with a sense of returning to somewhat more stable and safe circumstances. However, as the second letter referred to above indicates, listeners found it difficult to differentiate these kinds of shows from those of the late 1920s and early 1930s. To appear compatible with the ideas of National Socialism, these shows were therefore framed by National Socialist rhetoric and presented as following the spirit of ‘Aus dem Volk für das Volk’ (From the people to the people) and were still in line with the ideologically oriented broadcasts offered in the transitional period from Weimar to National Socialism. The attempts to turn the wireless into a companion concurred with the withdrawal to private space that could be observed during the 1930s. Clearly, this process was partly due to National Socialism’s efforts to integrate everybody at any time into the national-ethnic community while commanding demonstrations of loyalty in public spaces. Variety Shows: Popular Culture ‘from Above’ Cheerful and entertaining programming, with variety shows as just one example, was considered an important means to motivate the

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audience to listen to the wireless.46 Radio variety shows consisted of vaudeville acts, which were summarized under a broad general theme to give the acts a common denominator, as well as musical acts, which constituted about 60 per cent of each of these broadcasts. Variety shows were also in line with the retreat to the private realm, which is why they were able to contribute so well to the already growing consensus and tacit acceptance of National Socialism in Germany. Yet, to be successful in its ideological aim, radio programming had to offer its listeners some kind of gratification. Such gratification may have been in the form of the ‘continuity with a difference’ the shows offered,47 as well as the integration of radio listening into daily or weekly routines. In his discussion of the budget of the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Daniel Mühlenfeld has recently pointed out that there was another strong incentive to offer an attractive program: the broadcasting fees, which on average provided more than 90 per cent of the ministry’s budget. Thus there were concrete economic motives to court the existing listeners and to attract new ones.48 Listeners chose specific shows to form part of their everyday life and disregarded others. It is interesting to consider the relations that existed between particular structural factors such as schedule and sociability and the content of a specific show. The following refers to the show Merry Saturday Afternoon broadcast by the Station Cologne. The show was quite popular, and it is considered one of the first blockbusters of the time. It was the prototype of a variety show and a typical example of a seemingly apolitical entertainment program. At the same time, it was clearly in line with the idea of a cheerful after-work companion. Moreover, it was presented as derived ‘from the people.’ In the pre-war years, the politics of humour consisted of presenting seemingly apolitical entertainment shows, which were openly drawing on the successful formulas of vaudeville shows and cabarets. Thus, the origins of radio variety shows lay in the music halls and stage varieties which had provided entertainment for industrialized cities since the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, stage variety, be it chorus line, stand-up comedy, or even political cabaret, became popular in all milieux.49 Hence, when developing radio entertainment, broadcasters were able to draw on established popular forms of entertainment. Consequently, one may assume that the succession of songs, gags, and other acts was familiar to at least an urban audience, that is, the majority of listeners. Similarly, Scannell and Cardiff trace the development of entertainment formats in British broadcasting back to music hall and stage variety.50 However, these urban forms of enter-

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tainment did not correspond with National Socialist ideas of typically German entertainment (‘völkische Unterhaltung’).51 Similar to popular entertainment films produced in the 1930s,52 National Socialist ideology in broadcasting does not appear conspicuous, and the issues referred to likewise seem ‘timeless.’ This may be one reason for the framing of shows with National Socialist rhetoric. The show Merry Saturday Afternoon ran, with some disruptions, from November 1934 to October 1939. During the first years, the show was broadcast weekly every Saturday afternoon from 4 to 6 p.m. From October 1937 until its disappearance in October 1939, it was aired once a month. By and by, it was transmitted by national and almost all regional stations. The show was broadcast live from increasingly larger locations. The press presented it as providing sunny, folkloristic cheerfulness, thereby also offering an interpretative frame for its reception. Judging by the show’s growing success and the protests after it was taken off air for a few months in 1935 and 1936, its combination of music and jokes was very popular indeed.53 Merry Saturday Afternoon exhibited characteristics similar to those Scannell and Cardiff have pointed out for British radio shows in the 1930s. It had a serial character and appeared at a fixed time in the schedule; it was familiar, as recurring characters told and offered the same main act; it was aligned to weekly routines; and it was recognizable through signature tunes for the show as a whole and almost proverbial phrases for the main act.54 The opening song, always performed by the ‘six merry singers,’ invited listeners to forget their hard workweek and start the weekend by listening to the show. The song was followed by an introductory conversation between three ‘jolly fellows’ that included the same sentences every time. Taking turns, they would ask each other: Have you taken the milk from the stove? Turned the bathwater off? Taken the Sunday cake out of the oven? There’s nothing that can go wrong? Nothing overflowing? Nothing getting burnt? Well, in that case we can start! Merry Saturday afternoon to you all!55

This introduction, then, invited the audience to combine listening to the show with other activities, as it described social practices perceived as typical for a Saturday afternoon. The program attempted to tie in with existing weekly routines. The invitation to take a break and start the weekend furthermore indicated that the show provided a highlight, something special yet part of the ordinary.

Light Radio Entertainment during National Socialism 119 In fact, the three ‘jolly fellows’ ‘from the midst of the national community’ were the show’s main attraction. They linked music performances with funny dialogues and gags. They interacted with each other and with audience members who watched the live show. They made jokes on marriage and family life, and they introduced the performers. Two of these three ‘jolly fellows’ represented regional stock characters: Hans Salcher represented the typical man from Cologne, a homey sort of guy, always cheerful and funny, and liking his drink. Karl Wilhelmi, the second stereotypical character, was from northern Germany, a rather slow man with dry humour, and always a little stand-offish. The third ‘jolly fellow,’ Rudi Rauher, was portrayed as a ‘man of the world’ with the narrative function of balancing the other two contrasting characters. As this contrast made the dialogues work, Rudi Rauher told the majority of the jokes. As in numerous other short gags and jokes, the private sphere and the little challenges of everyday life were the primary topics of their conversations. These included, for instance, Rudi’s receding brow, Hans’s fondness for beer, which regularly landed him in trouble with his wife, and the boyish pranks of Hermann, Hans’s son. With these timeless issues, derived from the realm of family life and male friendship, the program aided listeners in turning their backs on the wider, particularly political, world.56 In constructing for example the typical man from the Rhine area, the author of the show drew on stereotypes for personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics, which were well known throughout Germany, so that listeners knew what to expect. The local characters were variations of the stock character ‘petty bourgeois’ with his endearing weakness for living in humble surroundings. These stereotypes had already become popular in Germany in the nineteenth century, continued to be successful in the 1920s, and were still popular in the era of the new media, radio and film.57 Conventional elements such as these characters asserted the audience’s relationship with members of their own society and culture.58 The main act of the show, the ‘Laterna Magica,’ stood in contrast to their talks. The ‘jolly fellows’ presented curious events from all over the world. Although couched in an exotic outfit, these events also told stories of ordinary people, for instance, stories of pupils who came up with innovative ways of cheating, or of a professor who transplanted animal fur as a treatment for hair loss. Again, this applies to entertainment in general. In the limited world which is represented, an acceptable and reassuring social order exists. ‘Providing that order and reassurance is what entertainers have always done for their audiences.’59

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To a large extent, the comical effects of the show probably derived from the way these stories were told, particularly from the combination and repetition of jokes and proverbial catchphrases, as well as the slow understanding of the Hamburgian. Scannell and Cardiff explain the same mechanism working in British radio shows: ‘Like the private jokes of a family, radio comedy built up its far-fetched associations, while remaining rooted in the charm of the familiar. One resource that could always be relied upon as a shared point of reference available to all listeners was the culture of radio itself.’60 This probably applied to German radio variety shows of the 1930s as well. From 1937 onwards any reference to politics, the state, religion, the police, or the army was forbidden.61 This of course limited the thematic scope further: the only topics left for sketch comedy were from the private realm. Although the proportion of word-based entertainment programs diminished during the war, sketch comedy seems to have been broadcast all over Germany and the occupied territories. Produced mainly by the propaganda troops,62 recordings of the short comic scenes have survived that show the thematic scope: ‘The Blue Letter,’ where a secretary takes a dictation which turns out to be a marriage proposal and her dismissal by the head of the firm at the same time (May 1944); or ‘Directions for Use’ (August 1944), in which a couple-to-be operates along a gender-specific set of directions meant to ensure ‘success,’ i.e., becoming engaged to each other. However, the formulaic directions at first impede a happy ending.63 During the war, when German everyday life was characterized by largely absent men and an increasingly difficult life, the necessarily apolitical word-based entertainment resorted to fabricating scenes of happiness that again drew on an imagined social order that was stable and reassuring. Most social activities recur daily and weekly. But there are other recurring routines throughout the year, usually tied to seasonal feasts and activities. Like other variety shows, Merry Saturday Afternoon referred to the course of the year as well. In the early twentieth century, summer became synonymous with ‘vacation time,’ and broadcasting picked up on that notion. Reasons could be twofold. It was a typical feature of NS Propaganda to picture characters who had little money but were still able to go to Austria or even Italy for a holiday. But at the same time, broadcast authors who were constantly on the lookout for new material happily took up the topic of vacation. At any rate, in the only remaining typescript of the show, from August 1938, the three ‘jolly fellows’ focus on the subject of vacation. The topic was almost

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self-evidently represented at a time when, due to the efforts of the leisure organization ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (literally strength through joy), people knew that the average guy no longer had to stay at home for the holiday. The process of linking summer and vacation left its marks. Consequently, it was picked up on the radio, which in turn contributed to this process. Presenting the petty bourgeois at large, the ‘jolly fellows’ would climb the Austrian mountain Watzmann to play cards on its summit instead of admiring the view, or they would argue about who might act as a Venetian gondolier, steering an uptight married couple through the canals. The couple itself would not be interested in sightseeing; the wife would plan to write a postcard in order to show off in front of the neighbours, and her husband would look for a pub serving German beer.64 The butt of the joke was the petty bourgeois, with his limited world-view, who was probably contrasted by contemporary listeners with the ideal sightseer as represented by the advertisements of ‘Strength through Joy.’ The audience always had the chance to compare the scenes presented with their own experience. It is likely that the familiarity of the show’s content and therefore its sociable properties made it successful. According to Scannell, the relationship between broadcasters and their audience is a social one that ‘lacks any specific aim or purpose.’ He contends that this even applies to content with persuasive intentions, arguing that the decision to listen constitutes ‘a social commitment in the communicative form of every programme.’65 Although the institutional authority still lies with those producing a program, thus setting a decisive frame for the production of meaning, they are limited in their ability to control the conditions of listening. As a consequence, radio talk needed to be adapted to domestic settings of reception. It needed to address listeners in a friendly and discursive style.66 The colloquial term ‘Goebbelsschnauze,’ coined in 1938 to depict the smaller version of the Volksempfänger, the DKE (German Small Receiver), invoked the blare of political speeches. However, this mode of address was not appreciated by those who coined and used this term. In contrast, the presenters of Merry Saturday Afternoon were described as belonging to the people: ‘From these three the people speak, and the people listen to these three.’67 Trying to explain the popularity of the show, its author Theo Rausch also drew on the bond with ‘the people’: ‘We are standing in your midst, and what we are saying is what you would say in exactly the

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same way.’68 The opening conversation between the three presenters also invoked a certain knowledge of the issues that were relevant to their audience. It is important to bear in mind that ‘the people’ referred to the Volksgemeinschaft. Hence, the success of the program made it a prime candidate for presenting the Volksgemeinschaft as something which had already come true.69 Generally, the success of Merry Saturday Afternoon can be seen as deriving from its format, the mode of talk, and its cheerful mood, rather than from its content. Guaranteeing a good time and with an agenda that fitted nicely with the domestic sphere and weekly routine, a format was realized that made the most of the specific conditions of broadcasting. Conclusion Numerous variety shows were listed in the radio guides of the 1930s. If we take these numbers as an indication, the format was rather successful at the time. It was a kind of harmless entertainment without consequences, demonstrating how one could adapt to the given circumstances while still finding something to laugh about. However, the example of Merry Saturday Afternoon also points to the ambiguity of popular entertainment. This kind of show could potentially apply to any system and, in fact, was the blueprint for a popular series called The Laughing Bear (Da lacht der Bär), broadcast in the early German Democratic Republic. The GDR show aimed at representing the idea of a unified Germany, and the concept of three different stereotypical local characters who linked music performances by their conversation seemed convenient for this purpose.70 In discussing present-day studies of media reception, Kirsten Drotner points out that ‘everyday life is a means to create some certainty in a world of ambivalence. And media are part of that process.’71 This signification process always takes place during political upheavals and in different systems; what is discussed here is the integration of individual programs and the broadcasting schedule into this process of creating ‘certainty’ or a feeling of stability. The ideologically driven schedule of 1933–4 was not able to provide the point of departure for the construction of a stable everyday, whereas the Merry Saturday Afternoon was. Regardless of the political system in National Socialist Germany, radio entertainment had to take into account the specific conditions of its production and reception, particularly since owning an indi-

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vidual wireless was a new experience for the majority of listeners in the 1930s, and routines in listening to the programs and handling the radio set had not yet been developed.72 The aim of attracting people to the radio and of keeping those already listening tuned in led to the development of a schedule structure that mirrored the characteristics of modern mass media in its daily or serial character. This should be recognized as the success of the medium itself rather than the success of a perfect propaganda plan. Integrating the wireless into daily routines, those defined as belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft were able to use it as a marker of an ordered social environment. The entertainment programs, as well as the overall program schedule, supported the withdrawal into the private, seemingly apolitical space of home and family. It thereby contributed to the acquiescence and stability of National Socialism. In doing so, the listeners as well as the producers tacitly accepted the exclusion of those defined as not belonging, who were not even seen as part of the audience. Constructing an audience through shows demonstrates the subtle use everyday NS propaganda put the radio to. The radio schedule was designed to integrate only the racially and socially desirable into the Volksgemeinschaft. However, the significance of the wireless and its programs needs to be put into perspective by a consideration of the increasing overall prosperity through economic revival. Consequently, the experience of listening to the wireless merged with other experiences and added up to a general sense of improvement.73 notes 1 Passage from the poem by Bertolt Brecht, ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (To Posterity): ‘Was sind das für Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist / Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!’ Translated by H.R. Hays. http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/8787Bertolt-Brecht-To-Posterity (accessed 15 September 2009). For the German text see Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9 (Frankfurt/M. 1967), 722. 2 See Thymian Bussemer, ‘“Über Propaganda zu diskutieren, hat wenig Zweck.” Zur Medien- und Propagandapolitik von Joseph Goebbels,’ in Das Goebbels-Experiment, Propaganda und Politik, ed. Lutz Hachmeister and Michael Kloft (Munich: DVA, 2005), 54; Konrad Dussel, ‘Radio Programming, Ideology and Cultural Change: Fascism, Communism and Liberal Democracy, 1920s–1950s,’ in Mass Media, Culture and Society in

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Monika Pater Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross (Houndsmill and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 80–94, 85. See Daniel Mühlenfeld, ‘Zur Bedeutung der NS-Propaganda für die Eroberung staatlicher Macht und die Sicherung politischer Loyalität,’ in Deformationen der Gesellschaft? Neue Forschungen zum Nationalsozialismus, ed. Christian A. Braun, Michael Mayer, and Sebastian Weitkamp (Berlin: WVB, 2008), 107. See Wolfgang Benz, ‘Konsolidierung und Konsens 1934–1939,’ in Das Dritte Reich im Überblick. Chronik – Ereignisse – Zusammenhänge, ed. Martin Broszat and Norbert Frei (Munich: Piper, 1999), 94–107; Mühlenfeld, ‘Zur Bedeutung der NS-Propaganda.’ This is demonstrated, for instance, by the reports to exiled social democratic leaders (SOPADE reports). These reports were written with the aim of strengthening resistance and determining when the time was right for trying to overthrow NS rule; see Bernd Stöver, ‘Loyalität statt Widerstand: Die sozialistischen Exilberichte und ihr Bild vom Dritten Reich’ Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 43 (1995): 437–71. For a similar argument see Detlef Peukert, Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfremde: Anpassung, Ausmerze und Aufbegehren unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: BundVerlag, 1992). See Stöver, ‘Loyalität statt Widerstand,’ 451. See Monika Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1: Radio im Nationalsozialismus zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern (Tübingen: edition discord, 1998), 142–4. Entertainment shows, even if they were broadcast for years, were not recorded. As everything was broadcast live, recording constituted an extra effort only made if something was considered important. Sources for information relating to entertainment shows consist mainly of radio guide articles, a few manuscripts, and program outlines of individual shows; see Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 132. See Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reichs: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1996); Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850–1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), esp. 221–3. Peter Brückner, Das Abseits als sicherer Ort: Kindheit und Jugend zwischen 1933–1945 (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1980), 38. See Shaun Moores, media/theory: Thinking about Media and Communications (Milton Park, NY: Routledge, 2005). For a more detailed discussion of the significance of the domestic setting

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in which audiences made sense of the new medium of radio in Britain, see Shaun Moores, ‘“The Box on the Dresser”: Memories of Early Radio and Everyday Life,’ in Media, Culture and Society 10 (1994): 23–40; for Germany see Monika Pater and Uta C. Schmidt, ‘“Vom Kellerloch bis hoch zur Mansard’ ist alles drin vernarrt” – Zur Veralltäglichung des Radios im Deutschland der 1930er Jahre,’ in Medienalltag: Domestizierungsprozesse alter und neuer Medien, ed. Jutta Röser (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006), 103–16. This is not to say there has been no analysis of entertainment programs. See for example Nanny Drechsler, Die Funktion der Musik im deutschen Rundfunk 1933–1945 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988), or Wolfram Wessels, Hörspiele im Dritten Reich: Zur Institutionen-, Theorie- und Literaturgeschichte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985). There were ten regional stations (twelve from 1938), plus the national Deutschlandsender, and the Kurzwellensender (KWS, shortwave transmitter) broadcasting overseas. For an institutional history of German broadcasting see Ansgar Diller, Rundfunkpolitik im Dritten Reich (Munich: dtv, 1980); for an overview of program development see Konrad Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland: Politik, Programm, Publikum (1923–1960) (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2002). Diller, Rundfunkpolitik, 222; Christa Nink, ‘Folgen nationalsozialistischer Personalpolitik im Westdeutschen Rundfunk 1933. Biographische Notizen – Ein Arbeitsbericht,’ Mitteilungen des Studienkreises Rundfunk und Geschichte 19, no. 4 (1993): 176. See also Daniela Münkel, ‘Produktionssphäre,’ in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1: Radio im Nationalsozialismus zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern (Tübingen, edition discord, 1998), 51–6. See Glenn R. Cuomo, Career at the Cost of Compromise: Günter Eich’s Life and Work in the Years 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989). Münkel, ‘Produktionssphäre,’ 59. Ibid., 99; Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 186. Andrew Bergerson, ‘Listening to the Radio in Hildesheim, 1923–53,’ German Studies Review 24 (2001): 83–113. Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 186. Alfred Mai, ‘Wo ist die Unterhaltung?’ Schlesische Monatshefte 2, no. 2 (1935): 98–9. Broadcasting memories of Gustav Kneip, written 15 January 1966, WestGerman Broadcasting Station (WDR) Historical Archive 29,12x1. Employed by the Westdeutsche Rundfunk AG (WERAG, West-German Broadcasting Company) since 1927, Kneip was responsible for the newly established

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‘folk music’ programs in 1933. One of his tasks was the search for unknown or forgotten folk songs. An appeal to listeners resulted in about 5,000 responses, which in turn led to the series Songs Posted by Listeners (Lieder, die Hörer uns einsandten). Similar to the strategy of the Cologne station, the Frankfurt station also placed considerable emphasis on folk songs, as can be observed in its self-portrayal 1934. See ‘Der Reichssender Frankfurt,’ Reichsrundfunk: Entwicklung, Aufbau, Bedeutung, compiled by the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft 10 (1934): 65–6. Similarly, the Reichssender Breslau asked its listeners to submit funny stories (‘lustige Begebenheiten’); see Mai, ‘Wo ist die Unterhaltung?’ 99, and Otto Paul Stehmann, Geschichte und Bedeutung der Leipziger Sender: Ein Beitrag zur Publizistik des Rundfunks (Dresden: Dittert, 1939), 81. Stehmann, Leipziger Sender, 80. Hertha Ohling, ‘Die Volkstumsarbeit des Reichssenders Köln: Volkskunde und Volkstumsarbeit – eine “politische” Aufgabe unserer Zeit!’ Reichsrundfunk no. 1 (1941–2): 16. David Morley, Home Territories, Media, Mobility and Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), 111. German Broadcasting Archive, Frankfurt am Main (DRA), Pressedienst RS Köln no. 4 (January 1938): 2. In 1937, 3,060 listeners’ letters reached the show; see Pressedienst RS Köln no. 31 (July 1938): 1. Motivated by the necessity to prove ‘Aryan’ descent, and supported by this program, family tree research became a widespread activity. The status of one’s own family, and thereby of each family member, was thus enhanced. Seen in the context of alienation and insecurity in a modern society, especially at the end of the Weimar Republic, the proof of a continuous family tree might have led to social placement and contributed to the creation of identity and a sense of belonging. The fact that this show survived the re-orientation from political to apolitical entertainment indicates that it received some response. DRA, ‘Zum 150. Male: Wir treiben Familienforschung’ (For the 150th time: We do family research), broadcast 26 January 1938, 16:00–16–30, Pressedienst RS Köln no. 4 (January 1938): 2; and ‘Am 1. März zum 200. Male’ (The 200th broadcast on 1 March), Pressedienst RS Köln no. 7 (February 1939): 11. Being exempted from paying the broadcasting fee was one of the policies by which the NS state tried to encourage the purchase of a radio set; therefore, the definition of the social groups who were able to take advantage of this policy indicates the target audience. This audience included, for example, war veterans as well as those with a low income, provided

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they were not of Jewish faith. See Uta C. Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ in Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1: Radio im Nationalsozialismus zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung, ed. Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern (Tübingen: edition discord, 1998), 299. See Bergerson, ‘Listening to the Radio in Hildesheim.’ See Michael Hensle, ‘Rundfunkverbrechen vor nationalsozialistischen Sondergerichten. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der Urteilspraxis in der Reichshauptstadt Berlin und der südbadischen Provinz‘ (PhD diss., TU Berlin, 2005), 47–50, http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2005/ 1074/pdf/hensle_michael.pdf. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, RSHA) was formed in September 1939 through the merger of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, i.e., Security Agency), the Sicherheitspolizei (consisting of the Gestapo, Secret State Police, and the Criminal Police). The RSHA was one of twelve subordinated departments in the SS with the function of identifying and fighting ‘enemies of the Reich.’ Wessels, Hörspiele, 126–7. Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 292; Chup Friemert, ‘Radiowelten. Objektgeschichte und Hörformen,’ in Chiffren des Alltags: Erkundungen zur Geschichte der industriellen Massenkultur, ed. Wolfgang Ruppert (Marburg: Jonas, 1993), 77. In 1941, 16 million wireless sets were registered; cf. Reichel, schöne Schein, 160. This is comparable to the increase in other industrialized countries. However, the number of sets per 1,000 inhabitants was lower than, for example, in Great Britain or Scandinavian countries; see Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 223. Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 143ff., 189–90. See also Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen, 199; Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland, 177. DRA Pressedienst Deutschlandsender 1937, Mitteilungen Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft 1935. This has been demonstrated by research into the implementation of the wireless. For Britain see Moores, ‘Box on the Dresser’; for the U.S., Susan Smulyan, ‘Radio Advertising to Women in Twenties America: A Latchkey to Every Home,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13 (1993): 299–314; and for Germany, Uta C. Schmidt and Monika Pater, ‘“Adriennes Hochantenne”: Geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte medialer Durchsetzungsprozesse am Beispiel des Rundfunks,’ Feministische Studien 15 (1997): 21–33, and Carsten Lenk, Die Erscheinung des Rundfunks: Vermittlungs-, Aneignungs- und Nutzungsweisen eines neuen Mediums 1923 bis 1932 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 114–15. Münkel, ‘Produktionssphäre,’ 113–14.

128 Monika Pater 38 Ibid. 39 Scannell, as cited in Moores, media/theory, 18. 40 Blue Monday was broadcast for the fiftieth time on 29 June 1936. Hence, its first broadcast probably took place at the end of 1935. See Federal Archives Koblenz, R 79, no. 784, Pressedienst RS Breslau (June 1936) (now archived in the Federal Archives Berlin). 41 Moores, Media/theory, 19. 42 ‘Der Älteste geht morgens so frisch und fröhlich zur Schule; dann sagt er: Mutti, der Radiomann hat gesagt, es sei Zeit zur Schule, nun muß ich gehen. Sie hören gerne, wenn Herr Rauher so allerhand Späße sagt. So bringt uns der Rundfunk schon morgens Frohsinn ins Haus.’ WDR, Historical Archive, February 1934, unpubl. letter no. 70 to the director of the RS Cologne, Glasmeier, as cited by Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 342. 43 ‘Gott sei Dank haben wir wieder unser altes Radio wie früher. Jeder kommt wieder zeitig ins Büro und die Kinder auch nicht mehr zu spät zur Schule, dafür sorgt ja unser Herr Rauher.’ WDR, Historical Archive, March 1934, unpubl. letter no. 40, as cited by Schmidt, ibid. 44 See the reports from the district (Gau) Westfalia-South on the broadcasting schedule, as cited by Schmidt, ‘Radioaneignung,’ 342. 45 Moores, media/theory, 17. 46 This kind of radio entertainment has not attracted as much attention as another product of popular culture, the Wunschkonzert (musical request program) that showed the propagandistic intentions more openly. See, for example, Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 224–39, and Hans-Jörg Koch, Das Wunschkonzert im NS-Rundfunk (Köln, Weimer, Wien: Böhlau, 2003). 47 Hans Dieter Schäfer, ‘Das gespaltene Bewusstsein: Über die Lebenswirklichkeit in Deutschland 1933–1945,’ in Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewusstsein: Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit (Munich, Wien: Hanser, 1981), 114–62, here 121ff.; Peukert, Volksgenossen, 90–2. 48 See Daniel Mühlenfeld, ‘Joseph Goebbels und die Grundlagen der NSRundfunkpolitik,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54, 5 (2006): 448. 49 Ellis, cited in Moores, media/theory, 18. 50 Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1: Serving the Nation 1929–1939 (Oxford and Cambridge/MA: Blackwell, 1991), 258. 51 The board-wide acceptance is evident in the use of communist agitprop groups made of this format to attract a larger audience; see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 211ff. For a description of the Berlin music halls and variety shows since the end of

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the nineteenth century see Wolfgang Jansen, Das Varieté, die glanzvolle Geschichte einer unterhaltenden Kunst (Berlin: edition hentrich 1990), 87 and 192ff. See, for example, Carsten Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1995), and more recently Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004). Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 187ff. See also Wolfgang Horn, ‘Der Reichssender Köln und der “Frohe Samstagnachmittag”: Ein Regionalprogramm im Einheitsrundfunk,’ in Rundfunk in der Region: Probleme und Möglichkeiten der Regionalität, ed. Walter Först (Cologne et al: Kohlhammer, 1984), 187–204. Scannell and Cardiff, Social History, 246–7. ‘Achtung! Achtung! … / Ist die Milch vom Herd? / Et Badewasser abgestellt? / Der Sonntagskuchen aus dem Backofen? / Kann nichts verderben? / Überlaufen? / Anbrennen? / Na, dann können wir ja anfangen! / Frohen Samstagnachmittag zusammen!’ WDR, Historical Archive, 36,12x2. Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 200. Ulrich Keuler, Häberle und Pfleiderer: Zur Geschichte, Machart und Funktion einer populären Unterhaltungsreihe (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 1992), 40. Harold Mendelsohn and H.T. Spretnagel, ‘Entertainment as Sociological Enterprise,’ in The Entertainment Functions of Television, ed. Percy H. Tannenbaum (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1980), 24. Ibid., 25. Scannell and Cardiff, Social History, 273. See Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 245. The Wehrmacht propaganda troops, known for war reporting, were also responsible for the entertainment of troops. See Daniel Uziel, The Propaganda Warriors: The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 101. DRA, ‘Der blaue Brief’ (the blue letter): B 193 (17 May 1944), ‘Gebrauchsanweisung’ (directions for use), C 8059 (21 August 1944); for a more extensive discussion, see Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 216ff. WDR, Historical Archive, 38,12x2, p. 16. Scannell, as cited in Moores, media/theory, 83. Paddy Scannell, ‘Introduction, The Relevance of Talk,’ in Broadcast Talk ed. Paddy Scannell (London: Sage 1991), 1–13. ‘Aus diesen dreien spricht das Volk, diesen dreien hört das Volk zu.’ DRA, Mitt. RRG, no. 495, 6–7, 28 April 1936.

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68 ‘Wir stehen mitten unter euch, und das, was wir hier sagen, würdet Ihr alle genau sagen.’ Theo Rausch, Die drei frohen Gesellen mit der Laterna Magica (Cologne: DuMont-Schauberg, [1935]), 4. 69 Horn discusses the use of this program as achieving the goals of the regime, particularly by cooperating with the KdF (Strength through Joy), which organized the live broadcasts. See Horn, ‘Der Reichssender Köln und der “Frohe Samstagnachmittag,”’ 195ff. 70 See Monika Pater, ‘Rundfunkangebote,’ 171–210. 71 Kirsten Drotner, ‘Ethnographic Enigmas: “The Everyday” in Recent Media Studies,’ Cultural Studies 8 (1994): 351. 72 See Pater and Schmidt, ‘Veralltäglichung des Radios.’ 73 For an account of how the standard of living improved, see, for example, Anne-Katrin Einfeldt, ‘Auskommen – Durchkommen – Weiterkommen: Weibliche Arbeitserfahrungen in der Bergarbeiterkolonie,’ in ‘Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll’: Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet. Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930– 1960, vol. 1, ed. Lutz Niethammer (Berlin, Bonn: Dietz, 1983), 267–96, esp. 274–5.

5 Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The Disappearance of Destructive Satire in National Socialist Germany PATRICK MERZIGER Humour and National Socialism are currently perceived as contradictions in point. The National Socialist movement is not associated with humour of any kind. Adolf Hitler is supposed to have been ‘a deeply humourless person’ who pursued his aim with ‘deadly seriousness.’1 Accordingly, Germany between 1933 and 1945 is said to have been characterized by a fanatical austerity, an aggressive humourlessness, and even a ‘bestial seriousness.’2 Popular accounts present a period in which ‘laughter could prove deadly’ and real humour was forbidden.3 Only a cheerless and cutting, aggressive, and combative form of satire has been attributed to National Socialist Germany and its public sphere. Postwar anthologies of NS propaganda emphasized the close link between the National Socialist Germany and satire by presenting eye-catching, spectacular, and harsh caricatures. They republished caricatures of ‘the Jew’ from the Stürmer (storm trooper), the salacious anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Julius Streicher,4 and war propaganda featured in the long-established satirical newspapers Kladderadatsch and Simplicisimus depicting the Allies and the ‘Jew’ as predators and beasts.5 On the whole, this evoked a popular image of the German population as being bombarded and incited by a constant stream of sharp political satires. This article, however, argues that the impact and importance of such satires and caricatures has been overrated. Actually, satire as a means to attack opponents was so widely challenged during National Socialism that it almost disappeared. Although NS ideologues propagated satire as a perfect means to do politics, it became highly unpopular among critics, audience, and also authors. The public con-

132 Patrick Merziger stantly complained about National Socialist satires aimed at members of the National Socialist community, the Volksgemeinschaft, as being too harmful; furthermore, what may be more surprising, the satires against the alleged enemies of the German Volk were received as rather awkward and counterproductive. Satire’s political importance in National Socialism therefore lies less in its function as a weapon or a means to unify the community, than in its disappearance and the reasons for this disappearance. After showing why the impression still persists that satire was the preferred humour of National Socialist Germany, this chapter undertakes to follow the attacks on satire and its marginalization. By finding out that this process was initiated by ‘the people’ rather than by the regime, the inherent politics should become apparent to the reader. The motivation to protest against the National Socialist satire was by no means opposition. On the contrary, the protesters took the propagandists’ promises for granted; satire did not fit in the harmonious picture of the Volksgemeinschaft, and that is why people turned away from this kind of humour. In a last step the chapter suggests an outlook on what kind of humour was popular instead. People did not stop laughing after satire disappeared; humour was one of the most popular entertainment genres in National Socialist Germany. But the popular laughter fit much better into the Volksgemeinschaft than the National Socialist satire did. The idea that satire was the dominant and quasi-natural form of humour for National Socialism has gone unchallenged namely because of the theories on the link between satire and totalitarianism and because of the National Socialist eulogies on satire which saw it as a perfect means of propaganda. In theories about the technique, function, and application of satirical humour, the argument goes that during times of intense confrontation or war, political humour always works at the expense of the opponent, aiming to exclude and degrade. Satire, and in particular caricature as its graphic form, is believed to be the ‘derisive laugh’ per se. Peter Berger argues that satire is ‘the deliberate use of the comic for purposes of attack’; in satire, ‘the aggressive intent becomes the central motive of comic expression.’6 Consequently, in studies of the politics of humour in the twentieth century, satire often became the point of departure.7 Satires and their stinging humour were held up as a ‘mirror’ reflecting the conflicts and confrontations of modern societies and wars,8 and were in turn understood as means to analyse central debates of the particular period in question.9

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Especially in the ‘age of extremes,’ theorists saw aggressive techniques and functions as satire’s characteristics.10 For them, its central technique was to highlight a deviation from the norm, or, to be more exact, a deviation from the norm or idea of the satirist,11 using distortion to do so.12 This satirical technique was closely linked to the political effectiveness of satirical humour. By using distortion, the satirist showed the target in a manner that, according to his pen, existed but was normally not apparent. Taken to extremes, the attacked society or ideology appeared ridiculous, provoking damnation. Satire was used to ridicule and demean the opponent, to make him appear intolerable13 by claiming to show a hidden truth. Theorists of the time believed that such satire even resulted in the ‘annihilation’ of the adversaries.14 Another function of satire was closely connected with the destruction of the opponent through ridicule: Henri Bergson interpreted such satire as a form of bonding for those members of society who could afford to laugh. By turning on the adversary, the supposed aberration was excluded from the community and ascribed its separate identity as the other. By laughing at the other, one could express a sense of belonging to a particular community.15 Based on these ideas of how satire works within a society, Anton J. Zijderveld considered the aggressive and unifying satirical laugh as the laugh of the twentieth century. The overwhelming thirst for power, so characteristic of fascism and communism, suppressed ‘real’ laughter. If there was anything to laugh about in such societies, then, according to Zijderveld, ‘it was always at the cost of others, that is to say, the rivals.’16 Even from a less pessimistic point of view, satire and its social functions seemed to fit into the concept of totalitarian regimes rather well. Because such regimes tended to draw sharp boundaries between themselves and others by urging members to close ranks and present an aggressive front, they seemed to relate to satire. Accordingly, its aggressive forms were often assumed to be typical of authoritarianism and of National Socialism.17 A second reason for the unchallenged assumption of a close link between National Socialism and satire can be found in the self-description of National Socialist propagandists as satirists. They presented the incorporation of satires in their propaganda as a central achievement and regarded satires as pivotal for a propaganda that, from their point of view, had proven to be successful. In applying satire, the National Socialist party followed a general trend in the Weimar Republic; the famous critic Alfred Kerr even de-

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scribed the republic as a ‘factory of contemporary satire.’18 While, until 1918, satirical magazines tried to take positions above party lines, after 1918, especially partisan satire boomed; at the end of the twenties, a satirical journal completed the portfolio of a modern political party. The communist party had set an example for successful campaigning. After the communist daily the Rote Fahne (Red Flag) and the illustrated journal Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Magazine), the party founded its own satirical newspaper, which appeared under different titles such as Der Rote Knüppel (Red Club) and, until February 1933, Roter Pfeffer (Red Pepper). Other parties also had their own satirical journals, and most satirical journals underwrote a particular political perspective.19 Starting in 1927, Joseph Goebbels, at that time Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin, also recruited satirists to write and draw for his newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack). Goebbels’s friend Hans Schweitzer, better known under his pseudonym ‘Mjölnir,’ soon became famous, especially for his caricatures of Bernhard Weiß, the vicepresident of the Berlin police. Weiß was the favourite aim of the Angriff because he recognized early the threat embodied by the National Socialist party and consequently prosecuted their violations of law. Schweitzer depicted Weiß as ‘a Jew,’ adding such typical stereotypes as a big nose and big glasses, and he insinuated that Weiß himself was breaking the law by prosecuting the National Socialist party. From the propagandist point of view, those defamatory caricatures were successful, because they caused a stir, involuntarily supported by legal proceedings that Weiß took against Goebbels and his co-workers.20 At the beginning of the thirties, the National Socialist party intensified efforts to establish satire as a means of propaganda because, from 1930 onward, the movement had to incorporate growing numbers of new followers. Satire obviously appealed to the party propagandists as an entertaining and effective medium to achieve this integration. In 1931, several anthologies of satires were published, taken from their various newspapers: Der Kesse Orje (The Breezy Orje),21 the fifth edition of Das Buch Isidor (The book Isidor),22 and the second edition of Knorke (Awesome).23 In the same year, the first satirical sketches and plays were published, as well as two magazines, the Brennessel (Stinging Nettle) and the Zeitlupe (Slow Motion). Der Kesse Orje is a good example for those early satires since it was a compilation of satires and caricatures from the newspaper Der Angriff.

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It presented Orje, its main protagonist, as an ordinary member of the SA, and the cultural and street life of Berlin were experienced through his eyes. Here, satirical distortion was taken to extremes. ‘The Jew,’ for example, not only has a big nose, but is also half the size of the average man; he is overweight and smelly. The intention clearly is to destroy through ridicule. But it is remarkable that the author did not regard the distortion as sufficient to achieve the goal. Most of the texts in fact enacted the opponent’s annihilation when Orje gave them a severe beating in the end.24 While these texts were meant to be read by convinced members of the Nazi Party, the satirical play ‘O diese Nazis!’ (‘Oh these Nazis’) aimed to reach a broader public.25 The protagonist is the magistrate Ehrlich, caricatured as a confused professor, who is at the same time a pedantic and inhumane public servant. He is confronted by the vital, revolutionary, and cordial National Socialists, thus illustrating another element of ideological satire, the contrast of the negative with the positive. The author tried to make the play accessible to a new audience. Ehrlich admits in the end that he also votes for the National Socialists, a surprising turn without apparent motivation. The play thus introduced the idea of conversion to National Socialism as an option even for the middle classes. The magazine Die Zeitlupe and even more so the Brennessel pursued a similar strategy to procure a broader acceptance for National Socialism. The Brennessel imitated the cover of the Simplicissimus, which had developed into a conservative middle-class satirical magazine in the Weimar Republic. Not only was the layout influenced by the Simplicisimus, but in contrast to earlier satires, the plots no longer revolved around street fights. At the end of the republic, the magazine attacked the representatives of modern Weimar culture and their products. To sum up, before 1933, National Socialists indeed successfully used a distinct form of satire, characterized by extreme distortion and aimed at ‘annihilating’ the opponent. In a manner typical for ideologically motivated satire, its authors underlined their intention by contrasting the ridiculous opponents with National Socialist hero types. In the clash of opinions at the end of the republic, satire proved to be an apt form of humour for the movement. At the same time, its theoreticians started to proclaim loudly that satire had achieved no less than the destruction of the political enemy.26

136 Patrick Merziger Because of the National Socialist tradition in applying satire and the public praise of satire as means of propaganda, historical research saw a close link between the National Socialist movement and satires.27 Furthermore, the development of satire after 1933 did not seem to be of much interest to academic researchers. Klaus Schulz, who undertook to write the history of the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch until 1944, stated that one should end such a history in 1934. From then on, the National Socialist regime controlled all the media; so Schulz and others expected that highly repetitive, artificially uninteresting satires would dominate the magazines and newspapers.28 Contemporaries also anticipated that satire would remain the dominant form of humour in Germany after 1933. Party members up into the highest echelons continued to praise satire when looking back on the ‘Kampfzeit,’ the period of fighting from 1925 to 1933. Joseph Goebbels, now minister for propaganda, continually emphasized the role of satire in the removal of the ‘Weimar system.’ He especially commended Hans Schweitzer, a.k.a. Mjölnir; according to Goebbels’s public eulogies, it seemed as if the satirist single-handedly had achieved the Nazi takeover of power with his caricatures.29 But conservative, Christian, and liberal theorists also proclaimed that, in a ‘heroic time,’ a heroic form of humour was needed. They agreed that only satire would meet the needs of the ‘new state.’30 Up to that time, satire was the only kind of humour National Socialists had used. Accordingly the humorists identified the Brennessel as the leading publication on the humour front,31 and traditional satirical magazines like the Simplicissimus set out to imitate the ‘Brennessel Style’ by harshly attacking and concentrating on ‘the Jew.’ A number of authors who wrote for the mass market before 1933 tried to win the favour of the new political elite by now writing satires which distinctly attacked ‘the Jews’ and the ‘European Left.’32 These authors expected that the new government would welcome their ingratiation, but at the same time they were sure to satisfy a popular demand by writing satires. In the first two years of the National Socialist regime, satire also captured new markets. Satire was now present in media that had been barred before. Since the radio of the Weimar Republic had to take a position above all party lines, it had been impossible to broadcast political satire.33 After 1933, the National Socialist producers tried to establish satire on central broadcast slots. For example, on the first of May 1933, they aired a satirical musical in between the propaganda

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speeches and the military marches that dominated the radio program on the newly established Labour Day.34 Therein the former political opponents were depicted as enemies of the working class and as ‘fat cats.’ Such National Socialist satire now became popular even on the stages of professional theatres. The satirical play Konjunktur (Boom) by Diedrich Loder was one of the most frequently performed comedies of the season from 1933 to 1934.35 It aimed at internal German politics and ridiculed those who wished to enhance their public image by inventing a National Socialist autobiography and by expressing an excessive commitment to the new ideology. But this success of satire was only a flash in the pan, fuelled rather by the political will to spread seemingly effective propaganda than by popular demand. Soon it turned out that the conditions for humorous entertainment had changed fundamentally, causing satire to backfire after 1933. Writing satires was becoming problematic, because on the one hand, members of the Volksgemeinschaft did not want to be the aim of mockery anymore and, on the other, satires that were externally aimed seemed awkward in concentrating too much on the alleged enemies of the Volksgemeinschaft. The first signs of irritation can already be found in March 1933. The Brennessel received strong complaints from readers, despite supposedly being the leading satirical newspaper. Letter writers insulted the National Socialist editors as ‘Jews, pimps, perverts and scum.’36 Again, in September 1933, some readers went into a rage because the magazine had ridiculed moralists seeking to ban make-up, fashion, and smoking for German women. One magazine writer had depicted the moralists’ ideal woman as an ‘old bat’ who chewed tobacco and wore lingerie made from flannel, dressed in a sack of potatoes and with a face glistening like streaky bacon. Those who felt attacked in turn insisted on their vision of the decent German woman. In response, the editors repeatedly stressed that they were not obliged to react to anonymous and insulting complaints. However, disapproval was so strong that in the end they were forced to prove that their view on German women was in line with National Socialist beliefs. To this end, they printed a speech by Ernst Roehm, the leader of the SA, demanding that German women wear make-up.37 And these disputes were not isolated cases. Due to public complaints, plays were banned, film scripts were rewritten, and satirical texts and caricatures became impossible to publish.38 In reaction to such objections, satirists and journalists sought to ex-

138 Patrick Merziger plain the necessity of satire to the general public. They argued that, in striving for a homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft, there still existed people who needed help by having their faults highlighted satirically. In addition, art itself had its own laws, so the argument continued, which made satirical interpretations necessary.39 Without negative figures or incisive, exaggerated images of the contrast between good and evil, the artwork would have no tension, but would only depict ‘flowery meadows and carefree springing lambs setting the background scene for a couple languishing in the grass, temple to temple, looking on in rapture as the sun sets.’40 A large number of articles asked the German population to relax when confronted with satires lampooning their work, their religion, or their lifestyle. In short, the articles demanded ‘more humour!’ The protests, however, became more severe. The German public was not willing to be the target of satire. From their perspective, being satirized put into doubt their being part of society at all. Finally, there was also a reaction from the political institutions. In 1936, for example, the Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, started a campaign to stop the ridicule of Saxons.41 Up to that point the Saxons had for decades been a popular target of satirical drawings and texts that depicted them as provincial, meddlesome, and prying gossips.42 Mutschmann’s goal was now to promote publications in which ‘the Saxons did not appear as fools and idiots, but as masters of the situation.’43 It no longer appeared appropriate to satirize what was close to home, and satire in general became nearly impossible. In a democratic system, satire is a normal part of the political struggle between differing viewpoints. In a society where conflicting political positions have an equal standing, satire may be less destructive. With a free press, victims of satire can argue back, choose their own allies, and thereby still remain part of society. In its quest for unity, however, National Socialism did not allow for any alternative.44 In such a context, being the object of ridicule could seem to result in exclusion from society itself. Here, satire literally killed, since the subject could then not belong to the only available community, the promoted Volksgemeinschaft. This fear of expulsion caused the sharp reactions, which in turn demonstrated the widespread wish to belong. But satirists had not only to deal with complaints from an audience that felt deeply hurt. The satire that targeted ‘the Jew,’ emigrants, or the English and clearly wanted to ‘annihilate’ those declared enemies was also no longer successful. A good example of the rapid decline

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of satire’s popularity, even if it lampooned external enemies, was provided by the later career of Dietrich Loder, who had been a successful satirical playwright. In 1935, he published his play Die Eule aus Athen (The owl of Athens).45 Since he no longer dared to caricature subjects within Germany, he concentrated on Jewish emigrants in a historical guise. Loder addressed the problem of the international bad press about the prosecution of Jews in Germany. In order to deflect the blame, the regime accused Jewish emigrants of inventing the atrocities. In his highly flawed allegory, he likened Germany to ancient Athens, which, in his account, is attacked by the Persian Xerxes because of the misinformation and scheming of a Jewish trader. Even this vague reference to current events was exceptional in 1935. A critic celebrated the piece because the playwright had been able to turn toward ‘the present present.’ The Deutsche Presse, the official NS organ for journalists, commended it highly. Goebbels attended the first night and newspapers reported that he was enthusiastic.46 But although the play did not refer to matters at home and although Goebbels gave it his approval, it was not a success. Its failure pointed to the second problem caused by satire, especially satires about those classified as enemies. Already in 1933 several voices had complained about satires about victims who could no longer defend themselves. The critics felt like they were watching an ass kicking a dead lion;47 it was pointless, boring, and not funny anymore. But as National Socialism persisted and the new regime began to stabilize, it became clear that the problem of these satires ran deeper than just being pointless. The satirists themselves above all noticed that their satires no longer had the desired effect. On the contrary, in order to satirize their victims, they had to give them more and more room. Or to use the same metaphor: by kicking, the ass directed attention to the already dead lion. This problem became particularly apparent on the radio, which can be shown by the example of the musical Jonny spült ab (Jonny Does the Dishes). The radio station Munich broadcast this satirical musical, written by Hugo Hartung with music by Bernd Eichhorn, in 1935. The piece parodied the jazz-opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up the Band), published in 1927 and generally perceived to represent cultural values of the 1920s. At first sight, it would seem to have been easy to write a National Socialist parody about an opera in which an AfricanAmerican jazz musician plays an important role. In 1935, National Socialist propaganda had marked the ‘black man’ and ‘chaotic jazz’

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as abhorrent, and nobody would have expected any misunderstanding. Even so, Hugo Hartung got the impression that it would better to explain his musical. To this end, he published a fictitious interview between himself, the writer, and his protagonist, Jonny. In the interview, Jonny speaks wistfully about his status in the Third Reich. ‘Being famous … this is over now! That was a long time ago … today there is no place for people like me in Germany anymore.’ To which the writer replies: ‘Yes, that’s right. You have been completely forgotten. More than forgotten! I must admit I don’t see any point in reviving your name by writing an opera on you. Forgotten, buried … that’s it.’48 And in fact, the writer was not able to explain why he had written the parody. At most, he was able to explain the paradoxical situation of the satirist. He wanted to eradicate Jonny by writing a satire on him, but the satire only kept his memory alive. Critics were not amused by the parody, since, although the music was bizarre and exaggerated, it still remained jazz.49 Consequentially, in an internal assessment of Hartung’s satirical radio plays, Willy Richartz, who was working for the Reichsendeleitung (the national radio administration) and was responsible for programming until 1937, considered satire in general to be ‘highly questionable.’ He feared that most of the listeners might take the play seriously because radio lacked those visual aids which in other media might have clarified that it was a satirical piece. In his opinion, the problem was reinforced by the fact that radio appealed to the ‘simple folk’ and ‘not only to the educated or the literati from Schwabing,’ a formerly bohemian borough of Munich, who were better able to understand subtle broadcasts. In this particular case, he feared that listeners only heard the jazz first and foremost. Richartz concluded that broadcasting could employ satire only ‘to a very limited degree’ for humorous purposes.50 In other media as well, satirists found their role confusing. One example from print media was the case of Fritz Reipert, who had edited an extensive series of propaganda brochures targeting England, which also meant ‘the Jews’ and their ‘world conspiracy.’ These propaganda pamphlets, masked as academic studies, were in part printed by the NSDAP publisher Eher, reaching large editions of up to one million copies.51 Reipert was a propagandist in the narrow sense of the word. Not only was he in total agreement with the regime, his publications were also recognized by propaganda experts as exemplary and distributed as such by the party. In 1942, Reipert attempted for the last

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time to address the theme ‘England.’ He used satire to do so, claiming that any serious analysis would be futile, given the British conduct against Germany. But even a satirical interpretation seemed too much of an honour in Reipert’s opinion. Accordingly, his introduction was confused: In this age of historical decisions and events determining the future on the chessboard of world politics there are a number of figures for whom no monument will be erected in posterity. Despite the insistence with which they adhere to the past, the memories of them will vanish in the same way that events have surpassed them […] And yet here it should be attempted to safeguard such a tragicomic figure from obscurity. The role which they have played in the wars which in turn has determined the fate of the people cannot be divorced from the development of this epoch. They are, then, the embodiment of the world of yesteryear, have long been rotten, hollow, and damned to irrevocable demise.52

On the one hand, Reipert stressed that the British were so ridiculous and insignificant that they were not worth remembering, since history had passed them by anyhow. On the other hand, he wrote a satire about them in order to highlight their role in history. He considered their impact to have been so negative that it had to be pointed out, but in order to make that point, he had to revive them, if only by stating that they would be condemned to oblivion at a later date. Reipert was caught up in the typical paradox of somebody who wants to annihilate his opponent through satire but first needs to render his audience familiar with the object in question before he then can ridicule and distort it. Although this paradoxical aspect of satire was well known, it had not been perceived as a problem before 1933. Rather, satirists had used this point to defend themselves against the charge that they were seeking to destroy their victims socially. From their point of view, the victims were indebted to the satirists because satires popularized the victim.53 But when the politics of exclusion were put into practice, the context for satires changed and satire’s characteristic of popularizing the victims became problematic. After 1933, the ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft promised unity and the bridging of all social and economic differences. But beyond this, propaganda made it unmistakably clear that such a unified community would be based on the radical exclusion of those identified as disturbing and alien.54 Radical

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anti-Semitism was then implemented, step by step shutting Jews out of society, for example, by constraining their occupational choices in 1933, classifying contact with ‘Aryan’ Germans as racial defilement in 1935, barring access to theatres and cinemas, and legalizing the expropriation of Jewish businesses in 1938.55 Satire was now published in an environment where exclusion and annihilation were no mere metaphors but real political and social processes. In this context, satire’s metaphorical ‘annihilation’ of the opponent was less impressive. Therefore, authors who targeted subjects outside the Volksgemeinschaft had to struggle with a new problem: they had the impression that, contrary to their intentions, their satire had an undesired effect on their subjects’ position, in the sense of drawing attention to them. While actual politics excluded others, satire imbibed them with a new presence. After 1933, satire’s effect went against the political will which radicalized and in the end had as its goal total annihilation. This discontent with a form of satire that resurrected the excluded was, above all, verbalized by those producers and writers who continued to use satire. The ‘Aryan’ public, however, was mainly concerned about not being depicted in satire. Its interest faded after satirists complied with that wish. Satire, once a quite popular entertainment, became a product for a niche market. Until the end of war, several attempts were made to reintroduce caricature as a popular form of humour, or at any rate as a politically useful form of humour. That such attempts still continued until almost the end of the war was due to those party functionaries who understood satire as the only possible form of entertaining and humorous propaganda. These propagandists in fact sustained the idea that National Socialism and satire had a natural affinity. The official Deutsche Presse (German Press), whose editors saw their role as steering the press in the direction of National Socialist ideas, tried hard to establish caricature as an attractive form of humour by launching campaigns, entitled, for example, in 1939, ‘The Good Political Caricature.’56 In 1939, the ‘Interpress Karikaturenbüro’ was founded in Berlin, with the specific task to ‘activate the lesser-known and cherished political caricature according to its propagandistic value.’ Such at least were the words of the editor, who still had great hopes for caricature in late 1943.57 Goebbels still believed that satire could help change the course of war in 1944. Together with Hitler, he unrealistically planned another newspaper called Front und Heimat (Front and

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Home Front), whose tone was to be set by a large caricature by Hans Schweitzer, i.e. Mjölnir, resplendent on the front cover. Although, in Goebbels’s eyes, Schweitzer had not accomplished much of late (his caricatures had mostly disappeared), Goebbels still hoped that the artist could be as effective as he was remembered to have been before 1933.58 But it should be clear by now that the perception of convinced National Socialists did not necessarily reflect the actual presence satire had in the public sphere at the time. Such projects were merely wishful thinking. Satire disappeared almost totally, not only in film, radio, and theatre, but also in the popular press and the newspapers. Whereas, before the Nazi takeover of power, the NSDAP journal the Illustrierte Beobachter (Illustrated Observer) had regularly printed satire, by 1934 satire had completely vanished from the periodical. The Brennessel, the prestigious satirical project, was shut down on 31 December 1938 because of its low circulation. At the end, it sold fewer than 10,000 copies.59 Although managing to survive until the end of 1944, the Simplicissimus and the Kladderadatsch sold only 18,000 and 12,000 copies, respectively, in 1939, compared with 50,000 and 40,000 copies in 1931. In the end, the Deutsche Presse and other semi-official journals had to admit repeatedly that their efforts to implement the use of satire were in vain. Newspapers that were published by the NSDAP or the Ministry for Propaganda – for example, the Völkischer Beobachter or Das Reich – printed caricatures as prescribed. The remaining newspapers, however, only did so when they were explicitly ordered to.60 The shortage of paper during the war was used as a welcome argument to evade the demand to print such satires.61 Newspaper editors experienced the unsolicited sending of material by the caricature office as a burden and criticized the waste of costly resources on such ‘minor matters’ in light of the paper shortage.62 The project Front und Heimat was abandoned, despite having Hitler’s emphatic support and despite Goebbels having already printed and distributed a dummy version.63 During the last year of war, even Goebbels could not get enough paper to realize such an ambitious project. In addition, the propagandists had to admit that the proposed layout, with Mjölnir’s caricature on the cover, was not as popular as expected.64 However, satire’s loss of popularity did not mean that the German populace had also lost interest in comic entertainment. The audience discovered a new form of humour that was referred to as ‘Deutscher

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Humor’ (German humour). This form was grounded in the tradition of the nineteenth century but was specific to National Socialist Germany with its emphasis on harmony.65 This ‘Deutscher Humor’ could be observed already in the Weimar Republic, but was not remotely as successful as it was after 1933. By one example out of thousands, I want to sketch some of the basic structures and functions of this special German humour. Unlike the increasingly unpopular caricaturists, Robert Högfeldt, a Swedish illustrator, met with public approval. In portrayals of his life, it was stressed not just that he was a ‘Nordic’ illustrator but that his artistic education had taken place in Germany, where he lived until moving to Sweden in 1913.66 Published from 1937 onwards, German anthologies of his illustrations were a great success. The picture shown in figure 5.1 is typical of his style. The title of the drawing was ‘In Harmony.’67 The caption reads, ‘In the bosom of the family / lulled by merry humour / a spot of bother now and then / when the waters ripple on the sea of life.’ The implications of such drawings can only be understood by contrasting them with unpopular satire. What is depicted here is a family or community that is sealed off. Conflicts, essential for humour in general, are generated inside the community, and supposedly they are not as intense as those which originate from outside. There is an understood assurance that the members of the community will not get hurt. In contrast to caricatures, they are depicted in a friendly and pleasant way. More important is that the outside world is not encroaching. The very style of drawing prevents some subjects from being touched upon. Högfeldt would not be able to portray the stereotype of a ‘Jew,’ a ‘communist,’ or a ‘socialist.’ Högfeldt himself illustrated the closed-off nature of his style. The introduction to his first volume contains some drawings that were not as large as his other pieces. Much smaller, and printed in black and white, one of these images again showed the happy community in the boat. In this case, however, Högfeldt also showed their surroundings. Entitled ‘Die Optimisten’ (The Optimists),68 figure 5.2 shows wolves stalking a rowboat full of happy, drunk, and revelling people who are being carried along by the current. It suggests that if the boat has to land on the bank, the wolves will attack the unsuspecting and innocent passengers. Högfeldt shows what lies outside the parameters of the close community of ‘Deutscher Humor,’ namely, the terrifying beasts, which were so central to NS caricatures and satire. Like the

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5.1 Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Harmony’ (‘In Eintracht’), in Robert Högfeldt, Das harmonische Familienleben (Leipzig: Neff, 1938), without pagination.

celebrating party on the boat, the German people were happy in their ignorance and felt secure in their close-knit community. At least, the sale numbers of products called German Humour implied this wish.69 Before coming to power, National Socialists chose satire because they saw it as the most apt political form of humour for an extreme party within the harsh conflicts of the time. After winning power, they continued to use it as a matter of course, but contrary to their expectations and to the standard view in historiography, it became increasingly unpopular. The audience took part in the politics of humour,

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5.2 Robert Högfeldt, ‘The Optimists’ (‘Die Optimisten’), in Robert Högfeldt, Das Högfeldt-Buch (Berlin: Neff, 1937), 3.

and its members managed to make disappear those forms which they disliked. The rejection of satire’s aggressive and combative character by parts of the population points to the specific relationship between the ideological elite and ‘the people.’ Satire did not disappear because politicians or institutions wanted it gone; ideologues, rather, supported it. The demise of satire was due to the audience’s dislike, and institutions fell in step. As members of the Volksgemeinschaft protested against being ridiculed publicly, their politics of humour reflected the interaction between different groups in the public sphere in Germany, a collaboration of the audience, publicists, and National Socialist institutions. In fact, people classified as ‘German’ could not allow

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themselves to be satirized, as this possibly meant being shut out of a group that was the only option for social integration. To be sure, they did not protest against the Volksgemeinschaft; rather, their indignation expressed the wish to be part of it. Furthermore, satire could not destroy its chosen subjects outside of Germany but instead focused attention on them. Seen from this angle, the disappearance of satire was a step towards the total exclusion of opponents from the German community. Satire turned out to be too destructive for the desired harmonious world. Satire’s disappearance in popular culture tells about a population which shared the longing for the Volksgemeinschaft with its ideology of a sealed community. notes 1 Walter Hagemann, Publizistik im Dritten Reich: Ein Beitrag zur Methode der Massenführung (Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag, 1948), 198. Recently, Gudrun Pausewang, Erlaubter Humor im Nationalsozialismus (1933–1945) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007), 32–7. 2 Christian Haider and Fritz Hausjell, ‘Die Apokalypse als Bildgeschichte: Antisemitische Karikatur am Beispiel des “Juden Tate” im Wiener “Deutschen Volksblatt” 1936 bis 1939,’ Medien & Zeit 6 (1991): 9–16, here 11. 3 Ralph Wiener, Als das Lachen tödlich war: Erinnerungen und Fakten 1933– 1945 (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1988). 4 Fred Hahn, Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924–1945: Eine Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1978), for example 127–8. 5 W.A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War, 6 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus, 1985–93), 3: 458–553. 6 Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 157. 7 Michael Mulkay, On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Cambridge: Politiy Press, 1988); Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, ‘Introduction: War in the Twentieth Century: The Functioning of Humour in Cultural Representation,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 247–63, here 251–5. 8 Ursula E. Koch, ‘Marianne und Germania: Zwei Nationalheldinnen aus der Sicht deutscher und französischer Karikaturisten,’ in Marianne und Germania in der Karikatur (1550–1999): Eine Interréseaux-Ausstellung, ed. Ursula E. Koch (Leipzig: Institut Français de Leipzig, 1999), 5–12. 9 Mary Lee Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits of Repression in Nineteenth-Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: The University

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of Michigan Press, 1992); Pierre Purseigle, ‘Mirroring Societies at War: Pictorial Humour in the British and French Popular Press during the First World War,’ Journal of European Studies 31 (2001): 289–328. Summing up the dominant theories: Lawrence H. Streicher, ‘On a Theory of Political Caricature,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1966–7): 427–45, here 434–5. For example: Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 70–4; W.A. Coupe, ‘Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (1969): 79–95, here 84–7. An overview of the different techniques that are associated with satire in Anglo-American and German theory: Thomas Knieper, Die politische Karikatur: Eine journalistische Darstellungsform und deren Produzenten (Cologne: Halem, 2002), 28–63. Georg Lukács, ‘Zur Frage der Satire (1932),’ in Georg Lukács, Essays über Realismus (Georg Lukács Werke, vol. IV) (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), 83–107, here 95–8; Coupe, ‘Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature,’ 87–9. Friedrich Georg Jünger, Über das Komische (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag, 1936), 9–21; Ernst Kris, ‘The Principles of Caricature (Written in Collaboration with E.H. Gombrich),’ in Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International University Press, 1952), 189–2003, here 200–1; Lukács, ‘Zur Frage der Satire (1932),’ 100–1. Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique (Paris: Alcan, 1900); Ruben Quintero, ‘Introduction: Understanding Satire,’ in A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, ed. Ruben Quintero (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1–11; Wolfgang K. Hünig, British and German Cartoons as Weapons in World War I: Invectives and Ideology of Political Cartoons. A Cognitive Linguistics Approach (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002), 215–17. Anton C. Zijderveld, Humor und Gesellschaft: Eine Soziologie des Humors und des Lachens (Graz: Styria, 1976), 206–8. W.A. Coupe, German Political Satires, 1: xxi. Kurt Reumann, ‘Das antithetische Kampfbild: Beiträge zur Bestimmung seines Wesens und seiner Wirkung’ (PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 1966). Alfred Kerr, ‘Quer durch die Zeitsatire (16.5.31) [Manuskript für eine Rundfunksendung],’ in Hermann Haarmann, ‘Pleite glotzt euch an. Restlos’: Satire in der Publizistik der Weimarer Republik. Ein Handbuch (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999), 208–12. Christian Gehring, ‘Die Entwicklung des politischen Witzblattes in Deutschland: Beiträge zu seiner Geschichte’ (PhD diss., Universitat Leipzig, 1927), 84–6.

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20 Dietz Bering, Kampf um Namen. Bernhard Weiß gegen Joseph Goebbels (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1991), 283–352. 21 Friedrich Karl Martin, Der kesse Orje: Spaziergänge eines Berliner Jungen durch das System: Mit einer Einleitung von Joseph Goebbels und Zeichnungen von Mjölnir (Munich: Eher, 1931). 22 Mjölnir [i.e., Hans Schweitzer] and Joseph Goebbels, Das Buch Isidor: Ein Zeitbild voll Lachen und Hass (Munich: Eher, 1931). 23 Joseph Goebbels, ed., Knorke: Ein neues Buch Isidor für Zeitgenossen (Munich: Eher, 1931). 24 For example Orje [i.e., Martin Bethke], ‘Ick machet nochmal, Neese,’ in Martin, Der kesse Orje, 14. 25 Max Reitz, ‘O diese Nazis!’ Nationalsozialistisches Lebensbild in 3 Akten (Leipzig: Strauch, 1931). 26 Kim, ‘Satire ist, wenn man …,’ Die Brennessel 2 (1932): 266; Hein Schlecht, ‘Karikatur und Photographie als politisches Agitationsmittel,’ Unser Wille und Weg 2 (1932): 139–40; Heinrich Salzmann, ‘Das Bild in der Presse als Kampfmittel,’ Unser Wille und Weg 2 (1932): 348–50. 27 Angelika Plum, Die Karikatur im Spannungsfeld von Kunstgeschichte und Politikwissenschaft: Eine ikonologische Untersuchung zu Feindbildern in Karikaturen (Aachen: Shaker, 1998), 133–44. Reumann, ‘Das antithetische Kampfbild,’ 108–36. 28 Klaus Schulz, Kladderadatsch: Ein bürgerliches Witzblatt von der Märzrevolution bis zum Nationalsozialismus 1848–1944 (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1975), 202. Cf. Ulrich Appel, Satire als Zeitdokument: Der Zeichner Erich Schilling. 1885 Suhl/Thüringen – 1945 Gauting bei München. Leben – Werk – Zeit – Umwelt (Witterschlick/Bonn: Wehle, 1995), 259. 29 Joseph Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin: Der Anfang (Munich: Eher, 1934), 140–2; Joseph Goebbels, ‘Haben wir eigentlich noch Humor?’ Völkischer Beobachter: Norddeutsche Ausgabe, 4 February 1939. 30 Ludwig Fischborn, ‘Ironie und Satire als publizistische Kampfmittel,’ Augustinus-Blatt 37 (1933): 7–8; Georg Foerster, ‘Können wir heute Humor haben?’ Der Tag, 19 April 1934; Heinz Riecke, ‘Der politische Sinn des Humors,’ Wille und Macht 3 (1935): 20–5. 31 Appel, Satire als Zeitdokument, 262–3. 32 For example, Eduard Schwechten, Das Lied vom Levi (Düsseldorf: Knippenberg-Verlag, 1933); Wladimir von Hartlieb, Ich habe gelacht: Satiren gegen die Linke Europas (Berlin: Neff, 1933). 33 Heinz Pohle, Der Rundfunk als Instrument der Politik: Zur Geschichte des deutschen Rundfunks von 1923/38 (Hamburg: Hans Bredow-Institut, 1955), 89–117.

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34 Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, C 1216 m, 59 U 227/Bd.3. 35 Dietrich Loder, Konjunktur: Eine Revolutionskomödie aus dem Frühjahr 1933 in 3 Akten (Berlin-Halensee: Chronos, 1933). 36 Lanzelot [i.e., Carl Martin Köhn], ‘An “Porzia!”’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 182. 37 Lanzelot [i.e., Carl Martin Köhn], ‘Darf die deutsche Frau …,’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 446; Orpheus der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], ‘Aufbauernde Gardinenpredigt,’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 435; Die Brennessel, ‘In Sachen: “Darf die deutsche Frau …,”’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 471; Orpheus der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], ‘Babette wird abermals verwarnt,’ Die Brennessel 3 (1933): 471. 38 For further examples, see Patrick Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und ‘Deutscher Humor’: Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 113–39. 39 Sigmund Graff, ‘Die “negative” Figur,’ Der Neue Weg 64 (1935): 264–5. 40 Anonymus, ‘Mehr Humor!’ Das Schwarze Korps 2 (1936): 1. 41 Thomas Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur und Diktatur: Sächsische Heimatbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/ DDR (Cologne: Böhlau), 124–56. Schaarschmidt describes the campaign misleadingly as a private obsession of the Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann that allegedly was not successful. 42 See, for example, Gustav Schumann, Partikularist Bliemchen aus Dresden in Rom und Neapel (Leipzig: Reißner, 1887); Hans Reimann, Sächsische Miniaturen (Leipzig: Steegemann, 1921). 43 Schl., ‘Wahrt Ehre und Ansehen des Gaues Sachsen, schützt unser Volkstum und unsere Arbeit!’ Die Deutsche Arbeiterfront: Rundbrief für die politischen Amtswalter und Amtswarte der DAf., NSG. ‘Kraft durch Freude’ und NSBO. im Gau Sachsen, 15 August 1936. 44 David Welch, ‘Nazi Popaganda and the “Volksgemeinschaft”: Constructing a People’s Community,’ Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 213–38. 45 Dietrich Loder, Die Eule aus Athen: Eine historische Komödie aus dem klassischen Altertum in 3 Akten (Berlin: Langen-Müller 1933). 46 Heinz Steguweit, ‘Dietrich Loder: “Die Eule aus Athen”: Festaufführung zur Reichstagung des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Presse,’ Deutsche Presse 25 (1935): 659–60; Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Teil I Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941 (Munich: Saur, 1998–2005), 1 December 1935. 47 An answer to the complaints can be found in Orpheus der Zwote [i.e., Goetz Otto Stoffregen], Das sind Sachen! Neue freche Verse (Berlin: Brunnen 1933), 5.

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48 Hugo Hartung, ‘Zwiegespräch mit Jonny: Zur Ursendung des musikalisch-parodistischen Hörspiels “Jonny spült ab,”’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk 13 (1935): 6. 49 W.G., ‘“Jonny spült ab,”’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk 13 (1935): 67. 50 BArch (BDC) RK, Hugo Hartung (Brief des Leiters der Abteilung A2, Willy Richartz, an den Reichssendeleiter, Eugen Hadamovsky, vom 15.2.1936) 51 Fritz Reipert, ‘Das ist England! Weltherrschaft durch Blut und Gold’ (Berlin: Rödiger 1939); Fritz Reipert, ed., In acht Kriegswochen 107 mal gelogen! Dokumente über Englands Nachrichtenpolitik im gegenwärtigen Kriege (Berlin: Eher 1939). 52 Fritz Reipert, ‘Ein Wort zuvor,’ in Fritz Reipert, Die von gestern: Satirische Glossen (Berlin: Rödiger 1942), 7–9. 53 Hans Reimann, Neue sächsische Miniaturen (Dresden: Reissner, 1928), 185; Thomas Theodor Heine, ‘Einiges über Karikaturen,’ Pester Lloyd, 7 October 1936. 54 Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the “Volksgemeinschaft,”’ 213–38. 55 For the chronology of sanctions, see, for example, Otto Dov Kulka et al., eds., Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004), 586–651. 56 For example, ‘Die gute politische Karikatur’ Deutsche Presse 29 (1939): 365 and 375. 57 Carl J.H. Villinger, ‘Die Vermittlung von Karikaturen an die Presse,’ in Handbuch der Zeitungswissenschaft, ed. Walther Heide (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1940–3), cols. 2256–60. 58 Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Teil II Diktate 1941–1945 (Munich: Saur, 1993–6), 25 January 1944, 2 February 1944, and 18 April 1944. 59 Hans Reimann, Mein blaues Wunder. Lebensmosaik eines Humoristen (Munich: List, 1959), 503. 60 C. Sch.., ‘Warum nur vorübergehend Karikaturen?’ Deutsche Presse 28 (1938): 402–6. 61 Gerhard Eckert, ‘Karikaturen in der Zeitschrift,’ Der Zeitschriften-Verleger 43 (1941): 165–7; -lt-, ‘Unentbehrliche Mittel der geistigen Kriegsführung: Auch der engere Raum berechtigt nicht zum Verzicht auf Karikatur und Karte,’ Zeitungs-Verlag 43 (1942), 202–4. 62 Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich 1938 – 1945: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984), vol. 15, 6135. 63 Goebbels, Die Tagebücher Teil II, 2 June 1944. 64 Goebbels, Die Tagebücher Teil II, 6 June 1944.

152 Patrick Merziger 65 Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und ‘Deutscher Humor,’ 212–53. 66 Anton Sailer, ‘Ein bezaubernd häßliches Völkchen,’ Signal 2, no. 20 (1941): 32–3. 67 Robert Högfeldt, ‘In Eintracht [Drawing],’ in Robert Högfeldt, Das harmonische Familienleben: 40 Zeichnungen mit Versen von Hayno Focken (Leipzig: Neff, 1938), no pagination. 68 Robert Högfeldt, ‘Die Optimisten [Drawing],’ in Robert Högfeldt, Das Högfeldt-Buch (Berlin: Neff, 1937), 3. 69 For sale figures, see, for example, Tobias Schneider, ‘Bestseller im Dritten Reich: Ermittlung und Analyse der meistverkauften Romane in Deutschland 1933–1944,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52 (2004): 77–97; Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs (Stuttgart: Enke, 1969).

6 Laughing to Keep from Dying: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show VINCENT BROOK Did the Jews invent self-hatred? A case can be made – from the production and the reception end. Centuries before they were branded collective Christ killers in the Gospel of St Matthew, a calumny that laid the groundwork for both anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred, Jews themselves had planted the seeds of self-hatred for all humanity in the Garden of Eden. The biblical God’s banishment of the ur-couple from Paradise inflicted a primal self-loathing (with a decidedly gendered component) that would prove, at least for the faithful, all but inexpungable. Then there’s the Jewish Freud, whose non-denominational take on original sin postulated a phylogenic and an ontogenic source: the collective killing of the primal father and the individual Oedipal complex. Freud’s daughter Anna, meanwhile, gave self-hatred back to the Jews through her concept of ‘identification with the aggressor.’ Although the concept can be applied universally, it derived specifically from the observations of Jewish children who had survived Nazism and yet identified positively with their Nazi persecutors and negatively with themselves as Jewish victims.1 Last not least, the poet laureate of existential angst, Franz Kafka, historicized self-hatred, laying the theoretical and experiential groundwork for what Jewish filmmaker Henry Bean calls ‘the ambivalent, self-doubting, self-hating modern condition.’2 To ascribe a privileged role for Jews in the encoding and decoding of self-hatred is certainly not to deny other groups’ significant enmeshment in the process. Power relations in general are a fertile field for the sowing and reaping of self-hatred, be it from the conquest, colonization, or enslavement of entire peoples to the subjugation and oppression of women. Those whose ‘otherness’ dare not speak its name have

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perhaps borne the greatest burden of self-inflicted shame, given the depth of self-denial imposed upon and induced within them. Just as Jews have introjected anti-Semitism, people of colour, women, gays, and lesbians have internalized the damaging social messages of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, directing against themselves the projected hatred of the normative society.3 Jews, as a religious or ethno-racial grouping, do appear to have the most historically overdetermined claim to self-hatred. In the modern era alone – dating for our purposes from the European emancipation of Jews in the late eighteenth century – the manifestations of Jewish self-hatred, including its mutation into virulent internecine strands, have been striking. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, especially, the permutations have been unique. This uniqueness derives largely from the expression of Jewish self-hatred despite, and because of, the well-documented and openly acknowledged preponderance of Jews in the U.S. entertainment industries and their remarkable material success in American society.4 It also relates to the integral role selfhatred has played in the formation of what is arguably the greatest contribution of Jews to American popular culture: comedy – be it on the vaudeville stage, the movie screen, radio, or television. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud located an explicitly Jewish self-critical component in the joke whereby ‘the mocker [the joke teller] participates in the defect being mocked [the butt of the joke].’5 This self-deprecatory aspect is often cited as a mainstay of Jewish humour – and, by influence and extension, of minoritarian humour in general – and its function as a self-defence mechanism is patently evident. However, rather than functioning primarily as a mode of perseverance – laughing to keep from crying – as humour has for other minorities and people in general, for Jews humour has operated additionally as a mode of survival – laughing to keep from dying. Albert Goldman has analysed the origins and applications of survivalist Jewish humour in the Brooklyn-bred comics who invented standup comedy: Milton Berle, Shecky Green, Lenny Bruce, and others. These comedians’ particular mode of satire, according to Goldman, was born of rejection of their immediate Jewish-immigrant families, neighbourhoods, and milieux. But instead of ‘swallowing or disguising their [negative] emotions, these young Jews – consumed with selfhatred or shame – came out in the open and blasted the things that hurt them.’6 By turning a perceived weakness into a weapon, such volatile humour served to assuage self-hatred by both acknowledg-

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 155 ing its source and distancing the comics from it, while also offering protection from the source’s career-, and potentially life-, threatening consequences. In the post-Second World War/post-Holocaust era, as overt antiSemitism in the United States receded dramatically and government policies and Jews’ own upward mobility encouraged widespread Jewish entry into the white middle class, self-hatred as a foundation for Jewish humour may well have declined but, as I will show, by no means disappeared.7 The focus of my analysis is the highly acclaimed ‘Jewish’ sitcom The Larry Sanders Show (1992–8), regarded by some critics as the most influential television series of the 1990s.8 Before embarking on a case study of Larry Sanders, however, it is necessary to contextualize the show in relation to what has become, in the past twenty years, an unprecedented ‘Jewish’ sitcom trend. The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom I address in Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom (2003) the complex historical and institutional factors contributing to the marked increase in sitcoms featuring explicitly identified Jewish protagonists since the late 1980s.9 Suffice to say here that even considering the barely decipherable, largely ‘virtual’ nature of the Jewishness displayed in most of these shows, the large number of mega-hit, Emmy-winning, ‘must-see’ shows featuring explicitly Jewish main characters over the trend period – close to forty such shows in all compared to only seven in the previous forty years – is extraordinary.10 A brief list of these shows reads like a Who’s Who of American television comedy over this time: besides Larry Sanders, they include Seinfeld (1989–98), The Nanny (1993–9), Mad About You (1992–9), Friends (1994– 2003), Dharma and Greg (1997–2001), Will and Grace (1998–2006), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), and Arrested Development (2002–5).11 This recent surge in ‘Jewish’ television further begs the question of why Jewish self-hatred should remain a factor in the postmodern era, in Jewish media representation and, by extension, in Jewish life. Yet remain a factor it clearly does, and The Larry Sanders Show, though perhaps the most prominent example, is not the only case in point. One of the first of the ‘Jewish’-trend sitcoms, the short-lived Chicken Soup (September-November 1989), starring the Borscht Belt stand-up comedian Jackie Mason, was arguably forced off the air by Jewish self-hatred, of the internecine variety. Internecine self-hatred

156 Vincent Brook refers to self-denigration imputed by one sub-group to another within a larger maligned group, though it needn’t be experienced as such by the sub-group to which it is imputed. This form of self-hatred also tends, at least for Jews, to be triple-pronged – with all three prongs intertwined in complex, often contradictory ways. One form of internecine self-hatred is directed at those demeaning attributes externally produced and reproduced through stereotype, such as the Coon, Buck, Sambo, and Mammy, among African Americans, and the Judas, Wanderer, Shylock, and Conspirator, among Jews. While justifiably held by the targeted group to be illusory, constructed, or grossly exaggerated, these attributes nonetheless have had and may persist in having analogues in everyday life. As such, they have tended – until recent attempts at appropriation – to be steadfastly denied or avoided, thus leading, when such traits are represented in the media or encountered in social interaction, to the label ‘too Black’ or ‘too Jewish.’ A second form of internecine self-hatred is reserved for those who attempt to avoid external stigmatization through adaptive strategies resulting in the exchange of self-identity and self-worth for acceptance within the dominant order. Exhibit A for Blacks here is the Uncle Tom, and for Jews, the Assimilated Jew. A third form of internecine self-hatred appears to be the exclusive province of Jews. Unleashed by their post-emancipation entry into mainstream European, and eventually U.S., society, yet drawing on the historical memory and continued experience of bigotry and persecution, this form also is based in negative stereotypes. These stereotypes, however, though crucially impacted by hostile contact with and displaced reaction to the non-Jewish world, have been generated primarily from within the Jewish community itself. Examples here range from the Schlemiel, Schlimazl, and Nebbish of the Old World to the Neurotic Jew, Jewish Mother, and Jewish American Princess (JAP) of the New.12 This brief taxonomy of internecine self-hatred is essential for an understanding of the fate that met Jackie Mason and Chicken Soup. Despite comparatively high ratings and generally favourable reviews, at least from the non-Jewish press, Chicken Soup was done in by pressure from within the Jewish community, which objected both to Mason’s ‘too Jewish’ self-portrayal and to the show’s interfaith-relationship theme (Mason’s character is romantically linked with an Irish Catholic played by Lynn Redgrave). The latter, assimilationist aspect was an especially sensitive topic at a historical moment when, for the first time in America, Jews were facing soaring, beyond-replacement-level

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 157 intermarriage rates.13 The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles combined the two issues in its trashing of the show: ‘As if this [intermarriage] problem isn’t bad enough […] [Mason’s negative stereotypes] are a pathetic reminder of an era long ago […] as inappropriate and offensive to Jews as Amos and Andy [sic] would be to blacks today.’14 Anti–Chicken Soup campaign organizer Dan Bloom added: ‘Many Jews […] have heard this type of humour in their homes, but in the public living rooms of America for everybody to hear it seemed embarrassing.’15 It is worth pursuing what it was, more precisely, that made Chicken Soup so hard for Jews to swallow in 1989, especially given that another Jewish sitcom that premiered the same year, Anything But Love (1989– 92) – although it featured an equally guilt-obsessed, Jewish mothersaddled, shiksa-enamoured Jew (played by Richard Lewis) – managed to survive for three years comparatively unscathed by Jewish critics. Much of the double standard, as Sander Gilman proposes, consisted in Mason’s, as opposed to Lewis’s, combination of Eastern-European Jewish (read: stunted) body, ‘vulgar’ attire, and Yiddish-inflected language. In short (no pun intended), Mason’s gnomish figure, loud dress, and immigrant speech not only articulated him as less than fully American, and less of a man, but also associated him with the less prized – that is to say, more despised – aspects of Jewishness.16 Offering an interesting comparison with Chicken Soup, from a gender standpoint, is the 1990s ‘Jewishcom’ The Nanny. While the show was taken to task in the Jewish press for its alleged caricaturing of a Jewish princess type – a ‘Shleppin Fetchit’ performed with chalkboard-scratching nasality by Fran Drescher – it was also lauded in Jewish circles. Representatives of a newly formed Jewish women’s media watchdog group, the Morning Star Commission, deemed Drescher’s portrayal of the working-class Jewish nanny ‘funny and fine and terrific’; Forward columnist Robin Cembalist called Drescher ‘a conceptual artist’ who ‘is not merely rehashing stereotypes but questioning them’; while critic Susan Glenn defended Drescher as the ‘only reigning Jewish actress on television with the chutzpah to celebrate her ethnic “otherness.”’17 Drescher, meanwhile, took the offensive. Responding to one of her Jewish critics, Judith Peiss, in a Los Angeles Times ‘Counterpunch’ article, she wrote: The truth of the matter is I created Fran Fine based very closely upon my mother, myself, and all the wonderful and rich characters I grew up

158 Vincent Brook around in Flushing, Queens. I am sorry and sad if the way we really are (yes, plastic covers and all) offends [critics like Peiss] mainly because all her article accomplished was to reveal her insecurities as a Jewish woman living in a Wasp culture. Perhaps Peiss finds Fran Fine too blatantly Jewish for her taste. But Fran is openly proud of her heritage […] I find it infuriating to deal with negativity regarding a character who is clearly carving inroads for other Jewish characters – particularly women – who will not have to apologize for who or what they are. Maybe Peiss has been brainwashed – by the very media she puts down – into believing that the only good portrayal of a Jew is an assimilated one.18

The Nanny ultimately was able to survive the sort of assault that sank Chicken Soup, for several reasons. First, as we have seen, Jewish reaction to Drescher’s show was less monolithic, more ambivalent than it had been to Mason’s. The Nanny had strong supporters not only among Jews generally, but, most significantly, among Jewish women. Second, The Nanny benefited from timing. Had it been one of the first Jewishcoms to hit American airwaves after a decadelong hiatus, as had been the case with Chicken Soup, The Nanny’s fate would have been far more uncertain.19 By the time of its premiere in 1993, however, the ‘Jewish’ sitcom trend was well established. There were five other Jewishcoms on the air, including the mega-hits Seinfeld and Mad about You. A range of Jewish portrayals existed, in other words, making The Nanny less subject to the Amos ’n’ Andy effect – that is, a show’s vulnerability to outside pressure, and thus to cancellation, when its alleged unsympathetic representations are not balanced by shows with more favourable ones.20 Third, Drescher’s nanny, unlike Mason’s schlemiel, had a host of redeeming character traits. As the otherwise critical Joyce Antler observed, ‘What many find likeable in the show are the nanny’s cleverness, honesty, sense of pride, and warmth […] [She] outsmarts her antagonists, whomever they may be, because of her innate shrewdness, a genuine concern for others, and the folk wisdom apparently imparted from her heritage.’21 Finally, and most crucially, the nanny is a knockout. Unlike Mason’s conventionally unprepossessing figure, Drescher’s character is darkly attractive and very sexy. More than any other factor, I believe, it was this non-stereotypical physical representation of a Jewish woman, at least for American television, that inclined a sizable portion of Jewish viewers, male and female, to tolerate her other, less flattering qualities.22

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 159 Another sitcom with a repository of purportedly negative Jewish traits, and therefore another test case for internecine Jewish selfhatred, is Seinfeld. Indeed, the show ‘about nothing’ was infamously rejected, initially, by NBC President Brandon Tartikoff (himself a Jew) for its alleged ‘too Jewishness’: the Jewish-named and -looking main character (Jerry Seinfeld), Jerry’s Jewish occupation (stand-up comedian), and his place of residence (‘Jew York City’).23 The show was only green-lighted, reluctantly, once Jerry’s hall mate’s name was changed from the more seemingly Jewish ‘Kessler’ to the more denominationally neutral ‘Kramer.’24 The character of Elaine, meanwhile, played by the Jewish (in fact and, arguably, appearance) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was explicitly marked, in several episodes, as non-Jewish.25 The show’s Semitic fault lines remained gapingly exposed, however, through the ethnically ambiguous character of George Costanza, played by the otherwise ‘quite Jewish’ Jason Alexander. Physically and behaviourally as much a ‘Jewish body’ as Jackie Mason (minus the Yiddish accent), George is Seinfeld’s Jewish bone of contention. Is he or isn’t he Jewish? Nobody, on or off the show, seems to know for sure. Jerry Stiller, who played George’s father, offered an explanation in an interview that trenchantly transposed Jewish selfhatred into humour: ‘I think we’re a Jewish family living under the Witness Protection Program under the name Costanza.’26 George is also the prototype for an emergent televisual response to Jewish selfhatred, the ‘perceptual Jew’: a character who is perceived as stereotypically Jewish by many viewers (Jewish and non-Jewish) yet who is diegetically represented as non-Jewish. The ‘perceptual Jew’ serves a twofold commercial function: general audience appeal is broadened and Jewish audience aversion assuaged due to the character’s ethnic hybridity.27 The ‘perceptual Jew’ also serves a therapeutic function: by foisting putatively unsympathetic Jewish traits onto a non-Jew, both the production and reception of Jewish self-hatred are shown to be contingent. One can make the argument – and the Jerry Stiller ‘Witness Protection’ joke lends it support – that the ‘perceptual Jew,’ as well as other examples cited so far, is not so much a sign of self-hatred as of selfpreservation. In other words, the various adverse responses to ‘too Jewishness,’ from stereotype aversion to assimilationism, can be taken as deriving more from concern for the commercial consequences and physical repercussions of such displays, in a decreasingly yet persistently anti-Semitic climate, than from aversion to the representa-

160 Vincent Brook tions per se. The point is, however, that the line between self-hatred and self-preservation is precariously thin, the one easily bleeding into the other. Selling one’s self to save one’s skin, while perhaps not rising to Faustian proportions, remains a tragic self-betrayal, and therefore subject, if not quite to metaphysical retribution, at least to painful inner laws of crime and punishment. The Larry Sanders Show Garry Shandling’s name and appearance are, arguably, conspicuously Jewish. He also grew up as, in his words, the only Jew in Tucson, Arizona – for which distinction he was occasionally beaten up as a child.28 Shandling survived, of course, to become, among other notable achievements, the star of The Larry Sanders Show, the quintessentially postmodern HBO sitcom about the behind-the-scenes and on-screen shenanigans of a late-night talk show called ‘The Larry Sanders Show.’29 I say quintessentially postmodern not only because of the show’s ‘hyperconscious’ style and content, but also because its mimicry of the late-night talk-show format both reveals and revels in that genre’s ontological incestuousness – a staged show about the ‘reality’ of celebrity in which media personalities perform but also sell ‘themselves.’30 Loosely based on Shandling’s real-life persona, The Larry Sanders Show features Garry/Larry as a talk-show host in a perpetual panic about his ratings, his sex life, and his ‘too-large’ lips and buttocks, not necessarily in that order and all obviously intimately entwined.31 The emphasis on ‘over-sized’ lips and buttocks, especially, is telling. Both labial and posterior profusions are generally associated with African Americans – more specifically, with Blacks’ alleged hypersexuality. Moreover, the association of Jews and Blackness is not a recent phenomenon. ‘Medieval iconography,’ Gilman writes, ‘always juxtaposed the black image of the synagogue, of the Old Law, with the white of the church.’ This imagery, moreover, ‘is incorporated, not merely as an intellectual abstraction, but as the model through which Jews are perceived, treated, and thus respond as if confronted with the reflection of their own reality.’32 In the nineteenth century, as ‘scientific racism’ became not only respectable but an essential prop of Western colonialism, the Jewish-Black connection was made into biological ‘fact.’ For Jews, who were already seen as a preternaturally ‘mongrel race,’ their most recent ‘hybridization,’ explained British ‘scientific’

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 161 racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, ‘was the admixture of Negro blood with Jewish in the Diaspora of Alexandria.’33 As for empirical ‘proof,’ this was provided by Jews and Blacks’ purported physical resemblance. As Adam Grotowski, a Polish noble, observed about a trip to the United States in 1857: ‘Jews [in Poland] have the greatest resemblance to the American mulattoes: Sallow carnation complexion, thick lips, crisped black hair. On my arrival in this country I took every light-colored mulatto for a Jew.’34 Whether the contemporary TV viewer takes Larry Sanders for a ‘Black Jew,’ or a ‘White Negro,’ is not the point here; rather, my concern is with the implications, for Larry’s self-image, of an aversion to traits associated with both Jews and another ‘other.’ And the aversion is not limited to only one ‘other’; ambivalent relations between Jews and gays are also abundantly cross-referenced on the show. Theoretically, as with Jews and African Americans, the Jewish/gay bond is a ‘natural’ fit. The Jewish male’s ‘resemblance to the homosexual’ through physical imputations of effeminacy was one of the main ‘pathological’ symptoms attributed to Jews by ‘scientific’ racism. Equally pertinent, and more grounded in reality, is the historical ‘affinity with the closet’ that the Jewish and gay subcultures have shared.35 Both the discursive and the historical aspects of Jewish-gay interaction are evident in The Larry Sanders Show. Virtually every main character, including Larry, is subjected to at least one embarrassing moment regarding his perception as being gay. The culmination of this metatextual motif occurs when the talk show’s chief writer, Phil (Wallace Langham), the most brazenly homophobic of the lot, ends up acknowledging his own repressed homosexuality when he falls for the openly gay secretary, Brian (Scott Thompson), whom he had been harassing. Before their climactic embrace in the studio offices, the gay-Jewish connection was made explicit when the trouble-shooting producer, Artie (Rip Torn), warned Phil about the potential damage to his career of his gay-bashing. Artie: ‘You know who runs this town?’ Phil: ‘The Jews.’ Artie: No, the gay Jews!’ (Episode #88: ‘Putting the “Gay” Back in Litigation’).36 Beyond what they reveal about the intersection of Jewishness, race, and sexuality, the show’s Jewish-Black and Jewish-gay approachavoidance complexes go a long way to explaining Larry Sanders’s highly overdetermined Jewish self-hatred. For unlike the other ‘Jewish’ sitcoms discussed so far, in which Jewish self-loathing has been more discursively inferred than explicitly represented, Larry Sanders’s

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self-hatred is worn on his sleeve – though, notably, not with a Star of David attached. Actor Janeane Garofalo, for example, who had a regular part as the show-within-the-show’s talent booker, describes Larry’s condition generically: ‘He’s so full of self-loathing, it’s just hilarious. He’s so full of sheer self-hatred it’s a pleasure to watch.’37 No mention here of the specifically Jewish nature of Larry’s self-hatred. Indeed, for the occasional viewer, his condition’s Jewishness might easily remain a mystery, as might Larry’s Jewish identity altogether. The closeting of Jewishness has a long history in American entertainment, from the nose-straightening, hair-dying, and name-changing of Jewish movie stars to the non-denominationality of TV performers such as George Burns and Jack Benny. Most Jews, and many non-Jews, may have been aware of Burns’s (né Nathan Birnbaum) and Benny’s (né Benjamin Kubelsky) Jewishness, but its overt disclosure was fastidiously avoided, as it had been with their earlier movie and radio personas, and on their TV shows (The Burns and Allen Show, 1950–8; The Jack Benny Program, 1950–65). This de-Judaizing may have been underscored, such as in Burns’s celebrating Christmas at his sitcom home, or overcompensated for, such as in Benny’s stereotypically Jewish miserliness, effeminacy, and violin-playing. But both celebrities remained closeted Jews throughout their entertainment careers. What distinguishes Larry Sanders’s Jewish self-denial is, first, that it occurs at a time when most other Jewish TV performers, including Garry Shandling himself in his earlier It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986–9), were ‘coming out’ Jewish, and second, that the self-denial is diegetically informed.38 This overtly ‘dis-simulative’ aspect, which resonates with Lawrence Grossberg’s postmodernist notion of ‘authentic inauthenticity,’ reinforces the quintessentially postmodern quality not only of The Larry Sanders Show but, at least in its self-denial aspect, of Jewish self-hatred itself.39 Of course, as previously indicated, despite Jews’ privileged relationship to self-hatred, the condition need not ‘always-already’ be aligned with them. The Jewishcom Curb Your Enthusiasm makes this point emphatically. In a second-season episode, a Jewish neighbour of Larry David’s character (named Larry David and based on the real-life Seinfeld co-creator) pounces on David for humming a Wagnerian tune in a public place. ‘You wanna know what you are?’ the neighbour inveighs. ‘You’re a self-hating Jew!’ David angrily responds that he does hate himself ‘but it has nothing to do with being Jewish,’ then gains revenge by hiring an orchestra to play Wagner on the neighbour’s front

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 163 lawn in the middle of the night. Freud, one can imagine, would accuse David of protesting too much, and he would have ample support for such a diagnosis. David’s disassociation of his self-hatred from his Jewishness recalls a classic Seinfeld episode (‘The Yada-Yada,’ cowritten by David) in which Jerry, upset about his dentist’s conversion to Judaism so that he can learn better jokes, complains to a priest in a confessional that the conversion doesn’t offend him as a Jew but as a comedian. The deeply self-loathing George Costanza, meanwhile, may technically have been only a ‘perceptual Jew,’ but his performance by actor Jason Alexander was modelled on a combination of series co-creator Larry David and Woody Allen.40 Allen himself famously quipped that ‘while it’s true that I am Jewish and I don’t like myself very much, it’s not because of my persuasion.’41 And Allen’s disclaimer echoes Kafka’s claim that his lack of identification with himself as a Jew was superseded by his lack of identification with himself as a human being.42 Existentialist claims to self-hatred have a long history, in other words, among Jews (and, recalling Grossman’s point, among Jewish comedians). Where Larry Sanders parts company from all of the above is that while these other fictional and non-fictional figures may disassociate their self-hatred from their Jewishness, they still (with the exception of George Costanza) admit that they’re Jewish. Larry Sanders fastidiously, and at all cost, avoids the subject. The only way to determine Larry’s ethnicity, besides inferring it from his appearance or from extratextual or intertextual associations with Garry Shandling or It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, is to have caught one of the two episodes (out of a total of eighty-nine) that directly confront the issue – or to have been a proactive participant in a panel discussion on the topic, as I was. At a ‘Creating Comedy’ panel sponsored by the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, I asked the panel of TV writers, which included Garry Shandling and Larry Sanders Show writer Judd Apatow, what part their Jewishness had played in their creative work (only one of the five panelists, Bernie Mac Show creator Larry Whilmore, was not Jewish). After the nervous uproar – among the writers, not the audience – caused by my question had subsided, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal broke the ice: ‘What part has it played? Not one shtickle!’ When the laughter greeting this Yiddishism died down, Apatow confided that the Larry Sanders writers had debated behind the scenes about whether Larry was Jewish and had concluded that he was a selfhating Jew.43

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As for the two episodes that affirm Apatow’s claim, the first (Episode #59: ‘I Was a Teenage Lesbian’) features comedian Brett Butler playing ‘herself ’ as a talk-show guest. In response to Larry’s reference to the success of her recent best-selling book, Butler opines that after buying a house for her mother with proceeds from the book, ‘everything you do with your money is okay.’ ‘You don’t have any guilt,’ Larry continues her thought. Butler: ‘No, uh-uh, I’m a WASP.’ Larry: ‘WASPs don’t have guilt, do they?’ To which Butler retorts with a wry smile and her Southern drawl: ‘Y’all killed Him, we didn’t!’ Larry bows his head embarrassedly amid the in-house audience’s nervous laughter, as the show-within-the show cuts to commercial. The second episode (#72: ‘Make a Wish’) similarly conflates Larry’s closeted Jewishness with its self-hating component. The spark here is Larry’s desperate need to make People magazine’s ‘Ten Sexiest Men’ list, even if it means bumping talk-show guest, and friend, Ben Stiller off the list. Stiller finds out about the dirty trick and, while he remains amiable during the talk-show interview, angrily confronts Larry behind the scenes. Feigning innocence, Larry tells the irate Stiller: ‘If you could see how Jewish you look!’ Stiller snaps back, ‘Oh, that’s great! Coming from a self-hating Jew like yourself!’ Before Larry can respond, Artie, the trouble-shooting producer, breaks up the argument.44 One can hardly conceive a more succinct delineation of the origins and manifestations of Jewish self-hatred than these two sitcom moments provide. The one highlights the condition’s anti-Semitic underpinnings – still very much alive, as the flap over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) affirmed – in the Christ-killing myth; the other illustrates its internecine expression in reaction to assimilation and self-denial. Larry Sanders emerges ‘guilty’ on both counts. The issue of self-denial, specifically, is elaborated on in another episode (#67: ‘My Name Is Asher Kingsley’).45 Here the issue is approached from two different angles, one related to Larry, the other to Larry’s talk-show sidekick and the series’ comic foil, Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor).46 Both aspects intersect with the notion of self-preservation. The episode opens with Hank’s abrupt decision to reclaim his Jewishness, starting by affixing a mezuzah (talisman) beside his office door and changing his stage name back to his birth name, Hank Lepstein. Referencing the self-preservation motif, Hank explains, ‘I’ve hidden it [my Jewishness] all my life. First in school so I wouldn’t get beat up. Then in show business so I wouldn’t alienate my public […] I want to regain my faith, I want to rejoin my people!’ It turns out that

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 165 Hank’s motives, as usual, are hardly pure: his real reason for coming out Jewish is to seduce Rabbi Klein, an attractive female rabbi he met at Marvin Hamlisch’s synagogue. In a vain attempt to dissuade Hank from his conversion, Artie reinforces the self-preservation theme with a gentile twist: ‘You know, I’ve worked for your people a long time. They run this town. They’ve run it a hell of a lot better than the agents […] But we’re just trying to entertain people and morality’s just gonna get in the way.’47 The Jewish jokes come fast and furious. When Larry’s Black secretary, Beverly (Penny Johnson), complains because Hank is allowed to give his rabbi a tour of the studio when her pastor wasn’t afforded the same privilege, Hank defends the double standard: ‘I think you’ll agree that a rabbi fits more nicely into a show business environment.’ Phil, also a non-Jew, questions whether Hank is really Jewish because he had previously seemed to deny it. ‘People change,’ Hank insists; ‘it’s called spiritual growth.’ Phil: ‘Well, this is called spiritual disbelief, because most Jewish people I know are smart!’ As for the connection to Larry, Artie cautions Hank about bringing the rabbi around the set because ‘religion makes Larry very uncomfortable.’ The topper comes when Hank surprises everyone by putting a yarmulke on during the talk show. During commercial break, after being scolded by Larry for his unscripted embarrassment, Hank asks Larry about his religion, which Hank hasn’t the slightest idea about even though he has known Larry for fifteen years. ‘That’s a private matter,’ Larry mutters evasively, though he tells Hank that his cap is on inside out. Artie adds in an aside, ‘His religion is talk-show host.’48 A subsequent backdoor meeting between Hank and two network executives expands on Artie’s aside, while putting the kibosh on Hank’s religious fling. ‘They [the network] want our appeal to be nondenominational,’ one of the execs explains.49 ‘But you’re Jewish, aren’t you, Stu?’ Hank protests. Updating the assimilationist adage ‘A Jew at home, a gentleman on the street,’ Stu responds, ‘Yes, but I’m behind the camera where the viewing public can’t see me.’ The meeting ends with Hank calling Stu an Uncle Tom and Stu calling Hank a schmuck. Hank, as usual, ultimately sacrifices personal principle for self-preservation, the urgency of which is underscored by the hate mail he receives. A swastika is scrawled on one envelope, and another letter reads, ‘Dear Jew: Keep wearing your Jew hat so I can use it as a target when I blow your Jew head off!’ When a third correspondent threatens to stop buying the brand of orange ‘jews’ Hank peddles, it’s off with Hank’s kippah – an opportunistic gesture that turns out to be redun-

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dant. For Hank had already been de-capped during the talk show by Artie’s order to shoot him in choker close-ups that cropped his objectionable head gear! When all the Jewish jokes are added up, this last one appears to crystallize the episode’s, if not the series’, overarching Jewish theme: If you want to survive in the entertainment business, much less in public life, don’t let your kippah – i.e., your Jewishness – show. In the ‘Creating Comedy’ panel alluded to previously, Garry Shandling extrapolated just such a theme from the ‘My Name Is Asher Kingsley’ episode. Drawing on Artie’s aside about Larry, ‘His religion is talk-show host,’ Shandling suggested that talk-show hosts don’t want to divulge their religion because they want to appeal to as broad a spectrum of the audience as possible: ‘They’re everyman.’ In a personal interview, Larry Sanders Show co-creator Dennis Klein was more ethnically specific: ‘Larry Sanders was conceived as the very antithesis of Jewishness. The Johnny Carson Show, for example – on which Larry patterns his show and himself as a talk-show host – was, in its background and approach, intended by Carson as a rebuke to mainstream Jewish comedy.’ Eager to dismiss his show’s associations with Jewishness, however, Klein quickly added that ‘Larry Sanders was not intended as a satirical comment on the hyper-gentile, anti-Jewish aspect of Carson’s show.’ Perhaps not, but the ‘anti-Jewishness’ seeps through. Conclusion The Larry Sanders Show demonstrates that Jewish self-hatred, and its representation in Jewish humour, remains subject to what Gilman calls self-hatred’s ‘inevitable double bind.’ On the one hand, Jews, in order to succeed in society, are forced to assimilate; but in so doing they must also reject as unworthy an aspect of themselves, which is then projected onto ‘others’ – of their own or of other marginalized groups.50 On the other hand, anti-Semites reflexively reject conspicuous Jews yet also suspect those Jews who manage to ‘pass’ into the mainstream as having done so under false (read: conspiratorial) pretences.51 Internally and externally, Jews, quite literally, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Then again, whether from genius or necessity, Jews have also managed to snatch redemption from the jaws of damnation by finding theological justification (the redemptive Chosen people) and psychological comfort (the moral righteousness

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 167 of marginality) in their role as the eternal outsider. When this outsider role is challenged, however, as it is today by Israel’s militarily dominant position in the Middle East and Jews’ insider status in the U.S. entertainment industry and society, the predicament becomes precarious once again. Ultimately, manifestations of Jewish self-hatred in American media, particularly in television, remain predicated largely on self-preservation. Thus, while the Jewish sitcom and overall Jewish TV trend may continue, fuelled by a conflation of assimilationist and multiculturalist forces, aversions to ‘too Jewishness’ will undoubtedly also persist, fed partly by commercial desire to reach the broadest audience, partly by sensitivity to Jews’ perceived ‘over-representation’ in the media and U.S. society. As Larry Sanders co-creator Klein stated in our interview: ‘It’s an accepted wisdom. For example, during casting sessions, after an actor does a reading and walks out, someone will say, “Too J,” and everyone will know what is meant. There’s always been, and remains, a tendency to veer away from overt Jewishness.’ Such a tendency will certainly prevail so long as the Jewish fat-cat, media-control, and world domination ca(na)rds continue to be played, by everyone from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Mel Gibson.52 As for internecine Jewish self-hatred, this dynamic, while changing significantly, has, if anything, been exacerbated by the continuing Jewish intermarriage crisis and conflicting attitudes toward Israel. With the intermarriage rate approaching 50 per cent in the 1990s, and with religious observance and child-rearing statistically also in decline, the combined survival-threatening trend has been called a ‘Silent Holocaust’ by many Orthodox survivalists, who compare the phenomenon to self-imposed genocide.53 The actual Holocaust, meanwhile, remains one of the most palpable postmodern sources for Jewish selfhatred, no longer so much through ‘identification with the oppressor,’ which applied more to the generation that had directly experienced Nazi persecution, as through shame at the alleged passive submission of Jews to the Final Solution. The Tough Jew of modern-day Israel and the Jewish Defense League (with antecedents in the Zionist pioneers and American gangsters) epitomizes psychosocial resistance to the ‘Jewish weakling’ syndrome. The most potent new source of internecine Jewish self-hatred is Israel itself – post-1967 Israel, that is, of the Palestinian occupation, the Lebanon invasions, the ‘Who is a Jew?’ controversy, and the two intifadas. The ‘good’ Jew/’bad’ Jew dichotomy that previously pitted Eastern European vs assimilated

168 Vincent Brook Jews in ways that saw the judgmental labels gyrate from one to the other54 now characterizes an equally voluble conflict in which orthodox vs secular beliefs and pro- vs anti-Israeli government sentiments are regarded alternately as badges of honour or disgrace. Jewish selfcriticism, a long-honoured Jewish tradition, which, only in the face of heightened anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe, transmogrified into the Jewish ‘pathology’ of self-hatred, has become an endangered species once again. This time, however, the transmogrification has been effected by Jews themselves.55 Stuck between images of a wimp (the Holocaust) and a storm trooper (Israel), Jews seem more mired in internecine self-hatred than ever before, with – as was demonstrated in the 1995 killing of Prime Minister Rabin by an ultraOrthodox Jew – potentially lethal consequences.56 In the end, as it has been throughout post-Emancipation Jewish history, one of the prime ways of dealing with this dilemma has been through transformative humour, humour that seeks to loosen, if not to break through, the multiple double-binds of Jewish self-hatred. Comedy has become for postmodern Jews much as epic poetry was for the Romantic Goethe, one of the main lines of defence in the Faustian psychodrama of self-loathing. Of course, channelling this defence mechanism through a mass cultural medium such as televison that is perceived, not unjustifiably, as dominated by Jews, potentially rebinds with one hand what is loosened with the other. Even here, however, the Sisyphean absurdity merely adds another layer of humour to the mix, at least from the existentialist perspective of a people postbiblically confronted with the cosmic joke of ‘chosen-ness.’ To illustrate the multifarious strands of the self-preservational paradox, let the last word go to The Larry Sanders Show, which in one of its most postmodern ‘Jewish moments’ uses the self-referential logic of media representation to deconstruct the torturous illogic of the ‘Jewish question.’57 In the episode titled ‘Adolph Hankler’ (#84), comic Jon Stewart, as himself, acts as Larry’s talk-show-host substitute. As if to compensate for Larry’s, and Hank Kingsley’s, avoidance of Jewishness, Stewart does a sketch lampooning the game show Jeopardy that functions as a limit case for the ‘return of the repressed.’ Called ‘The Adolph Hankler Show,’ it features Hank as Adolph Hankler, the gameshow host, dressed in a Nazi uniform and wearing a Hitler moustache. The correct ‘question’ to all of Hankler’s ‘answers’ – such as ‘They caused the sinking of the Titanic’ and ‘The small people that controls the world’s money supply’ – is, uniformly of course, ‘Who Are the

Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show 169 Jews?’ When the non-Jewish Artie complains about the offensiveness of the sketch, Stewart responds, ‘Yeah well, it doesn’t bother me, and I’m Jewish.’ ‘So was Jesus,’ Artie fires back, ‘and look where he ended up?’ ‘On the WB [network],’ Stewart retorts.58 notes This essay was developed from an earlier essay of mine titled ‘Y’All Killed Him, We Didn’t: Jewish Self-Hatred and The Larry Sanders Show,’ in You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, ed. Vincent Brook (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 298–331. 1 See Sander Gilman, ‘Jewish Self Hatred (I) and The Believer (II),’ in Henry Bean, ‘The Believer’: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), 238. 2 Henry Bean, ‘The Believer,’ 19. Following the same line of thought, one could easily include the (quasi-Jewish) Marx among self-hatred’s theorizers, given his class-based notion of ‘false consciousness.’ 3 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967); Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1948; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1960); Miriam Greenspan, ‘The New Anti-Semitism,’ Tikkun 18 (Fall 2003): 33–42. 4 See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor Books, 1989); Neal Gabler, ‘Conference Presentation,’ in Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (Los Angeles: The American Jewish Committee and The Norman Lear Center, 1998), 3–12; Muriel Cantor, The Hollywood Producer: His Work and His Audience (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1998); Juliet Lushbough, ‘The Hollywood TV Writer: A Descriptive Study of Sixty Primetime Television Writers,’ (PhD. diss., Temple University, 1981); David Desser and Lester Friedman, eds., American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). 5 Quoted in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Affective Genealogies: Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and the ‘Jewish Question’ after Auschwitz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 96. 6 Albert Goldman, ‘Boy-Man Shlemiel: The Jewish Element in American Humour,’ in Albert Goldman, Freakshow (New York: Antheneum, 1971), 174–8; here 178. 7 See Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford

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University Press, 1994); Janet Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks … and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). Robert Lloyd, ‘“Pilot” Flies in the Face of Convention,’ Los Angeles Times, 5 September 2004, E12. Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). See Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, for a more complete list. See also David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover, MA, and London: University Press of New England, 2003). Recent hit dramatic series featuring Jewish protagonists include Everwood (2002–6), The O.C. (2003–7), and Numb3rs (2005–). See Gilman, ‘Jewish Self-Hatred.’ See Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher; Ellen Jaffe MacClain, Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (New York: Basic Books, 1995). ‘David Hyman, ‘“Chicken Soup” Is a Tasteless Broth,’ Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, 22–8 September 1989, 53. Quoted in ‘Highly Touted “Soup” Goes down the Drain,’ USA Today, 8 November 1989, 1D–2D. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). Beverly Beyette, ‘Image Make-Over,’ Los Angeles Times, 9 November 1998, E4; Robin Cembalist, ‘Big Hair, Short Skirts – and High Culture: Taking Fran Drescher Seriously,’ Forward, 14 February 1997, 9; quoted in Joyce Antler, ‘Jewish Women on Television: Too Jewish or Not Enough,’ in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in Popular American Culture, ed. Joyce Antler (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 247. Fran Drescher, ‘“The Nanny” Is Jewish and Proud of It,’ Los Angeles Times, 9 May 2004, F5. The 1980s hiatus followed a brief upswing in Jewish sitcoms in the 1970s that included, most prominently, Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–3) and Rhoda (1974–9). For more on Jewishcoms from this and earlier periods, again see Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, and Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time. Amos ’n’ Andy (1951–3) was cancelled despite good ratings, due partly to pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Joyce Antler, ‘Too Jewish or Not Enough,’ 247. See Vincent Brook, ‘The Fallacy of Falsity: Un-“Dresch”-ing Masquerade, Fashion, and Postfeminist Jewish Princesses in The Nanny,’ Television

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and New Media 1 (August 2000): 279–305, and Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher. David Kronke and Robert Gauthier, ‘There’s Nothing to It,’ Los Angeles Times, 29 January 1995, C13. Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 290. For specific examples of Elaine’s ‘coming out’ non-Jewish, see Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher; Stratton, Coming Out Jewish. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher, 107. For more on ‘perceptual’ Jewishness, see Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher. Shandling offered this biographical information at the ‘Creating Comedy’ panel sponsored by the Museum of Television and Radio, held 26 February 2003, at the Director’s Guild of America Theater in West Hollywood, California. Appearing on HBO in the mid-1990s, when cable programming was less of an industry force than it is today, the show received correspondingly less audience and media recognition than popular network Jewishcoms such as Seinfeld, The Nanny, Mad about You, and Friends. Nonetheless, Larry Sanders proved a success both critically and (comparatively) ratings-wise, garnering numerous Emmy and Golden Globe nominations (winning several of the former) and remaining on the air for a syndication-assuring six years (reruns of the show have since aired on Bravo and ABC). ‘Hyperconsciousness’ refers to ‘a hyperawareness on the part of the text itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the conditions of its circulation and reception.’ Jim Collins, ‘Postmodernism and Television,’ in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 327–53, here 335. The altered eponym was chosen to avoid confusion with Shandling’s earlier sitcom, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986-9). Gilman, ‘Self-Hatred,’ 7. Quoted in ibid., 7. Quoted in ibid., 8; emphasis mine. Larry also complained, in one episode at least, about a talk-show guest’s mocking his ‘big hair.’ Catherine Seipp, ‘Cathy’s World: Garry Shandling’s “Larry,”’ United Press International, 25 December 2002). Bodily based self-hatred for Jewish women, while sharing some of the same Black associative origins, is of course somewhat different than for men. For more on self-hatred specific to Jewish women, see Janice L. Booker, The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths: The

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Many Faces of Self-Hatred (New York: Shapolsky, 1991); Ophira Edut, ‘Tales of a Jewess with Caboose,’ in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1991), 24–30; Riv-Ellen Prell, ‘Cinderellas Who (Almost) Never Become Princesses: Subversive Representations of Jewish Women in Postwar Popular Novels,’ in Antler, Talking Back, 123–38. For more on affinities between Jews and gays, see Gilman, The Jew’s Body; Naomi Seidman, ‘Fag Hags and Bu-Jews: Toward a (Jewish) Politics of Vicarious Identity,’ in Insider/Outside: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 254–68; Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: Jewish Masculinity (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1998); Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkowitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). The show’s reference to the entertainment industry’s gay-Jewish connection was no doubt triggered by a high-profile incident involving Hollywood power player Michael Ovitz. Upon his unceremonious firing from a top position at the Walt Disney Company by CEO Michael Eisner, Ovitz blamed his fate on Hollywood’s ‘gay mafia,’ in which category the apparently straight (and Jewish) Ovitz included (not necessarily accurately) Eisner, David Geffen, and Barry Diller (all Jews), among others. Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 34. Quoted in Jay Martel, ‘True Lies,’ Rolling Stone, 8 September 1994, 66. In It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, along with other Jewish references, Garry’s having attended Hebrew school is revealed. Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1997). Bill Zehme, ‘Jerry & George & Kramer & Elaine: Exposing the Secrets of Seinfeld’s Success,’ Rolling Stone, 8–22 July 1993, 40. Allen is quoted in Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 196. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1948–9). The exact quote (in translation), from the 8 January 1914 entry, is: ‘What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’ ‘Creating Comedy’ panel. The fifth panelist was Beverly Hills 90210 and Sex and the City creator Darren Star. Apatow recalled a slightly different ending to the scene (probably from

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the original HBO episode rather than the edited Bravo rerun I viewed), in which Larry compounds the self-denying implications of Stiller’s remark by replying, ‘You think I’m Jewish?’ The episode title is an obvious reference to the Chaim Potok novel My Name Is Asher Lev. Tambor had a featured role in Arrested Development as the incarcerated patriarch of a wealthy, hyper-dysfunctional Westside Los Angeles Jewish family. For more on this show, see Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger, ‘Something Old Is New Again? Postmodern Jewishness in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, and The O.C.,’ in Brook, ed., You Should See Yourself, 277–97. The absurdist irony of separating agents from the ‘Jewish-run’ entertainment industry cannot have been lost on the showbiz-savvy Artie, nor on the (Jewish) writers of the episode. At least this is how Apatow recalled the end of the scene at the panel, again probably from the original HBO episode. Artie’s comment is not in the Bravo rerun. Larry Sanders Show co-creator Dennis Klein offered an elaboration of this argument in our phone interview: ‘It would be a drag to bring in religion, from a comedic standpoint. It’s not really funny. If you need it for an episode maybe, such as a bar mitzvah, but not to carry a series […] especially on network TV. The last thing you want is to have a fight with Standards and Practices’ (Los Angeles, California, 14 February 2003). Gilman, ‘Jewish Self-Hatred,’ 228. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 19. Other recent high-profile examples: New Republic columnist Greg Easterbrook’s blaming of a spate of Hollywood gore-fests on boorish Jewish movie moguls who ‘worship money above all else’ – see ‘Take Out the Gore and “Kill Bill” Is an Episode of “Might Power Rangers,”’ New Republic, 23 October 2003; the Parent Television Council’s charge of the anti-religiosity of the ‘Jewish’ television industry – see Lynn Smith, ‘Advocacy Group Says TV Has Little Respect for Religion,’ Los Angeles Times, 17 December 2004, E1, E6; William Donahue of the Catholic League for Civil Rights’ sinister conflation of Jews, secularism, and sodomy: ‘Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? […] Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes,’ quoted in Tim Rutten, ‘Yule Tidings of a Culture War,’ Los Angeles Times, 18 December 2004, E1, E26–7, here E27; and CNN newscaster Rick Sanchez’s on-air comment that Jews run CNN and ‘all the other’ networks – see Melissa

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Vincent Brook Maertz, ‘CNN’s Sanchez Fired after Remarks,’ Los Angeles Times, 2 October 2010, AA2. The 1990 Jewish National Population Survey (JNPS) initially reported a 52 per cent intermarriage rate since 1985. Sociologist Steven Cohen and others subsequently revised the figure downward to between 42 and 43 per cent; see J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 66–8. The 2000 JNPS, working from the revised 1990 figure, showed a steady rise in intermarriage to 47 per cent from 1990; see Joe Berkofsy, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, 12 September 2003, 20. For more on the intermarriage issue, see MacClain, Embracing the Stranger; Susan Weidman Schneider, Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living with Differences between Christians and Jews (New York: The Free Press, 1989); Sylvia Barack Fishman, Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004). Gilman, ‘Jewish Self-Hatred,’ 227–34. Ibid., 221. For a brilliant conflation of the Holocaust- and Israel-based strands of Jewish self-hatred, see Henry Bean’s film The Believer (2002) and his anthology ‘The Believer’ (cited in note 1), which contains the film’s shooting script and commentary by the filmmaker and various scholars. This dichotomy is drawn from a scene in the film The Believer. When the American Jewish protagonist, a self-hating neo-Nazi based on an actual historical figure, rants against Jews of the Holocaust and those of modern-day Israel, a Jewish friend retorts, ‘Do you hate them because they’re wimps or because they’re storm troopers?’ The term ‘Jewish moments’ is used here to refer to overt textual representations of Jewishness. It is not to be confused with Stratton’s use of the term in Coming Out. There, ‘Jewish moments,’ drawing on Alexander Doty’s notion of ‘queer moments,’ refer to more subtle Jewish references that were either encoded as Jewish by the text’s producers and/or can be decoded as such by ‘competent’ viewers. For those who don’t get the joke, the Jesus-WB connection refers to the (former) Warner Brothers TV network’s penchant for Christian-oriented programming such as Seventh Heaven (1996–2007). Warner Brothers, of course, was founded by, and its entertainment operations remain largely under the management of, Jews, though the WB can just as well serve as a metaphor for Jewish-’dominated’ television (and mass media) in general. An added irony is that the WB itself has since died and risen again, as part of the new CW network formed in 2006 from a merger of the floundering WB and UPN (United Paramount) networks.

7 Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Politics in the Netherlands: The Rules and Attraction of Clandestine Humour GISELINDE KUIPERS Introduction: Ethnic Humour and Ethnic Sensibilities In the Netherlands of the early twenty-first century, as in most of Western Europe, ethnic humour is the most ‘dangerous’ form of humour. People freely joke about nationals from other countries, such as Germans or Belgians, or ‘native’ minorities like the Limburghers in the south of the country, or the Frisians in the north. But jokes about ethnic minority groups like Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, and Antilleans are highly contested. Since the 1970s, such jokes told in public have caused considerable controversy from time to time, replacing sex, religion, and the Royal Family as the most taboo topic for joking. This reflects a greatly increased sensitivity to ethnic references. Even in the private domain, humorous references to this sensitive and ‘serious’ topic became subject to many informal rules and regulations, making ethnic humour essentially a clandestine pleasure.1 Ever since Freud published Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious in 1905, scholars have studied the relationship between humour and taboo. Humour often focuses on sensitive issues such as sex, gender relations, death and disease, and – especially in authoritarian regimes – politics. Such themes are surrounded by taboos and cannot be discussed freely, yet at the same time they provoke anxiety and tend to be on people’s minds a lot – a combination with great humorous potential. In Freud’s time, the obvious example of such a sensitive, central, and restricted theme was sexuality. Many of the jokes Freud cites are sexual, and so implicit that they are all but incomprehensible to present-day readers. Apparently, these oblique jokes were suggestive enough in Freud’s age: the subject was so sen-

176 Giselinde Kuipers sitive that people responded with understanding and mirth to even the slightest hint of a sexual meaning. Joking about this dangerous subject was considered risqué and relegated to male-only private and semi-public settings.2 In the Netherlands after the 1970s, ethnic difference became a topic rather like sexuality in Freud’s era: surrounded by anxieties and implicit rules, to be discussed only with circumspection and care, yet increasingly central to everyday experience, moral concern, and political debate. This expansion of people’s ‘thresholds of embarrassment’3 with respect to ethnic difference resulted in the emergence of many unwritten rules and regulations about ethnic discourse. Somewhat pejoratively, this regime has been referred to as ‘political correctness.’ This growing sensitivity greatly contributed to the humorous potential of ethnicity: the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of jokes about ethnic minorities, which are almost exclusively told in the private sphere. In the newly sensitive regime, ethnic joking, like sexual humour a century earlier, became both attractive, and illicit and dangerous. This chapter explores the dynamics of humour, social sensibilities, and the regulation of discourse by analysing ethnic humour in the Netherlands around the turn of the twenty-first century. Why, and how, do the Dutch joke about ethnic minorities? When and where is ethnic humour allowed, when is it considered out of bounds, and how are such regimes enforced? What is the appeal of ethnic humour? Why is it considered offensive or even dangerous? How is the appeal of ethnic humour related to its clandestinity? By exploring this particular form of illicit humour, this chapter highlights the relation between humour, pleasure, and taboo, as well as the regulation of laughter through informal normative regimes and self-censorship. Hence, this essay analyses both the pleasures and the politics of joking. This chapter consists of three parts. The first part looks at Dutch ethnic humour: whom, and what, do Dutch people joke about? I will argue that, although ethnic jokes partly reflect the actual ethnic landscape of the Netherlands, they do so through the prism of a particularly Dutch perspective on ethnic relations. This perspective was grounded in class and race at first, increasingly remapped onto culture and religion in the early 2000s – but it remained overly sensitive to ethnic categories throughout this remapping. The second part explores the regime governing ethnic humour and the way this regime has developed since the 1960s. Despite changes in public discourse,

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and an increasing diversification of ethnic joking after 2001, ethnic humour has remained risky and restricted. The third part of this essay analyses the relation between ethnic humour and the regulation of ethnic discourse. Ethnicity, ethnic diversity, or ethnic minorities are not ‘naturally’ funny: they become humorous in a particular social and historical figuration. Moreover, ethnic humour makes ethnicity humorous in specific ways, by mapping ethnicity onto semantic domains that are meaningful in specific cultural contexts. Stupidity, dirtiness, religiosity, criminality, or skin colour, the central themes of ethnic jokes, all point to wider concerns in Dutch culture. Hence, Dutch ethnic humour tells us much about Dutch society and its sensibilities, little about the minorities it mocks. This is highlighted by the fact that sensitivity to ethnic difference predates the arrival of most migrants in Dutch society. The emergence of ethnic joking in the Netherlands is therefore not the direct result of increasing ethnic diversity. Neither the increased sensitivity to ethnicity nor the growth in ethnic humour is typical of the Netherlands. Both developments occurred in most European countries, and – earlier – in North America, too. This indicates that they are related, and, moreover, that they are connected with shifts in Western culture as a whole. Christie Davies, in his seminal work on ethnic humour, has argued that the jokes about stupidity and canniness which are told around the world are related to the rise of modernity.4 Ethnic groups dubbed stupid are lacking rationality and hence modernity; canny groups are overdoing it. The jokers are thus portrayed as exemplars of wise moderation. In a similar vein, I will argue that jokes about ethnic minorities, which in Europe emerged long after those jokes about modernity, are linked with cultural developments of the past half-century. Ethnic humour therefore has to be understood an attempt on the part of jokers both to grapple with these developments and to position and align themselves with others in present-day Dutch society. I will argue that the rise and the rules of ethnic joking in the Netherlands are related to two central sensibilities in Western culture. First, social hierarchy: ethnic jokes mark and map status hierarchies in Western societies. At the same time, they reflect and comment on the grown sensitivity towards hierarchy, exclusion, and ascribed status. Second, ethnic humour expresses and highlights the contradictions in one of the central institutions of our era: the nation-state. Especially in Europe, the nation-state has always been associated with ethnic

178 Giselinde Kuipers unity; ethnic diversity is an anomaly and challenge to this ideal. Such cultural anomalies often become charged, contested, and tabooed. Humorous discourse is a way to address such unspeakable topics – and to make light of them. Ethnic Joking, Cultural Boundaries, and Ethnic Hierarchies Ethnic humour refers to all humour that targets an ethnic group. Typically, such humour plays on a negative stereotype of this group – stinginess, stupidity, different eating habits, dirtiness. Many ethnic jokes target inhabitants of neighbouring countries, or ‘native’ minorities: inhabitants of specific regions, groups considered somewhat similar to the jokers. Stupidity jokes, for instance, target groups seen as a slightly backward version of the jokers’ group. Belgians, the main butt of stupidity jokes in the Netherlands, are a case in point: they speak a non-dominant version of the same language, and are considered poorer, more rural, less powerful, but overall quite likeable. A typical stupidity joke is slightly absurdist, often punning: Why does a Belgian take hay with him to bed? To feed the nightmares.

Typically, such jokes about ‘similar Others’ are felt to be unproblematic and not insulting. Other ethnic jokes target groups that are considered fundamentally different: immigrant groups, or minorities that stand out from dominant culture. This essay focuses on the latter, more problematic category of humour. In the Netherlands, such jokes typically target migrant groups that came to the Netherlands in the second half of the twentieth century. Because of restrictions on this form of ethnic joking in public, jokes are the most common form of ethnic humour: short stories or riddles, with standardized characters, situations, and formulas, ending in a punch line. Jokes are mostly shared and told by non-professional joketellers, in the private domain. Therefore, they can address themes and topics that are taboo: sex and bodily functions across cultures, politics in totalitarian regimes, and ethnic differences – especially ethnic superiority – in Western democracies today.5 Being a private and lowstatus genre, jokes provide a good entryway for a study of the relation between laughter and social taboos and sensitivities: jokes go where public jokers may not. Hence, much of the research on ethnic humour has focused on jokes.6

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In 1995, I collected ethnic jokes on schools in the Netherlands.7 The most popular joke targets were Belgians: 74.2 per cent of all students knew a Belgian joke; 70.2 per cent of students told me a joke about Turks; 34.7 per cent about Blacks;8 31.9 per cent about Jews; 13.3 per cent about Surinamese; and 2 per cent knew a joke about Moroccans. There were no jokes about Antilleans, the other post-colonial migrant group. Most of these jokes were not exclusively Dutch, but stemmed from an international repertoire of jokes, which relies mostly on oral transmission and existed long before the Internet. International joke scripts like stupidity, canniness, dirtiness, or laziness are adapted and applied to a local group.9 Most groups in the joke universe had their own humorous ‘scripts’: Belgians were stupid, Germans belligerent, Turks were dirty and criminal, Jews were stingy and had big noses, and Moroccans – in the rare jokes I found about them – were criminals and had a thing for camels. However, there was considerable overlap between jokes about Surinamese and Blacks: both were portrayed as lazy, oversexed, with a typical physical appearance (black, big lips, curly hair). Some stupidity jokes, which mostly target Belgians, were also told about Surinamese/Blacks, and I found Surinamese versions of some ‘dirty Turk’ jokes. A comparison between the joke universe and the real universe of ethnic relations in the Netherlands shows that Turks and Surinamese were overrepresented whereas Moroccans and Antilleans were virtually absent. The joke universe tends to ‘lump together’ groups with associated status and image in the humorous imagination. In 1995, Turks and Moroccans were almost indistinguishable in Dutch eyes: Mediterranean migrants with poor Dutch language skills, women with headscarves, who came to the Netherlands as labour migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. Turks and Moroccans had a similar low social status in Dutch society: the lowest in the ‘ethnic hierarchy.’10 In pejorative and joking language, the label ‘Turk’ was generally used to refer to both groups. Moroccan and Turk jokes had rather similar scripts, about dirtiness and criminality. This is illustrated by this Morroccan joke: a pun on the word ‘Moroccan’ which only works in Dutch: What do you call someone who steals a lot? Kleptomaan [kleptomaniac]. What do you call someone who sets things on fire? Pyromaan [pyromaniac]. What do you call someone who does both? Marokkaan [Moroccan].

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This joke refers to a script mostly reserved for Turks. For linguistic reasons, it targets Moroccans. Turks and Moroccans have similar ‘profiles’ in the joke universe. ‘Turk’ has probably become the umbrella term because Turks were the larger of the two Mediterranean migrant groups. Also, there are stylistic considerations: Turk is a short word, better suited to an oral genre. Finally, the Dutch language already had a number of negative phrases about Turks: dirty as a Turk, young Turks. Intriguingly, English has similar expressions, which probably date as far back as the Crusades. This means there was a label, with connotation, ready for use in a new cycle of jokes. A similar mechanism is at work in the case of Surinamese, Blacks, and Antilleans. From the 1970s onwards, many Surinamese migrated to the Netherlands from this former colony. In the 1970s and 1980s they were the ethnic group with the lowest social status. Judging from the overlap between joke scripts, Surinamese were generally subsumed under the literally and politically incorrect heading ‘Black’ although more Surinamese are of Asian descent. In 1995, I found no jokes about the mostly African-American migrants from the Netherlands Antilles. These various Caribbean migrants also had a similar status in Dutch society.11 So here, as with the Turks and Moroccans, similar groups are ‘lumped together’ in one category, which in this case is mixed racial/ national. Many of the jokes about Surinamese/Blacks feed on older stereotypes, such as the image of the lazy and silly Black person. The references to appearance are reminiscent of old advertisements for soap, chocolate, licorice, and toothpaste to make white teeth stand out in a dark face with big lips.12 These jokes did not circulate widely in the Netherlands before the influx of Surinamese migrants, suggesting that the appearance of a people of African-American descent in the Netherlands made these old humorous scripts salient again. This may have set off the import of Black jokes from the United States, where most joke cycles of the late twentieth century originated. The humorous ‘profile’ for Turks is different from the Black/Surinamese category. Jokes about Turks are harsher in tone, with nastier scripts. ‘Dirtiness’ is a stereotype generally associated with low class (‘the great unwashed’), social exclusion, and general undesirability.13 Dirtiness was more typical of Turkish than of Black jokes. Moreover, although I found some attitude jokes targeting Blacks, these were most commonly applied to Turks. This joke category refers more directly to hostility and aggression than most stereotype jokes: jokes

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that do not play on a stereotype but (jokingly) refer to an attitude or opinion about a group: there are ‘too many’ of them; they should be killed or exterminated. A common example has a man crying on the waterside. When asked what the problem is, he sobbingly tells that a van/car/bus/truck filled with Surinamese/Blacks/Turks/Moroccans just drove into the water. When comforted because these were only Blacks, Turks, etc., he retorts something like: ‘But the van was not full’; or ‘Many more could have fitted into it.’ From a comparison of the various ethnic jokes cycles since the 1980s, attitude jokes emerge as the joke type most directly connected to social status: they always target the group lowest in the ethnic hierarchy. In 1995, most attitude jokes were about Turks, but a number of them targeted Blacks/Surinamese. Other studies have shown that in the 1980s, most attitude jokes dealt with Surinamese/Blacks.14 Since then these jokes have moved on, and now principally target Moroccans. Jokes are ‘social facts’: they only exist because there are enough people willing to tell and retell them. This means jokes can be analysed on the macro-level: as a reflection of what is salient in a specific society. Moreover, jokes reflect the world view and preoccupations of the joke-tellers, and often have little to do with the actual characteristics of the groups targeted in these jokes.15 Thus, these jokes mostly tell us something about the collective perspective of the Dutch on ethnicity and various ethnic groups. The existence of a large number of jokes about these ‘new’ minorities indicates that ethnicity and ethnic difference are a central and sensitive issue in Dutch society. In particular, the jokes show that by the mid-nineties ethnicity had become an important dimension of social status. This marks a major transition in the history of the Netherlands: from an ethnically homogeneous nation-state towards a multi-ethnic society. Within this new multi-ethnic society, status dimensions and ethnic characteristics have become deeply entangled. Dutch ethnic jokes reflect the status dynamics on the societal level: they target lowstatus groups, using predominantly scripts that are associated with low status, particularly low class and lack of civilization, and, in the case of Surinamese, also racial characteristics. However, even though groups with low social status are generally not looked upon kindly, low status does not automatically translate into hatred or aggression. The existence of ethnic jokes cannot, therefore, be interpreted automatically as an expression of ethnic hostility.

182 Giselinde Kuipers On the micro-level of the actual telling of jokes, an ethnic joke may reflect a wide range of sentiments, intentions, and convictions, from a sense of ethnic superiority to simple amusement and mirth. The status dimension is something that people in a given society will be aware of and that is needed to understand the joke. But a single instance of joke-telling does not necessarily reflect the speaker’s attitude towards any specific minority. Having a negative or hostile image of a specific group is not a prerequisite for the enjoyment of a joke, although it adds to its enjoyment. But so may the realization that this is a joke that one is not ‘supposed’ to tell – a clandestine pleasure. A Changing Ethnic Landscape and a Changing Joke Universe In the fourteen years since I began collecting these jokes, ethnic relations in the Netherlands have changed considerably.16 In the collective imagination, the images of Turks and Moroccans have become disengaged. Turks have been superseded by Moroccans as the group with the lowest social status.17 Religion has become a central factor in the Dutch ethnic landscape. After the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has suddenly become significant that Turks and Moroccans are Muslims. In the Netherlands, the assassinations of two outspoken critics of Islam, politician Pim Fortuyn and film director Theo van Gogh, put Islam at the centre of national politics. This has added to the generally negative perception of both Muslim minority groups, but particularly Moroccans, as ‘problematic.’ The social status of the Surinamese has gradually risen. There is now a sizable Surinamese middle class.18 Antilleans, the other postcolonial migrant group, have acquired their own, rather negative, popular image. While previously consisting mainly of university students and professionals, Antillean immigrants have gradually become less educated, which in turn has led to higher levels of unemployment and crime.19 The changing ethnic landscape is reflected in the changing joke universe.20 Many jokes previously told about Turks have been transferred to Moroccans, especially jokes about stealing and crime, and some of the jokes about dirtiness now target Moroccans, although ‘dirty Turk’ is such a fixed category in Dutch oral culture that this may linger on for a while. I estimate that more than half of the dirtiness jokes are now about Moroccans. Attitude jokes now almost always target Mo-

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roccans. These jokes had already shifted from Surinamese to Turks earlier. This further transference confirms that these jokes target the group with the lowest status. The Surinamese have become less prominent in the joke universe, although there are still jokes about the physical appearance of Blacks (these would be hard to transfer to other groups). But most jokes I have recently heard that explicitly refer to Surinamese have to do with the typical Surinamese accent, which is generally perceived as nice and amusing. Moreover, Surinamese are increasingly the butt of stupidity jokes, sometimes also in the context of public humorous performances. This suggests a move of the Surinamese from the ranks of the real ‘Others’ to the category of ‘Backward versions of ourselves,’ rather like Belgians. This coincides with the increased status of Surinamese, but also with a shift in the discourse of ethnicity away from race. As Dutch-speaking, increasingly middle-class former colonials, Surinamese are more like ‘us,’ despite their dark skin, than the Turks and Moroccans, who are formally white but Muslim, lower class, and less fluent in Dutch. The Antilleans, on the other hand, have now been recognized as a separate ethnic group in the joke universe. The main script in Antillean jokes is criminality/stealing, a script previously associated with Turks. The following is one example that illustrates the place of both Moroccans and Antilleans in today’s joke universe: An Antillean goes to a club with a T-shirt saying: ‘Moroccans have three problems!!!’ A Moroccan comes at him and asks: ‘What sort of bullshit is that?’ The Antillean answers: ‘Look that’s your first problem: you are way too curious.’ The Moroccan leaves but returns a few minutes later with a friend and starts to challenge the man. The Antillean reacts: ‘Look that’s your second problem … you are much too aggressive.’ The two Moroccans disappear and the Antillean finishes his beer, dances for an hour, and goes home. Outside the club he is awaited by five Moroccans, all drawing their knives. The Antillean reacts immediately: ‘See, and that’s your third problem: you always take a knife to a shoot out!!!’21

This joke was found on the Internet, a rare find since most sites attempt to exclude ethnic jokes. While the butt of this joke is the Moroccan, the position of the Antillean is ambivalent: he is portrayed as a criminal, but he also challenges and outwits the Moroccan. Told by a ‘native’ Dutch teller, this seems a traditional ethnic joke putting down

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problematic minorities – and the more problematic, the more they are put down. However, this joke can also be told in ethnically mixed company, where it functions as an ethnic rivalry joke, one group outsmarting the other. In recent years, ethnic rivalry jokes have become common in the Dutch joke universe. Previously, many ethnic jokes in the Netherlands (as elsewhere) showed a rivalry between three national groups: a Dutchman, a German, and a Belgian. During his research in a multiethnic neighbourhood in Utrecht, Theo Meder and his team found many jokes featuring ‘A Dutchman, a Moroccan, and a Turk.’22 It depended on the ethnicity of the teller, who, in such a joke, would come out smartest. This formula has now become standard in ethnically mixed settings. The appearance of these ethnic rivalry jokes marks an important change in the Dutch joke universe: the butts of the joke strike back. Previously a domain in which the dominant group was ‘joking down,’ ethnic joking now is becoming a multi-ethnic enterprise. This indicates that the former ‘outsiders’ have now gained sufficient confidence, status, and cultural competence to appropriate this particular genre from the ‘established.’23 This development occurred around the same time as the emergence of ethnic comics, who had great success joking about their ethnic background, which I will discuss below. A final development in the Dutch joke universe is the emergence of a new category, which I first encountered in 2003: the Muslim joke. Strictly speaking, these are religious rather than ethnic, but these categories have become increasingly muddled. When I first heard these Muslim jokes, many of them were new to me, which means that they were not adaptations from previous recent Dutch joke cycles. Muslim jokes tend to be short, which is typical of new joke cycles,24 and often are puns on Muslim or Arab phrases or names. Some are more or less transferable to English: ‘What is a Muslim prostitute? A ram-madam.’

Madam means ‘Mrs,’ with the more specific connotation of the mistress of a brothel, and ‘ram’ means to thrust or to poke, with probably more explicit sexual undertones in Dutch than in English. Although these Muslim jokes form a new category, there is some overlap with jokes about Turks and Moroccans. I have encountered dirtiness jokes and attitude jokes explicitly targeting Muslims. This

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points to the ‘ethnification’ of Muslims in the joke universe and the increasing conflation of ethnicity and religion/Islam. Some 1990s Turk jokes containing a reference to Islam now circulate in a Muslim version, such as this joke: A Muslim dies and comes at the Pearly Gates, finding St Peter waiting for him. ‘Ah Mr Abdul, we have been expecting you. God is ready to receive you.’ Abdul: ‘But sir, I am a Muslim, I would prefer to see Allah!’ St Peter: ‘You will see him later, come along now, God is waiting for you.’ Abdul passes the gates, and there God is waiting for him. God: ‘Ah, there you are, just come along now and we can register you.’ Abdul: ‘But I’m a Muslim and would like to see Allah.’ God: ‘Don’t worry, you will, just come with me.’ They enter God’s beautiful office, Abdul is very impressed, but really wants to go to Paradise, where 70 virgins are waiting for him. Abdul: ‘I really appreciated your willingness to receive me, mister god, but as you know, I am a Muslim and I would like to see Allah.’ God: ‘All right, if that is so important to you.’ He presses the intercom button and says: ‘allah two coffees!! and make it quick.’25

In the version I recorded in 1995, the butt was a Turk, and the punchline was ‘Allah, put down that broom and bring us two coffees.’ Thus, this version combined the cleaner/dirtiness script with the Islam script. The recent variation is more focused on the religious element, and while it still suggests a lower status for Muslims (in heaven as on earth) the status difference decreased: Allah has been promoted from janitor to secretary. Muslim jokes differ from ethnic jokes in content, but also in use: they are exempt from the strict rules that are applied to ethnic jokes. They are easily found on the Internet,26 and they do not come with the warnings and disclaimers accompanying ethnic jokes. Apparently, they are not felt to be in violation of the regime of ethnic joking. The emergence of Muslims as a new joke target reflects a marked shift in the Dutch discourse on minorities: boundaries are increasingly drawn on the basis of religion and culture rather than race or class. The conflation of Turks, Moroccans, and Muslims shows that religion and ethnicity are increasingly felt to overlap. The changing content and gradual disappearance of Surinamese jokes points to diminishing relevance of race in the joke universe: status trumps race.

186 Giselinde Kuipers This increasing focus on Islam mirrors a wider global discourse about the modern, secular West versus the traditional, religious, Muslim world. This discourse shift from class and race to religion and culture provides a possibility to circumvent the regime governing ethnic discourse. Linking ethnicity with race or class implies social exclusion, deprivation, and a responsibility of the part of the (possibly racist or exclusivist) Dutch. An interpretation centring on culture and religion, on the other hand, implies the option of adaptation, assimilation, and a primary responsibility for migrants in relinquishing their (possibly backward) manners and beliefs.27 Mocking people for things they cannot help, like race, poverty, and social disadvantage, is considered hurtful and in bad taste. Religion and culture are more easily constructed as personal choice, for which people can be blamed – and hence mocked. In practice, this remapping opened up an escape route, at least partial, from the regime governing ethnic discourse. The new Muslim jokes target, with partly similar scripts, the same low-status group as the bulk of ethnic jokes – Mediterranean migrants – but with much less multicultural circumspection. The Rules of Ethnic Joking Joking about ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands is largely limited to the private domain: in informal situations, among people one knows well. Joke books and joke pages in magazines contain jokes about Belgians, Germans, Scots, or Americans, but never ethnic minority groups. Professional comedians avoid jokes about race and ethnicity. Even on the Internet, it is hard to find jokes targeting ethnic minorities. People who attempt to spread ethnic jokes online on the Dutch part of the Internet may be chided by other users, or reported to the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet (www.meldpunt.nl). However, this hardly happens: people seem to know that ethnic joking is ‘not done,’ not even on the Web.28 As the website of this Internet Complaints Bureau states: We don’t want to split hairs, but if we get a complaint about a racist joke, and we think the law has been broken, then we will treat it as any other complaint. Often we are told ‘but it is only a joke! It was not meant to hurt anyone!’ Racist remarks, even in the guise of jokes, are always made at the expense of others.29

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The Bureau’s view is representative of a view that has been dominant in the Netherlands for a long time: ethnic jokes are ‘hurtful’ to minorities, and possibly a sign of racism. While this line of thought has been criticized as ‘political correctness,’ consensus is still that these jokes are better not told in public. I originally collected ethnic jokes in high schools because children are relatively unaware of these restrictions. During my later research I interviewed adults, who often were reluctant to tell me their ethnic jokes. Usually, they would only tell them by the end of the interview, after many disclaimers and excuses (‘I know you are not supposed to tell these jokes but …’). Among these interviewees, I found a strong consensus on when, where, and with whom it was allowed to tell ethnic jokes.30 Muslim jokes, which target similar groups but draw on a different discursive domain, are somewhat (not totally) exempt from this regime. Joking about ethnic minorities is mainly a clandestine pleasure. Apart from the (aesthetic/cognitive) enjoyment of the joke and its punchline, exchanging ethnic humour has the added conspiratorial pleasure of transgressing a norm: the ‘forbidden fruit’ effect. Rather like sexual jokes in Freud’s time, ethnic joking deals with a topic that is on many people’s minds and a central cultural concern but at the same time strongly guarded and restricted. Ethnic jokes thus provide a way of escaping one’s ‘inner censor.’ The ‘ethnic taboo,’ as Herman Vuijsje31 dubbed it, is an important reason why ethnic jokes exist and do so well. People realize they are ‘offensive,’ ‘off limits,’ and potentially ‘hurtful,’ but still they like them, despite, or even because of, their transgressive nature. This is solved by the introduction of the rules of the ethnic joke: an informal regime that, despite recent changes in the Dutch discourse on ethnicity, is still in place. The increased sensitivity to ethnicity and ethnic humour started in the late 1960s.32 Until then, humour scandals in the Netherlands revolved around religion, sex, royalty, or a combination of those elements, but these topics lost their scandalous appeal. In 1972, the TV program Hadimassa caused the first scandal related to ethnic humour. Comics told jokes about Jews and Blacks, which led to public outrage and questions in Parliament.33 In the next thirty-five years, various people got into trouble for publicly joking about ethnicity. In 2003, a complaint was filed against the makers of the daily cartoon in the elite newspaper NRC Handelsblad for alleged racism.34 In 2008, a cartoonist known under the pseudonym Gregorius Nekschot was arrested because of the discriminatory nature of his cartoons

188 Giselinde Kuipers targeting Blacks, Muslims, and Jews. Eventually, the charges were dropped.35 The rules of ethnic joking draw a strong line between public and private spheres. One can always joke about migrants and minorities as long as one is ‘among friends,’ when one is with people who are known to be able to ‘take it’ and who are certain to understand you are ‘just joking.’ Usually, this means: in the company of native Dutch. However, joke-tellers have high praise for people from minority groups who ‘can take’ such jokes, and being able to share jokes with a ‘foreigner’ means she or he is accepted as part of the in-group. However, the regime stipulates that everyone may joke about their own group: Turks about Turks, Jews about Jews, Surinamese about Surinamese. Also, the exchange of jokes between members of minority groups of similar status is deemed acceptable: Turks about Surinamese, Moroccans about Antilleans, and so forth. Generally, ethnic humour is considered problematic only when it is ‘downward’ joking, about a group with a lower social status. This proved to be a golden opportunity for migrant comedians: they can make the jokes that native comedians would never dare make, but which both Dutch and migrants like to hear since it is such a charged subject. During the late 1990s, comedians of Surinamese, Moroccan, and Turkish background emerged, mostly in the stand-up comedy scene. Especially in their early routines, they relied on references to their ethnicity. A Surinamese comedian, Erik van Sauers, would make his entrance on stage saying: ‘I suppose you’re all thinking: a Negro on stage, so it’s gonna be tap dancing tonight.’ Often, such simple references to ethnic background would be enough to provoke peals of laughter. Many of these comedians performed together, and in their acts they would joke back and forth about each other’s ethnic background. Ethnic Comedians and the Rise of Reflexive Humour These ‘ethnic comedians’ paved the way for more diverse and self-reflexive forms of ethnic humour. The comedy format allowed for more sophisticated humorous techniques than the rather straightforward joke form, and their ‘safe’ position as ethnic comedians made it possible to play with ethnic stereotypes and comic scripts. The culmination of this self-reflexive humour is the successful film Shouf Shouf habibi (2004), a comedy about a group of young Moroccans. It was popular

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among both Dutch Moroccans and indigenous Dutch, and managed to convince the critics as well, winning the critics’ award at the 2004 Dutch Film Festival. The film, which was also a modest international success, has now been made into a TV comedy series. In the trailer for this film the Dutch-Moroccan protagonist Ap (short for Abdullah) introduces himself and his family. When introducing his uncle in Morocco, a bearded man in traditional Moroccan dress, he recounts his attempt at telling him a (new) ethnic joke: What are the differences between E.T. and a Moroccan? 1: E.T. had a bike of his own. 2: E.T. wanted to learn the language. 3: E.T. wanted to go back where he came from.

His uncle, Ap explains, didn’t get the joke, because he didn’t know who E.T. was. The shot then shifts to his father, another bearded man in jellabah, but this time not in a Moroccan village, but in a Dutch high-rise neighbourhood. ‘And this is my father, his brother. He went to the Netherlands. And that’s why I speak two languages, and know who E.T. is.’ Although his trailer is based on a joke, the result is more ambiguous and self-reflexive than the average ethnic joke. This ambiguity is the result not just of the joke being told by Ap, or the added context of him trying to tell it to his uncle. The longer format of the trailer (like a movie or a comedy performance) creates identification with the various characters, which rarely happens in jokes, and allows for more complex and sophisticated employment of comic scripts and stereotypes. Comic stereotypes are played with, mocked, reversed, exaggerated, rather than simply invoked and repeated, as in most oral jokes. As a result, in Shouf Shouf Habibi images and expectations of Moroccans are at the same time confirmed, reversed, mocked, and destroyed. The emergence of ethnic comics marked the point where humour became a multi-ethnic enterprise, rather than a case of the established36 joking about outsiders. It also implied the opening up of the public domain to some forms of ethnic joking, although still governed by the same regime of ethnic humour. Most importantly, it meant the development of new, more varied forms of ethnic humour. Such selfreflexive humour, however, is tricky: it can easily be turned back into regular, unreflexive ethnic humour. This became clear to me when I discovered the E.T. joke on www.stormfront.org, a white supremacist site hosted outside of the country (since it would be banned if it were

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hosted by a Dutch provider), surrounded by openly racist language. Without the careful framing, all of a sudden it is a straightforward, rather blunt, ethnic joke. For indigenous comedians, joking about minorities under the rules of the joke is risky, but not impossible. Jokers have to make clear that they are not serious and strongly distance themselves from the content of the joke. Since the 1970s, progressive comedians told ethnic jokes and then chided their audiences for laughing at these jokes, calling them racist. The National Bureau for the Prevention of Racism employed a similar strategy, using cartoons that made fun of racism, in an attempt to prevent racism. In these examples, the framing as ‘antiracist’ is so clear there is no room for doubt about the joker’s intent, and ethnic jokes become jokes mocking racists. In the comic routines of the younger, more confrontational, but politically less engaged comics of the 1990s and 2000s, these distancing strategies have become less preachy and more absurdist. An early example from comedian Theo Maassen (1994): In the old days, the old days, there never used to be a problem with the environment. Now we have all these foreigners here and all of sudden there’s a hole in the ozone layer! Now guess how this happened! But of course you can’t say that, because then you would be discriminating!37

In a similar vein, comic Hans Teeuwen (1997) portrayed the warped logic of a bigot: Moreover, the Powers That Be in The Hague [residence of the Dutch government] have allowed all these colored funny-speaking unemployed from all sorts of far filthy countries into our country. On arrival, these unemployed just lie down on their beds waiting till we come, meek as lambs, bringing them money. These unemployed we call: the foreigners. Also known as drug users. And they make no effort whatsoever to get acquainted with our rich culture. At the mention of names like Ad Visser [presenter of a 1970s pop music program] or Loeki Knol [actress in 1970s TV shows. Her last name, Knol, means ‘Turnip’] they will look you in the eye with a dull and uninterested gaze.

Both Teeuwen and Maassen present themselves as dim-witted characters with rural accents. By using the guise of stupid bigots, they manage to make ethnic humour palatable to diverse audiences, pleas-

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antly transgressive, yet (to most people) not too offensive. This strategy is actually quite like the self-reflexive ethnic humour of the ethnic comedians: like them, Maassen and Teeuwen (and others) play with ethnic scripts and with the rules of ethnic humour. In the end, the butts of their jokes are never the minorities, but the native Dutch who employ these stereotypes. Such playing with the rules of ethnic humour became more common in comedy performances around 2000. While considered risqué at first, it has become widespread now, mostly as a result of the breakthrough of migrant comics. The rise of this reflexive humour reflects not only the transformation of comedy into a multi-ethnic domain (as has happened with oral jokes, too), but also a more general development in comedy. Comedy became less overtly political, more reflexive, and more confrontational. In this ‘postmodern’ style of humour, the exploration of transgression and taboo is an important element. The strongest taboo in Dutch society could not remain unexplored – although the strategies these comedians use leave the taboo intact and unbroken. However, comics today are generally careful in their observance of the boundaries of the ethnic taboo. The changes in public ethnic joking since the 1990s remain within the limits of the regime. Even the most confrontational of these comedians, Hans Teeuwen, who has a reputation for keeping his audience in the dark as to his intentions when joking about, for instance, pedophilia, has always distanced himself from possibly serious racist ‘readings’ of his ethnic jokes. In recent years we see two shifts in comedy routines that mirror the changes in oral joke-telling. First, Muslim jokes have appeared in professional comedy routines, although especially in the routines of the more ‘shocking’ comics like Teeuwen, or in the smaller stand-up comedy venues. Second, professional comics occasionally tell jokes about Blacks and Surinamese, probably a reflection of the growing status of Surinamese. However, despite these gradual shifts, the regime regulating the public use of ethnic humour largely remains in place even today, in 2009, and native Dutch comedians typically joke of other topics, or make sure their good intentions are clear. Ethnic Humour and Multicultural Sensibilities Ethnicity and ethnic diversity became a delicate topic in the late 1960s, and the first ethnic joke scandal occurred in 1972. This means the sen-

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sitivity towards ethnic humour predates the advent of most migrants as well as the emergence of the joke cycles about Surinamese, Turks, Moroccans, and Antilleans. Thus, the ‘ethnic taboo’ cannot be the result of immigration or the transformation of the Netherlands into a multi-ethnic or multicultural society. Intriguingly, it also means that ethnic humour was identified as a problematic category when the Netherlands was an ethnically homogeneous country, with few ethnic groups to joke about, and (as far as I can tell) few ethnic jokes. If the presence of ethnic minorities did not make ethnicity a delicate issue, what did? It must be, at least in part, the result of internal changes within the Netherlands in the 1960s. Of course, the further dynamics of ethnic humour have been influenced by the arrival of actual ethnic minorities. But this happened mostly after ethnicity had become so sensitive. The increased sensitivity to ethnicity after 1970 has been subject to much debate in recent years, during which the multicultural discourse got replaced by a harsher assimilationist discourse.38 A common explanation suggests that the Second World War and the Holocaust were pivotal in the development of Dutch ethnic sensitivity. However, ethnicity only became a truly salient issue twenty-five years after the end of the war, when suddenly the Holocaust, rather than the heroism of the resistance, emerged as the central historical ‘lesson’ of the war. The increasing ethnic sensitivity is part of a general mentality change that occurred in the late 1960s. Along with student revolutions, anti-authoritarianism, feminism, sexual liberation, a (lasting) power shift toward the younger generation, and a (temporary) dominance of the political left, this resulted in a tendency to avoid references to power inequalities.39 Such a shift took place in most egalitarian, meritocratic democracies during this period: status difference became problematic, especially for ‘ascribed categories’ such as race, ethnicity or gender.40 In essence, the ‘sixties’ was a power struggle between age groups. The experience of the Second World War marked a central rift between the conflicting generations, which explains its redefinition at this time. Moreover, the role of ethnicity in the (northwest) European consciousness was affected by decolonization and the ensuing redefinition of the nation-state. Around 1900, European nations were colonial empires, based on a clear ethnic and racial hierarchy, with a monoethnic nation-state at its core. The twentieth century brought a shift in the balance of power between colonials and colonized, and increased

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sensitivity towards the experiences of the (former) colonized. Decolonization, along with increasing international migration, challenged the notion of the mono-ethnic nation-state, a core value in Dutch, and European, politics during the twentieth century. The concern with ethnicity and ethnic differences is inherent in the definition of the Dutch nation as a religiously plural but ethnically homogeneous society. This development in the Netherlands is comparable to that in other European countries, but differs from immigrant nations such as the United States, Australia, or Canada. In the United States criticism of ethnic humour was often voiced by members of minority groups who increasingly spoke out.41 In the Netherlands, however, the concern about ethnic humour and ethnic difference was mostly an affair of the native Dutch. The multiculturalist discourse and ideology were firmly in place by the time the immigrants arrived. In fact, ethnicity – in the shape of concern over colonialism and attempts to grapple with the Holocaust – had become a central issue in Dutch political discourse before ethnic groups played a role of any significance in Dutch society. Therefore, the sensitivity about ethnicity appears to be one of the causes of the rise of ethnic humour, rather than the other way around. Around 2000, the Dutch debate about migration and assimilation became more heated, partly because of global developments such as increased immigration, European integration, and the attacks of 9/11, but also because of the assassinations of two public personalities known for their anti-immigrant stance: politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004.42 Van Gogh himself had been involved in various ‘humour scandals’ concerned with his allegedly racist or anti-Semitic remarks in his satirical columns. These global and national events led to a hardening of the multicultural debate and a shift in the discourse about minorities. Ethnic and ‘integration’ issues now virtually dominate the political debate. Consequently, the guarded speech about migrants has been replaced by a discourse that is direct to the point of bluntness. After the murder of van Gogh, foreign correspondents in the Netherlands had a hard time explaining to their editors and their readers that the filmmaker regularly referred to Muslims as ‘goat fuckers.’ The rules of unspeakability and circumspection have declined: when it comes to ethnicity and ethnic difference, most things can be said. Still, the avoidance and regulation of ethnic humour in the public domain persists. For instance, in the 2005–6 season of the immensely

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popular satirical television show Kopspijkers, jokes alluding to ethnicity were, even with the multicultural debate raging, conspicuously absent. When satirists poke fun at anti-immigrant politicians, they use the same distancing strategies Teeuwen en Maassen used in the 1990s. Unlike the case ten years ago, this absence, and this circumspection, can hardly be explained exclusively by the fear of being called ‘racist.’ Why, now that so much, and maybe everything, may be said about migrants, has there not been an explosion of racist jokes on the Internet, in theatres, in the newspaper, or on TV? A first explanation would be that the demise of circumspection has made jokes superfluous. In a reversal of Freud’s argument, if everything can be said directly, there is no need to disguise it as a joke. However, history has shown that jokes about sex have not disappeared with the decrease in taboos about sex; rather, they have become more numerous. Similarly, ethnic jokes have not disappeared but have become slightly more visible. I think the persisting clandestine character of ethnic humour can be explained in two ways. First, ethnic difference, in Dutch public discourse, still counts as first and foremost as a serious topic: a problem that is too large and too serious to joke about. Even though the tone has changed from circumspection to concern and alarm, ethnic difference is still identified as one of the nation’s central political themes, social problems, and moral concerns. Maybe jokes about religion in the 1950s and 1960s are a better analogy than the repressed sexual humour of Victorians: things that are so important, sacred, and urgent that they can only be discussed in serious, reverent, tones. Another reason for the clandestine attraction of ethnic jokes is that, despite all the shifts in the debate, the discourse about ethnic minorities has not become totally free of restrictions. Philosopher Baukje Prins has aptly summarized the Dutch multicultural debate as ‘the loss of innocence.’ People on all sides of the multicultural debate tend to complain about being prevented from saying things, and being muzzled. In practice, however, people are hardly actively restrained or censored.43 The regime of ethnic joking is the result of internal controls rather than external pressure: Selbstzwang rather than Fremdzwang.44 Drawing ethnic boundaries cannot be reconciled easily with the thoroughly internalized equality principle of meritocratic democracy and its written and unwritten rules not to be ‘hurtful.’ Mocking and ridiculing the excluded and less powerful, even though they are considered a problem, still feels morally wrong.

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Finally, members of minority groups themselves are not as pliant as they used to be. This is the flipside of the rise of ethnic comedians and their self-reflexive humour. Prins quotes the nostalgic reminiscences of Black entertainers of yore by Vuijsje, the critic of multiculturalism who coined the term ‘ethnic taboo’: ‘It seems like ages ago, in a barbarian prehistory, that Black artists would use their blackness coquettishly and without reticence.’45 In 2003, shortly before he died, I spoke to Donald Jones, for a long time the best-known Black entertainer of the Netherlands, and one of the entertainers Vuijsje was so nostalgic about. He had become very ambivalent about his former role as ‘the Netherlands’ professional Negro.’46 The realization that stereotypes, no matter how funny they are intended to be, can have serious consequences has struck home among migrants as well as native Dutch. And the effects of this realization are irreversible. Thus, the Dutch inhabitants of the multicultural society have indeed, as Prins says, lost their innocence. Even though the space to speak, and joke, freely about ethnicity has increased in the past decade in the Netherlands, this space is not unlimited. It is the realization of the inevitable boundaries to speech that fuels ethnic humour in the Netherlands. Whereof one cannot speak freely, thereof one must joke. Conclusion: Ethnic Politics in the Nation-State and the Persistence of Ethnic Humour This chapter has explored the politics of joking through an analysis of ethnic humour, its regulation, and its relation to ethnic politics in the Netherlands from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century. Ethnic humour is the most constested form of humour in the Netherlands as well other Western liberal democracies. The analysis of this particular case highlights two aspects of humour and laughter that make this seemingly cheerful and non-serious mode of communication thoroughly political. First, humour and laughter are strongly connected to status hierarchies. And second, humour and laughter reflect, comment on, and occasionally offend social and moral sensitivities. Because of this, humour itself turns into a sensitive issue that needs to be regulated, policed, and sometimes even prosecuted and suppressed. The emergence of ethnic jokes about the ‘new’ minorities shows the (grudging) transition of the Netherlands from a homogeneous nation-state to a multi-ethnic society and the concurrent emergence of ethnicity as an important marker of status. However, this hierar-

196 Giselinde Kuipers chy is refracted through the prism of a Dutch perspective on ethnic relations. This perspective was grounded in class and race at first, increasingly remapped onto culture and religion in the early 2000s – but it remained overly sensitive to ethnic categories throughout this remapping. Hence, ethnic humour is not a direct reflection of Dutch society or ethnic relations. Rather, it mirrors the discursive domains – class, race, culture, religion47 – through which hierarchies are understood and conceptualized. The semi-standardized, semi-private form of the jokes provides a cultural ‘free zone’ where such hierarchies can be enacted, repeated, reinforced – and sometimes contested, as in the newly emerged ethnic competition jokes. For the jokers, this may present an opportunity to reaffirm group identity, stressing their own normality, moderation, and (possibly) superiority. However, the transgressive nature of these jokes adds as much to their appeal at this identity-affirming aspect. Neither the existence of ethnic humour, nor the increasing sensitivity to ethnic references is typical of the Netherlands. The Netherlands was probably more extreme both in its embrace of multiculturalism and in the anti-multiculturalist backlash of the early 2000s. But many Western liberal democracies have witnessed the rise of ethnic humour in the second half of the twentieth century, complemented by an increasing sensitivity about this topic. This was illustrated most dramatically by the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005–6, which highlighted ethnic, religious, and political divisions all over Europe and around the world.48 Hence, neither the rise of ethnic humour, nor its clandestine and contested nature, can be explained from specifically Dutch sensibilities. Ethnic difference sits uneasily with the central ideologies and institutions of Western European nation-states. Ethnicity is hard to reconcile with the European notion of citizenship, which, unlike the American or Canadian one, is connected with local descent, parentage, and language. Most European countries are struggling with the political puzzle of making old notions of ‘belonging’ fit the ‘new’ citizens. Ethnicity also is problematic in the context of egalitarian democracies, where power differences are uncomfortable, and ‘ascribed statuses’ like ethnic background especially problematic. Feelings of superiority are increasingly suppressed, and, as we saw, ethnicity is very much a status marker. Thus, in the context of egalitarian European nations, ethnic differ-

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ence is a cultural anomaly. And, as Mary Douglas noted in Purity and Danger, cultural anomalies, while typically suppressed, ignored, or filtered out because of their dangerous and disturbing qualities, are also felt to be imbued with special powers. Hence, anomalies are often invoked in ritual, religion, and art. In domains that are carefully separated from the real world, such as the sacred, the aesthetic, or the humorous, the special appeal of anomalies can be exploited. Because, as Douglas remarks, ‘it is not always an unpleasant experience to confront ambiguity. Obviously it is more tolerable in some areas than in others. There is a whole gradient on which laughter, revulsion, and shock belong at different points and intensities.’49 In ethnic humour, the cultural anomaly of ethnic difference in the European nation-state can be safely explored, because it is made into a – clandestine – aesthetic experience. In the Netherlands, the concepts of equality, citizenship, and their overarching political institution, the nation-state, were already in the process of being redefined before the arrival of immigrants. The influx of immigrants further muddled the notion of the imagined Dutch community, aggravating the ‘crisis’ of the nation-state, and making ethnicity even more of a challenge to national identity. Hence the centrality of ethnicity to Dutch politics: ethnic difference is anomalous to the core political institutions and beliefs. I conclude with another analogy with Freud. Sexual humour in Freud’s time was sensitive, clandestine, and attractive not just because sex was strictly regulated – that would be a tautology. This regulation of sexuality was entwined with the central societal institutions of the time, which were to a large extent based on keeping men and women apart. The sexual division of labour, marriage, the family, but also religion, the army, the educational system – all were based on a notion that men and women should be separated, their sexual attraction repressed. In this constellation, sexuality was a social puzzle, an anomaly, dangerous and funny at the same time. To the core institutions of the late twentieth century, ethnicity has become similarly anomalous, complicated, and inevitable. It is the institution of the European nation-state, proclaiming itself to be a homogeneous, meritrocratic community, that has given birth to modern ethnic politics, and to the notion of the problematic ‘ethnic minority.’ And hence, it is this institution that has given birth to the clandestine pleasure of ethnic humour.

198 Giselinde Kuipers notes 1 The author wants to thank Christie Davies, Martina Kessel, Patrick Merziger, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on previous versions of this essay. Special thanks to Christie Davies for inspiring me to pursue this topic to begin with, and for many insightful and stimulating discussions. 2 Elliott Oring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). 3 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 4 Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), Jokes and Their Relation to Society (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), and The Mirth of Nations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002). 5 Alan Dundes, Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1987); Mahadev Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Gershon Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (New York: Breaking Point, 1975); Kathleen Stokker, Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway 1940–45 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Mary Lee Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits of Repression in Nineteenth Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Eliott Oring, Engaging Humor (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Paul Lewis, Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 6 Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World, Jokes and Their Relation to Society, and The Mirth of Nations. 7 Giselinde Kuipers, ‘The Difference between a Surinamese and a Turk: Ethnic Jokes and the Position of Ethnic Minorities in the Netherlands,’ HUMOR: International Journal for Humor Research 12 (2000): 141–75. 8 The most commonly used word in Dutch jokes to refer to people of colour is neger (always uncapitalized), literally meaning ‘negro.’ However, I have translated it throughout as ‘Black.’ Neger primarily denotes anyone of African or African-American descent and does not carry the connotations of colonialism, segregation, slavery, or the American South that ‘negro’ conjures up in (American?) English. Also, neger, like ‘Black,’ is somewhat, but not very, taboo: there are better, more politically correct equivalents, but using it is not seen as a major violation. 9 Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World.

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10 Louk Hagendoorn and Joseph Hraba, ‘Foreign, Deviant, Seclusive and Working Class: Anchors to an Ethnic Hierarchy in the Netherlands,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 12 (1989): 441–67. 11 Ibid. 12 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 13 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 14 F. Jansen, ‘Schelden op migranten,’ Hollands Maandblad 26 (1984): 6–15; Jacques Köhler, Etnische grappen, een uiting van racisme? Middelbare scholieren en hun grappen (MA thesis psychology, Leiden University, 1985). 15 Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World and The Mirth of Nations. 16 In 2010, the total population of the Netherlands was 16,574,989. People of Turkish descent are now the largest minority group, numbering 383,957 (2.3 per cent). 349,005 (2.1 per cent) of inhabitants are of Moroccan, 342,279 (2 per cent) are of Surinamese, and 138,420 (0.8 per cent) are of Antillean descent. Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek (Statistics Netherlands): www.cbs.nl. 17 Jaco Dagevos, Rob Euwals, Merove Gijsberts, Hans Roodenburg, Turken in Nederland en Duitsland (Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, 2006); SCP/WODC/CBS, Jaarrapport Integratie 2005 (Den Haag: SCP/ WODC/CBS, 2005). 18 Jack Burgers and Hugo van der Lugt, ‘”Zwarte vlucht.” De suburbanisatie van Surinamers uit Rotterdam,’ Sociologie 1–2 (2005): 126–42. 19 Marion van San, Stelen en steken: Delinquent gedrag van Curacaose jongens in Nederland (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1998). 20 My analysis of these changes is based on collection of jokes for various other studies. See Giselinde Kuipers, Good Humor Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), and ‘The Social Construction of Digital Danger: Debating, Diffusing, and Inflating the Moral Dangers of Online Pornography and Ethnic Humor in the Netherlands and the United States,’ New Media and Society 8, no. 3 (2006): 379–400. 21 http://daansgeinpaleis.nl/moppen_2.htm. Joke site accessed 22 March 2006. See also http://www.snowwie.nl/content/view/429/53/ (accessed 5 August 2007). 22 Theo Meder, ‘Er waren een Marokkaan, een Turk en een Nederlander …’ Volkskundige en taalkundige opstellen over het vertellen van moppen in de multiculturele wijk Lombok (Amsterdam: IISG, 2001). 23 Norbert Elias and John Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders: A So-

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26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38

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ciological Enquiry into Community Problems, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Sage, 1994). Dundes, Cracking Jokes. This version was collected on 20 June 2007 on a joke site: http://www .flabber.nl/archief/009162.php?p=http://www.flabber.nl/archief/009162 .php?p=7. See for instance the following joke sites: http://www.spacie.nl/weblog/ index.php?entry=437 http://www.newsgroups-index.com/group/ nl_-politiek_l4022.html http://hiphopinjesmoel.com/forums/1/ categories/2/topics/12122 (all visited 5 August 2007). See Baukje Prins, Voorbij de onschuld. Het debat over integratie in Nederland (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2004). Kuipers, ‘The Social Construction of Digital Danger.’ www.meldpunt.nl (accessed 10 June 2007). Kuipers, Good Humor Bad Taste, 148–69. Herman Vuijsje, The Politically Correct Netherlands: Since the 1960s (Westport/London: Greenwood, 2000). For two opposite interpretations of this development, see Prins, Voorbij de onschuld, and Vuijsje, Politically Correct Netherlands. Patrick van den Hanenberg and Frank Verhallen, Het is weer tijd om te bepalen waar het allemaal op staat: Nederlands cabaret 1970–1995 (Amsterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1996). For the documentation about this case, see the website of the Press Council: http://www.rvdj.nl, zaak 2003/42. Joep Dohmen, ‘Humor of haat; Feiten en dilemma’s van de affaireNekschot,’ NRC Handelsblad, 5 July 2008, Zaterdags Bijvoegsel, 8–9. Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders. Source for all comics’ quotes: www.zwartekat.nl (Dutch Cabaret Homepage) (accessed 5 August 2007). Prins, Voorbij de onschuld; Vuijsje, Politically Correct Netherlands; Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn, When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). James Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in Aanbouw: Nederland in de Jaren zestig (Amsterdam: Boom, 1995). Cas Wouters, Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (London: Sage, 2007). Mahadev Apte, ‘Ethnic Humor versus “Sense of Humor”: An American Sociocultural Dilemma,’ American Behavioral Scientist 30, no. 3 (1987): 27–41.

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42 Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 43 Kuipers, ‘Social Construction of Digital Danger.’ 44 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process 1: A History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); Wouters, Informalization. 45 Cited in Prins, Voorbij de onschuld, 27. 46 Giselinde Kuipers, ‘1 oktober 1957: Donald Jones verschijnt in Pension Hommeles. De rol van gekleurde acteurs in Nederlandse televisiehumor,’ in Kunsten in Beweging deel 1, ed. Rosemarie Buikema and Maaike Meijer (Den Haag: SDU, 2003). 47 Arguably, religion here serves as proxy for modernity, contrasting the modern, secular Dutch with the traditional, religious Muslim minorities. 48 Paul Lewis, Christie Davies, Giselinde Kuipers, Rod Martin, Elliott Oring, and Victor Raskin, ‘The Muhammad Cartoons and Humor Research: A Collection of Essays,’ HUMOR International Journal of Humor Research 21, no. 1 (2006): 1–46; Giselinde Kuipers, ’The Politics of Humor in the Public Sphere: Cartoons, Power and Modernity in the First Transnational Humor Scandal,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2011): 63–80. 49 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 37.

8 ‘The Tongues of Mocking Wenches’: Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction EILEEN GILLOOLY The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen As is the razor’s edge invisible, Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen […] Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.256–8

The Poetics of Feminine Humour A decade ago, I published a book in which I set out to describe a form of humour that, although relatively rare and often inconspicuous, could with a little digging be reliably uncovered in a number of British novels written mostly by nineteenth-century women.1 While the gender of the author was by no means insignificant, I was initially drawn to study these novels not because they were written by women, but rather because they seemed to me to share a distinctive humorous aesthetic that I found at once especially appealing and extremely difficult to categorize or define, fitting so awkwardly, as it did, into the comic tradition. No less a critical and creative force than Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) admitted to being similarly appreciative and perplexed. He envied the way in which his contemporary novelists Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, and Jane Austen, taking as their subject the ‘feelings and characters of ordinary life’ in Ireland, Scotland, and England (respectively), were capable of producing humour that was ‘gentle but powerful,’ full of ‘pathetic tenderness and admirable tact,’ but he found it impossible, try as he might, to imitate them: ‘The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch’ exemplified best by Austen ‘is denied me.’2

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 203 Despite such passing nods of admiration, the aesthetic itself has until quite recently attracted no sustained critical attention, presumably as a consequence of its having acquired so few male practitioners.3 At once frustratingly evasive and thoroughly winning, the stylistic effects of this humorous aesthetic are generated almost entirely by the narrative voice as it deftly deploys a number of rhetorical tropes and affective tactics that – owing to their indirection, subtlety, diffuseness, and self-effacement – might be described, according to the logic of gender, as ‘feminine.’ Such tactics, that is, are not ‘feminine’ simply because women have had recourse to them more frequently than have men, but rather because they are associated with traits, behaviours, perspectives, and dispositions that – with remarkable continuity – have been trans-historically and cross-culturally prescribed to women. (Another way of making this point would be to note that the early Greek philosophical and social construction of the feminine has proved to be alarmingly pervasive and resilient in our globalized world.) Passivity, submission, selflessness, maternal feeling, and affectivity in general have traditionally been gendered ‘feminine’ in the West, just as agency, aggression, rationality, autonomy – and, indeed, the rights-based notion of the Liberal individuated self – have been gendered ‘masculine.’ And this is so no matter how often individual male or female subjects may manifest traits associated with the opposite gender. Similarly, in humour, well-known, widely respected, and self-proclaiming rhetorical gestures – such as hyperbole, broad satire, and blatant irony – culturally register as masculine, despite female usage, while quieter, receding tropes like meiosis (or understatement), litotes (or double negatives), and periphrasis (or circumlocution) are relegated to the feminine. Affectively speaking, humour is gendered masculine when it expresses aggression towards its victim in socially and psychologically acceptable ways – through tendentious jokes, for example, as Freud has famously discussed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) – and through irony, which theoretically, at least since Aristotle, requires not only an eiron but an alazon as well (that is, a third party who, devalued by the ironist and the listener, is deaf to the irony of the utterance). William Hazlitt, in his 1819 essay ‘On Wit and Humour,’ goes so far as to insist that a necessary condition for ‘the laughable’ is the complete absence of any sympathy for the victim: not only do ‘we burst into laughter from want of sympathy’; we actually derive ‘amusement from the very rejection of […] false claims upon

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our sympathy.’ Only those ‘misfortunes in which we are spectators, not sharers,’ are capable of evoking our laughter; for when we are the victims of misfortune ourselves, ‘we feel the pain as well, which more than counterbalances the speculative entertainment.’4 Certainly laughter of this sort – derisive and superior – is commonly fuelled by feelings of hostility, more or less sublimated, depending on whether our explicator is Hobbes or Freud. But there is another sort of humour that, even if it does not move us to outright laughter, is nevertheless capable of eliciting an understanding smile. Such humour expresses sympathy for its victim – however ambivalently, however imbricated with mocking irony. In doing so, it may be said to be affectively maternal – psychologically recalling the internalization of the protective, pre-Oedipal mother-child dyad rather than the triangulating, Oedipal configuration of jokes and irony. Such kindly, compassionate humour results from our empathic identification with the victim: rather than laughing from a safe emotional distance at a stranger who is slipping on a banana peel, we are psychologically encouraged instead to put ourselves in her position. The humorous pleasure we experience in such a case, being not unmixed with a tinge of pain, might be characterized as slightly masochistic, just as the pleasure we derive from aggressive, emotionally distant humour is recognized by its mildly sadistic edge. In his book English Humour (1976), J.B. Priestley suggested the term ‘feminine humour’ to name the sort of humorous discourse I am describing here – what he called ‘the plentiful supply of light satirical wit, much candid sharp humour, and fine eyes lighting up with laughter’ that he found most richly veined in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and in Cranford (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell’s story of a northern English village under the authority, the first line tells us, ‘of the Amazons.’5 To his mind, feminine humour is quite different from humour ‘that is aggressive, coarse in grain, predominantly masculine’ (128): it is a ‘very gentle humour’ (122), a ‘tender humour,’ a humour that leaves us ‘with our sympathies broadened instead of being further constricted’ (129), and ‘while it is essentially feminine in spirit, any man not armoured in machismo, too stiffly male, might create it’ (129). Note well that, in borrowing Priestly’s term, I use it even more cautiously, I suspect, than he did. It is for me not a physical but a phenomenological mark of gender, bestowing a discursive identity upon, and thus bringing to cultural consciousness, what might otherwise be sensed as only faint textual muttering – or, as Boyet remarks in Love’s

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 205 Labour’s Lost (quoted in the epigraph to this essay), as a cut so ‘keen’ and ‘swift’ as to be invisible, if not altogether undetectable. The tactics mobilized by feminine humour – notably its subtle subversiveness and disarming self-deprecation – have much in common with the humour of others who have similarly been marginalized (and consequently been gendered feminine) in a culture dominated by white, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, middle-class masculinity. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, the distinguishing characteristic of the humorist is precisely ‘feel[ing] for a time like the other’ – though like minority humour of other sorts, feminine humour is probably best appreciated by that coterie whose experiences and resentments most sharply resemble those engaged in the humour, however amusing others outside the targeted audience may find it.6 And yet without, I hope, treating feminine humour as a restrictive critical category, I limit my discussion here to the ways in which gender as an isolated variable – rather than in conjunction with other aspects of identity or affiliation such as race, nationality, class, religion, ethnicity, or sexuality, with which it inevitably occurs in practice – makes its presence humorously felt, however fleetingly. For feminine humour characteristically occurs as an assortment of barely perceptible punctures in the narration, hidden in the interstices of otherwise sober expression. Although the targets of feminine humour are no less numerous than those of other, more traditionally-recognized, forms of the comic, the delight such humour concocts from the often deadening routines and duties of ‘women’s sphere’ – whether in the nineteenth century or the twentieth – is one of its tell-tale features: observing the intricate workings out of social relations, chronicling the minutiae of domesticity, or otherwise dwelling with fondness upon the culturally trivialized, ignored, and demeaned. Jane Austen, for one, relentlessly mined the quotidian in her efforts to entertain her family and friends, producing in her letters a bit of diversion from a weather report, a country ball, or a shopping expedition. Indeed, references to work – often prominent in the correspondence of her male contemporaries – rarely surface in her own, and even when they do, they are barely noticeable in the sea of gossip. When faced with an unpromising topic, Austen discovered that rhetorical ingenuity in conveying it could prove effective. In the following passage from a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 31 May 1811, she exploits apophasis and zeugma7 to create an imaginative alternative reading of an otherwise tedious feminine script:

206 Eileen Gillooly I am so glad you are so well and wish everybody else were equally so. – I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive. We shall have pease soon – I mean to have them with a couple of Ducks from Wood Barn & Maria Middleton towards the end of next week.8

Noticing its self-conscious embrace of the culturally feminine is crucial to our distinguishing feminine humour from the more commonly studied varieties alongside which it often occurs and by which it is contextually occluded. Rather than openly contesting the contemporary articulation of femininity as dutifully familial, happily self-denying, quietly pleasing, and instinctively maternal, feminine humour scrupulously reproduces such traits in its own domestic content, demure rhetoric, and, perhaps most significantly, in its sympathy for those in the feminine position. For contrary to most forms of humour, which demand that the humorist remain emotionally aloof from his victim, feminine humour consoles the suffering self – who in the novelistic context is almost always a heroine affectively linked to the narrator – soliciting readerly empathy for her in the process. As I hope I have made clear, feminine humour is a particular strain of humorous discourse: it is not synonomous with ‘women’s humor’; indeed, it is not necessarily employed by women, nor is it unavailable to men. Although it occurs, in the nineteenth century, more frequently in the novels of Austen, Gaskell, and even George Eliot than it does in Dickens or Thackeray, both Anthony Trollope and Henry James can be said at least occasionally to employ humour that passes for the feminine variety. And as we shall see in a moment, such humour survives – indeed, thrives – in some late twentieth-century novels as well. Feminine Humour in the Late Twentieth Century For the first several decades of the twentieth century, however, feminine humour had more or less disappeared from the British novel. This was so, at least in part, because, beginning around the turn of the century, social, political, and aesthetic changes conspired to make other types of humour available for female use. Fin-de-siècle culture, women’s suffrage, the Great War, Modernism, and indeed modernity itself expanded the cultural understanding of femininity sufficiently so as to accommodate a wider spectrum of acceptable behaviours, duties, traits, and virtues: for example, after the founding of Girton and

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 207 Newnham Colleges, intelligence was no longer the impediment it was for, say, George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860), whose childhood experience of being twice as ‘’cute’ (that is, twice as acute) as anyone around her is only redeemed from tragedy by the femininely humorous tone of sympathetic engagement with which her experience is narrated. Racy jokes, satire, black comedy, and burlesque became increasingly popular, and women who utilized such forms – for example, Stella Gibbons in her grand spoof of the English rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) – were generally considered to be funnier than their nineteenth-century predecessors. Muriel Spark’s corrosively satiric fiction, Iris Murdoch’s darkly humorous philosophical novels, Angela Carter’s droll bawdiness, and Fay Weldon’s barbed, macabre, explicitly feminist humour are, for the most part, virulent, aggressive, and other-directed rather than soft, passive, and internalized.9 Broadly speaking, as the humour produced by women has become more diverse, more ‘masculinized,’ in its strategies, targets, and affects, it has also become less ‘feminine’ according to the prevailing nineteenth-century connotation of that term. Even a book like Good Behaviour (1981) by the Irish writer Molly Keane – which features an ostensibly meek and dutiful daughter as its heroine – transforms that topos so familiar to feminine humour into a bitingly funny revenge plot, wherein the heroine ‘cares’ for the cold, withholding mother of her youth by force-feeding her in old age. But feminine humour is not only a product of nineteenth-century historical contingencies: it forms part of that century’s legacy to our own. As Mary Poovey has pointed out, despite enormous cultural and legal changes over the last two hundred years, ‘many of the same values and inhibitions persist, sedimented deep in the layers of our culture and our consciousness.’ Despite the often vast difference in material conditions, the ‘psychological experience of many women’ today still resembles to a significant degree that of their nineteenthcentury counterparts.10 It is hardly surprising, then, that appropriations of masculine tropes like hyperbole and extended metaphor tend to supplement rather than supplant traditionally feminine ones, even in writers as caustically funny as Spark and Weldon. Circumlocution may have been largely abandoned, but indirection, double negatives, and understatement – if Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald are any evidence – continue unabated. Indeed, what some readers perceive as an anachronistic (if not atavistic) element of style in their work results less, I would argue, from their putative imitation

208 Eileen Gillooly of Austen than from their participation in a humorous aesthetic and discourse shared by a number of (mostly female) nineteenth-century novelists. Curiously, given its largely nineteenth-century provenance, feminine humour achieves in these critically acclaimed late twentiethcentury writers a greater degree of visibility and attention than ever before. (All three have been awarded or shortlisted – sometimes frequently – for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, arguably the most prestigious of all English-language prizes.) Pym’s fiction, in particular, offers perhaps the most extensive example of such humour at work in either century. Her heroines – acutely self-conscious but otherwise psychologically undifferentiated from the narrator – are, by and large, from novel to novel, disorientingly interchangeable: capable, under-appreciated, quietly lonely women of indeterminate middle age, whose amorous expectations, never very great, are sadly diminished by the time we meet them. With few exceptions, they wander about in the confines of an almost static romantic plot – but a romantic plot gone awry, in which persevering love is not inevitably fulfilled, but rather frustrated, mis-allied, disillusioned, or rejected. Yet even against the loss of conventional comic closure, the most memorable feature of Pym’s stories is surely, as one reader has put, their ‘odd, oblique, elegant humor.’11 Such humour springs, in part, from the abundant, affectionate reference to nineteenth-century women writers and their creations. Not only does the title of Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953) playfully allude to Austen’s most famous novel, but its heroine Prudence Bates associates herself with ‘poor silly Miss Bates’ of Austen’s Emma (1816) by explicitly denying the association: ‘if she resembled any character in fiction, it was certainly not Miss Bates. And yet how could Miss Trapnell and Miss Clothier call her anything else?’ And Jane Eyre (who ‘must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person’) blithely haunts more than one Pym novel.12 Like her namesake, the Victorian writer Margaret Oliphant, Catherine Oliphant of Less Than Angels (1955) churns out articles for women’s magazines to support herself and her sometime boyfriend (who, like Margaret’s many dependants, eventually dies on her), while Mildred Lathbury of the euphemistically entitled Excellent Women (1952) is only one of several examples of the eponymous species inspired by the morally steadfast, slightly priggish, Fanny Price of Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814): aging young churchwomen who dutifully apply themselves to

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 209 charitable causes of both a personal and impersonal nature, less from a positive desire to be useful than to combat a feeling of uselessness or redundancy. Such allusions in the work of late twentieth-century writers to nineteenth-century heroines generate a richly complicated humorous connection to literary foremothers – a connection augmented not only by an affinity for self-denying rhetoric and a shared thematic concern with peculiarly feminine frustrations, but also by similar affective goals. Sympathetic humour, that is, still crucially informs the narrator-heroine bond in the work of writers like Pym, offering at least a sense of commiseration, if no longer reassurance and comfort, to the discontented heroine. ‘Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature,’ announces the first sentence of Brookner’s The Debut (1981) – a sentence in which the wry humour is so finely wrought that it effectively hangs on comma placement.13 Escaping from parents far more infantile than Maggie Tulliver’s in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), more distant and more demanding than the Bertrams of Mansfield Park (the Brookner heroine’s mother, unlike Lady Bertram, doesn’t simply loll on the sofa: she absolutely refuses to leave her bed), Ruth Weiss loses herself in nineteenth-century novels, where she discovers a modicum of emotional security. Yet even though ‘she ponder[s] the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary’ (7), and, at forty, is the author of the cautionary Women in Balzac’s Novels, she nevertheless finds, when she turns her own ‘life into literature’ (8), that the heroine she most imitates is Dickens’s Little Dorrit (7). Less willingly dutiful, Ruth is every bit as self-effacing as Amy Dorrit (she dresses so as to disappear); and perhaps because more consciously resentful, she is also more fatalistically submissive: ‘I don’t like the idea of your going away, Ruth [her father said]. Don’t like it at all […] You have a duty to your mother, you know.’ Then he left, in a hurry to get to Harrods to oversee his purchases and perhaps buy himself a towelling bathrobe. This was the first Ruth had heard of her duty, which she had imagined was confined to the characters of Balzac. She had a duty to them, certainly, and the British Council, no less, had recognized it. Her father could not really imagine that she would be of any use here? In the days that followed, it became quite clear that he did. (96–7)

Understatement is here honed to an almost lethal sharpness, and

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its cut is felt to be largely self-inflicted. Yet, though undeniably painful, the gesture is not simply masochistic: Brookner’s humour does not actively solicit punishment, but rather engages in shielding (however unsuccessfully) the heroine from the blows of reality. The effect is less perverse pleasure in self-deprecation than a cosmic sense of absurdity, less psychological bonding with a cold, withholding, punitive mother than simply a recognition that the benevolent, consoling mother is utterly inaccessible. The dynamic structure of feminine humour is retained: yearning for the lost mother can still be heard murmuring, but even momentary solace has become hyper-attenuated – or perhaps simply exhausted, as it is in the following passage from Brookner’s Brief Lives (1990): I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser’s […] The child, whose hair was about to be cut for the first time, screamed with terror and clung to her mother. The hairdresser stood by gravely, comb in hand: he recognized that this was a serious moment. The mother, blushing, tried to comfort the child who had suddenly plunged into despair; all around the shop women smiled in sympathy. What impressed me, and what I particularly remember, was the child’s passionate attempt to re-enter her mother, the arms locked around the woman’s neck, the terrified cries of unending love […] I had tears in my eyes, witnessing that bond, seeing that closeness, of which only a sorrowful memory remained in my own life […] One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions – sorrow and anger – adequately.14

Despite the classically comic arrangement of this scene, the acuity of loss the narrator conveys blots out any hope of a maternally comforting humorous embrace. ‘Sorrow and anger’ – once the very fuel of humorous sublimation – are now simply ‘no longer manage[able].’ The Example of Penelope Fitzgerald In the globalizing middle-class culture of the late twentieth-century – a culture founded economically and psychologically on the gratification of self-interest – it is extremely difficult for feminine virtues like self-sacrifice and eager sympathy not to appear contextually absurd. As the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) remarks of her widowed heroine, Florence Green, ‘she had a kind heart, though that is

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 211 not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.’15 The ‘insignificant,’ indeterminately middle-aged Mrs Green wonders ‘whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself, and probably to others, that she existed in her own right’ (7). This ‘want[ing] to be doing something,’ to be ‘any thing in propria persona,’ leads Mrs Green to establish a bookshop in her Suffolk village, notwithstanding the profound indifference of the local population (which only converts at moments into active hostility) and the express disapproval of the malignant Mrs Gamart, the self-appointed ‘world’s wife’ of the aptly named Hardborough, whose ‘strict code of gentility’ is ‘rather upset by the sudden transformation of our Old House into a shop’ (26). Despite Mrs Green’s ‘ready sympathy’ (14), her strong passive resistance (‘her courage […] was the determination to survive’ [88]), and her active self-denial (she, like the Amazons of Cranford, lives in elegantly economic fashion, on tea, herring, and biscuits), Mrs Green is ultimately vanquished by the combined forces of nature, culture, and the supernatural: by, that is, the book-hating damp of East Anglia, the treachery of Mrs Gamart, and the demoralizing attacks of a poltergeist, whose actions (like Mrs Gamart’s) are sudden, unjust, and unpredictable and whose ‘furious physical frustration’ (17) intimates similar, though untapped, reserves of her own. The last line of the novel ends with the now penniless Mrs Green taking permanent leave of Hardborough, ‘her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop’ (123). Remarkably, despite the authentic sadness of this closing image and the note of everyday hopelessness upon which the novel ends, Fitzgerald’s narrative nevertheless manages not only to maintain our willing empathic engagement with her heroine and her travails, but to leave us with a sense of humorous satisfaction as well. This is the signature effect of Fitzgerald’s work – this talent for eliciting our fond, sympathetic, amused interest, under novelistic circumstances that conventionally resist a romantic or comic resolution. Mrs Green, apprehending – if not fully understanding – the affective poverty of a culture that relies on commercial greeting cards to express private feeling, observes that ‘the only two attitudes to the stages of life’s journey envisaged by the manufacturers’ (55) are the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Humorous.’ By cheerfully ignoring the authority of these determining categories, by parsing the ‘Romantic’ into various other modes of affectionate response and then crossing one such mode with an odd, elliptical (feminine) variety of the ‘Humorous,’ Fitzgerald achieves,

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according to the novelist A.S. Byatt, a style of ‘mysterious clarity nobody else approaches’ – at least, that is, among her contemporaries.16 For the writer against whom Fitzgerald is most often measured – however implicitly or unwittingly – is Austen. ‘Fitzgerald’s special talent is stylistic, a mannered comic dryness that relishes absurdities without dwelling on them. She moves at speed, is full of sharp observations and inventions, and is very funny,’ Anthony Thwaite notes admiringly.17 (Compare, for example, the following remark by a typical Fitzgerald narrator to Austen’s epistolary humour, quoted near the end of Section I: ‘Meantime here were the Justs, Coelestin magnificent in the dark green ceremonial uniform of his rank. Heun, who came with them, was also entitled to a uniform, though not, apparently, one that fitted him.’)18 Other novelists, following Scott, may have mastered the ‘Big Bow-Wow strain’ of ‘impasto description and research,’ but Fitzgerald’s ‘fugitive scraps of insight and information – like single brushstrokes of vivid and true colors – convey more reality’: they also require the rare, ‘exquisite touch’ that Scott so esteemed in Austen but found personally incapable of producing. Her ‘marvelously deft,’ ‘shrewd, sympathetic, and sharply economical books’ are resolutely ‘small-scale’ (like Austen’s self-described ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory’ worked ‘with so fine a Brush’), but her prose, like Austen’s, nonetheless ‘manages to produce large-scale emotional effects’19 – often in a sentence or two of stunning concentration: ‘Thoughtfulness can be much more painful than neglect. The Freifrau, however, had had very few opportunities to learn this’ (Blue Flower, 163). Like Austen, too, Fitzgerald continually presses us to stretch and strengthen our powers of discernment and sympathy. But whereas Austen’s narrative humour – however kindly it treats her heroines – always retains a trace of self-protective irony, Fitzgerald is capable at moments of turning her heroine’s momentary bonding with even a hostile Other into an occasion for sympathetic amusement: ‘Is there room on your step for me to sit down?’ Kattie asked. She was behaving nicely, trying to please and conciliate. Either she wanted Milo to see how readily she could charm other people, or she wanted to show him how kind she could be to a dull middle-aged woman, simply because Milo seemed to know her. Whichever it was, Florence felt deeply sympathetic. (The Bookshop, 93)

If sympathy under such conditions normally hints of masochism

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 213 (where humorous pleasure derives from narrative identification with the heroine in her pain), Fitzgerald’s narrator in this instance sidesteps the imputation by inverting the dynamic – by having her heroine’s sympathetic understanding of her aggressor’s motives swamp any sense of her own woundedness at being thought simply ‘dull’ and ‘middle-aged.’ A similar dynamic structures Florence Green’s response to the intimidating Mr Brundish, when an unexpected feeling of compassion suddenly replaces the anxiety he usually awakens, transforming fear into the relief of recognition: ‘He wanted to welcome her but was more used to threatening, and the change of attitude was difficult for him. She felt the appeal of this’ (80). Fitzgerald’s humour works against expectation in other ways as well. Almost all theories of humour – from Aristotle and Cicero to Kant, Darwin, and Freud – privilege incongruity, conceptualizing humour as the disjunction (social, cognitive, biological, or psychological) between the norm and its transgression.20 Fitzgerald, in contrast, while acknowledging the disjunction, produces humour not from the incongruity between the Ideal and the Real – between theory and practice, between what ought to be and what is – but rather from the quick, surprising, appreciative embrace of the peculiar, the flawed, the human. In Offshore (1979), Richard Blake’s ‘war service in the RNVR, and his whole temperament before and since’ (9), have made him exceptionally fit for the unexamined life. When he discovers that, despite his strenuous efforts of resistance, questions, doubts, and marital problems will disturb his happy complacency, he resigns himself to the psychic assault, asking merely that they take turns in their demands for attention: ‘Richard did not like to have to think about two things at once, particularly at the end of the day’ (60). He kissed Laura, sat down, and tried to bring the two subjects put to him into order, and under one heading. A frown ran in a slanting direction between his eyebrows and half way up his forehead […] Laura was lucky to be married to Richard, who would not have hurt her feelings deliberately for the whole world. A fortnight with her parents, he was thinking now, on their many damp acres of damp earth, must surely bring home to her the advantages of living on Lord Jim [their houseboat on the Thames]. Of course, it hadn’t so far done anything of the kind, and he had to arrive at the best thing to do in the circumstances. He was not quite satisfied with the way his mind was working. Something was out of phase. He did not recognize it as hope. (60–1)

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Here Fitzgerald’s humour – almost too keenly aphoristic to be immediately perceived – is ironically inflected: the narrator and reader both understand, as Richard does not, that the possibility of his wife’s leaving him, because she refuses to tolerate living offshore any longer, feels to him more like unanticipated relief than impending loss. But whereas irony characteristically endows the eiron and audience with a sense of superiority to the alazon, in this instance knowingness is tempered by affection both for Richard (with whom the narration, often centred on his consciousness, has consistently urged us to identify) and for a former version of ourselves, whose emotional grasp of Richard’s situation presumably results from a similar past experience. Fitzgerald is adept not only at infusing irony with sympathetic humour (and in so doing, avoiding any trace of arrogance, to which irony in its purest form is highly susceptible), but also at crossing literary genres to produce a text, as she does in The Blue Flower (1995), as hybridized and unclassifiable as feminine humour itself. Although identified in the ‘Author’s Note’ as ‘a novel,’ Fitzgerald’s rendering of an episode in ‘the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801) before he became famous under the name Novalis,’ is sui generis: not history, biography, tragedy, or comedy, but rather a tragicomic quasi-philosophical novel, steeped in historical time, that imagines the domestic and emotional life of a promising German university student who believes himself in love, at first sight, with a twelve-year-old girl of no apparent intellectual gifts or remarkable personal charms. Although more eccentric in form and subject than her other novels, The Blue Flower similarly muses about the binaries that structure life and thought: the symbiotic bond between the Real and the Ideal, pain and pleasure, self-regard and sympathy, tears and laughter, the general and the particular, men and women. If elsewhere Fitzgerald turns potentially aggressive laughter into an occasion of humorous sympathy by siding with the victim, in this, her final novel, she generates humour by suggesting, Sancho-like, that perhaps, as a matter of lived experience, it is the Ideal, rather than the Real, that is contextually absurd. Fritz (Novalis), the student of Fichte, Schiller, and Friedrich Schlegel, writes to Karoline Just – whom he has ‘perhaps not very tactfully’ made his confidante after having aroused her own romantic interest in him – to say that he has been ‘marooned’ by a severe snowstorm at the residence of ‘his Philosophy,’ the twelve-year-old Sophie: While Karoline was helping to clear a path to the outside pump, a letter arrived from [Fritz] […] The snow was so deep he alleged, that he couldn’t

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 215 go out without danger, and to take pointless risks was unworthy of a responsible man. ‘I shall, I will, I must, I ought, I can stay here, who can do anything against Fate? I have decided that I am a Determinist. Fate might not be so kind another time.’ ‘In that great house there must be someone who can clear the carriageway,’ Karoline told herself. (77)

However much the Romantics may have prided themselves on their originality and powers of self-definition, their actual investment in received codes of gender is hardly distinguishable from that of previously fashionable ideologies. As Mary Shelley (1797–1851) well knew, even women whose intellectual gifts were openly acknowledged and praised were expected to maintain the domestic infrastructure: ‘“No women!” cried Erasmus’ to his brother Fritz, on being informed of the inhabitants of their enlightened Uncle’s household-cum-salon. ‘“Who then did the washing?”’ (23). If men were somehow entitled by virtue of their gender to be self-absorbed and philosophical, women must perforce be sympathetic and practical, since ‘someone,’ as Karoline Just points out to Fritz, ‘has to look after’ the ‘particulars’ (100). Generalization, moreover – however widely esteemed as the superior habit of mind (men ‘are morally better than’ women, Fritz explains, because they ‘generalise’ while women can only ‘particularise’) – is shown to have its internal defects, being insensitive, as it is, to the human, idiosyncratic, emotional element that, predictably, undermines probable universal truths: ‘No other system is so reliable as Brown’s,’ Fritz told Karoline Just, not for the first time [referring to the medical therapy used to treat the dying Sophie]. ‘To some extent Brownismus is based on Locke’s ideas of the nervous system.’ ‘We have to believe in someone,’ said Karoline. ‘Another one, I mean, besides ourselves, or life would be a poor thing.’ ‘I was talking of the exact sciences, Justen.’ (184)

By slyly exposing such defects – by subversively mocking normative, ‘naturalized’ values like generalization rather than those who fail, or perhaps simply refuse, to practise them – Fitzgerald, like other feminine humorists of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, registers a quiet political protest against prevailing gender conditions. And yet, while the continuities and affinities between them are extensive and pronounced, Fitzgerald’s humorous aesthetic – shared by Pym and

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Brookner – differs significantly from that of their literary foremothers in the strength of what Robert Polhemus in a different context has called its ‘comic faith.’21 Feminine humour in the late twentieth century, that is, distinguishes itself – and shows its postmodernity – in being well-marbled with self-irony. Steering clear of both sentimentality and cynicism, it exhibits a ‘’cute’ awareness that its very identity as feminine humour lies in its being, in effect, ineffectual. Although such wry ontological understanding dissolves confidence in the saving power of maternal consolation (so distinguishing a feature of Eliot’s humorous treatment of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, for instance), it nevertheless leaves the empathic bond between the humorous narrator and her helpless heroine firmly intact. Curiously perhaps, despite dashed hopes of comfort, the humor thus produced hints at neither self-loathing nor despair. Rather, feminine humor in the late twentieth century, while poignantly acknowledging the inaccessibility of maternal solace, yet offers us its small pleasures in the very process of futilely striving towards that ever-elusive, ever-beckoning, goal. notes 1 See Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and NineteenthCentury British Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). The present essay draws heavily from sections of this book, especially the Preface and the Coda. I wish to thank the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint. 2 Scott’s remark on Edgeworth comes from his ‘general Preface’ in Waverley (1814; New York: Dent, 1969), 9; his approval of Ferrier is noted by Margaret Oliphant, The Literary History of England; in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1882), 245, 248; and his by now well-known tribute to Austen is extracted from his journal entry of 14 March 1826 and is reprinted in B.C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 106. 3 My interest in this particular humorous aesthetic – with its mostly female adherents – distinguishes my work in humour from that of others writing on the humour of women writers. Most prominent among these is Regina Barecca, whose Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994) considers many of the same novels I do in Smile of Discontent. Our work differs significantly, however, in two fundamental ways. Barreca looks at ‘wom-

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 217

4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11 12

en’s humour’ in all its complexity (that is, what I might call its masculine as well as its feminine varieties), rather than as a strain of humour that has been culturally marked feminine, regardless of the sex of the practitioner. And, in contrast to my interest in the gendered implications of sympathy in humour, what most intrigues Barreca about her subject is its anger: ‘Women’s writing of comedy is characterized by its thinly disguised rage’ (21). William Hazlitt, ‘On Wit and Humour,’ in Lectures on the English Poets, and the English Comic Writers, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: George Bell and Sons 1894), 3–9 passim. J.B. Priestley, English Humour (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), 115. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 426. Apophasis and zeugma are, like metaphor and simile, rhetorical tropes, though it would be an understatement (meiosis) to say their meanings are less well known to most of us. According to the OED (http://dictionary .oed.com), an apophasis is ‘a kind of an Irony,’ ‘whereby we really say or advise a thing under a feigned show of passing over, or dissuading it’: thus, ‘I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.’ A zeugma is ‘a figure by which a single word is made to refer to two or more words in the sentence; esp. when properly applying in sense to only one of them, or applying to them in different senses’: thus, ‘I mean to have them [pease] with a couple of Ducks from Wood Barn & Maria Middleton’ (grammatically suggesting that Austen intends to eat both the ducks and her guest for dinner). Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R.W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 285. Spark, Murdoch, Weldon, and Carter are all prolific, but for purposes of illustration, see: Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988); Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (1978); Carter, Wise Children (1991); and Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1984). Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 245–6. Robert Emmet Long, Barbara Pym (New York: Ungar, 1986), 40. Jane and Prudence (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 36; Excellent Women (New York: Penguin, 1978), 7. Like Jane Austen, Jane Eyre is often a background presence in the Pym canon, particularly Excellent Women and Less Than Angels (1955; repr., New York: Dutton, 1990).

218 Eileen Gillooly 13 Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 7. Subsequent references to this edition are included in the text. 14 Anita Brookner, Brief Lives (New York: Vintage, 1992), 82–3. 15 Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop (1978; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 7. Subsequent references to this edition are included in the text. The final sentence of this textual paragraph contains five quotations: only the last is from Fitzgerald. The others quote from Persuasion, Mansfield Park, The Mill on the Floss, and Cranford, respectively. 16 Quoted on the first, unnumbered page of The Bookshop. Peter Wolfe, Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), focuses on Fitzgerald’s style as the distinguishing feature of her novels and of their appeal. 17 Quoted on the first, unnumbered page of Offshore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 18 Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 170. Subsequent references to this edition are included in the text. 19 These descriptions of Fitzgerald’s work are taken from the opening, unnumbered pages of Offshore and The Blue Flower: ‘fugitive scraps’ is attributed to Michael Hofmann, New York Times Book Review; ‘marvelously deft,’ anonymously to Spectator; ‘shrewd,’ Hofmann; ‘small-scale prose,’ anonymously to Mail on Sunday. Austen’s oft-quoted comment on her style was made in a letter to a fiction-writing nephew (1816), who had reportedly lost some of the manuscript on which he was working. Like Scott, she acknowledges the gender difference between her work and that of the ‘Big Bow-Wow strain,’ though, unlike Scott, her praise of the opposite gender style is humorously barbed: ‘It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately, & therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them […] I do not think however that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?’ Quoted in Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), 284. 20 For extensive reviews of the literature on humour theory, see Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds., Handbook of Humor Research, 2 vols. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983), and Edmund Bergler, Laughter and the Sense of Humor (New York: Intercontinental Medical Book, 1956). With an eye to gender difference, Regenia Gagnier, ‘Between Women: A Cross-Class Analysis of Status and Anarchic Humor,’ in Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. Regina Barreca (New York: Gordon

Humour and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century British Fiction 219 and Breach, 1988), 135–48, admirably reviews and synthesizes these theories, and in Trollope and Comic Pleasure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Christopher Herbert gives a useful summary of several studies of humour theory of the past two centuries. 21 Polhemus defines comic faith as ‘a tacit belief that the world is both funny and potentially good; a pattern of expressing or finding religious impulse, motive, and meaning in the forms of comedy; and an implicit assumption that a basis for believing in the value of life can be found in the fact of comic expression itself.’ Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.

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Contributors

Vincent Brook has a PhD in film and television from UCLA. He teaches media studies at UCLA, USC, Cal-State LA, and Pierce College. Besides numerous journal and other articles, he has authored or edited three books: Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom (2003), You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (2006), and Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (2009). Eileen Gillooly teaches nineteenth-century British literature and women’s studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1999) and contributing co-editor of Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (2007) and Contemporary Dickens (2009). Among her other publications are essays and reviews in Victorian Studies, ELH, and The New York Times Book Review. She is currently completing a critical edition of David Copperfield and a monograph on parental feeling in nineteenth-century middle-class Britain. Peter Jelavich teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914 (1985); Berlin Cabaret (1993); and Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (2006). Martina Kessel is professor of Modern History at Bielefeld University. Among her most important publications are Westeuropa und die deutsche Teilung. Englische und französische Deutschlandpolitik auf

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Contributors

den Außenministerkonferenzen 1945–1947 (1989) and Langeweile. Zum Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert (2001). Giselinde Kuipers is associate professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and (part-time) Norbert Elias Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (2006) as well as numerous articles on humour, popular culture, media, and cultural globalization. Patrick Merziger is post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate School ‘Trans-National Media Events,’ Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. His latest publications include Nationalsozialistische Satire und ‘Deutscher Humor.’ Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945 (2010); Die Macht des Populären. Politik und populäre Kultur im 20. Jahrhundert (2010) [ed. together with V. Borsò und C. Liermann]. Monika Pater teaches journalism studies at the Institute for Journalism and Communications, University of Hamburg. Her major publications in the field of German media history focus on broadcast programs during National Socialism and the early German Democratic Republic (see Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern, eds., Zuhören und Gehörtwerden (1998), vol. 1: 129–241, and vol. 2: 171–258). Mark Winokur has a PhD in film and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches film, literature, and digital media history, criticism, and theory at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He speaks and publishes on the same subjects. He has published most conspicuously American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (1996), and is working on two books, one on film and one on new media: Technologies of Race: Makeup, Special Effects and Ethnic Groups in American Film and The Point of View of Information.

GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: Rebecca Wittman 1 Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford, Federica Bicchi, and Rafaella Del Sarto, The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region 2 James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination 3 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology 4 Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russian Between the Wars 5 Laurence McFalls, ed., Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Revisited 6 Robin Ostow, ed., (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millenium 7 David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 8 John Zilcosky, ed., Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey 9 Angelica Fenner, Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxi 10 Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger, eds., The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century