I can recall one of the special Easter editions of The Simpsons in which the beloved cartoon family and their cohorts found themselves recreating biblical stories for an episode. At one point, after helping build the pyramids, Milhouse asks Lisa what lies ahead for the Israelites. After she tells him that his people will have to wander the desert for 40 years, he asks, “But it’s smooth sailing after that, right?” To which she nervously replies, “Uh, more or less.” It’s a classic Simpsons moment full of wit and hilarity, and in one single instance, also provides the basis for The Last Laugh, one of the most telling and debatable documentaries of the year.
The Last Laugh deals with what is still one of the most touchy subjects in modern-day society: the holocaust. More specifically, the documentary asks the question, “How appropriate is it to center comedy around the holocaust and laugh at it?” Director Ferne Pearlstein’s film attempts to shed light on this controversial issue by exploring how the holocaust has been dealt with humorously in film and TV in the years since the war, while also looking at the differing perspectives from a number of famous Jewish comics and actual holocaust survivors who debate the idea of laughing at one of the biggest atrocities in the world’s history.
Plenty of well-known comics are on-hand offering up their own holocaust-related material, such as Judy Gold, who recalls an instance watching a documentary showing footage of Jews marching naked into the gas chambers upon where she immediately thought, “If that were me, would I hold my stomach in?” For Gold, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Gilbert Gottfried, and others, laughter is the ultimate defense mechanism against something that still inspires fear. It is a weapon used to strip away at the evil of something most people are afraid to talk about, let alone laugh at. “Someone once said: ‘Tragedy plus time equals comedy,’” states Gottfried. “I say: ‘Why wait?!’” And yet, as Gold is quick to point out, there is a very specific sort of science which proves detrimental to crafting such humor, a thin line between what is comical and what is flat out demeaning. “The thing about the holocaust, AIDS, 9/11, is that it’s all about the funny,” she explains. “You can’t tell a crappy joke about the biggest tragedy in the world. You can’t do it.” And yet some jokes, regardless of intent, don’t always go down well, as evidenced by a clip of Joan Rivers looking at a photo of a stunning Heidi Klum and proclaiming, “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were standing next to the ovens at Auschwitz.” Upon hearing the joke for the first time for the film, Brooks expresses his conflicted feelings as a comedian and a Jewish man. “I couldn’t have said it,” he flat out states. “It doesn’t mean that it isn’t funny. It’s in terrible taste. But it’s funny.”
While all of the name commentators in The Last Laugh make it known their business is comedy, Brooks, Silverman, and company make sure people know they aren’t insensitive to one of the most real horrors ever to have happened. “I know it’s a real fear in people that the holocaust would be forgotten,” Silverman says sympathetically. “Has it not been forgotten? There are genocides all over the world we aren’t doing anything about. They’re just not happening to Jews,” she says. Brooks points to the idea of time making such a topic less taboo by saying, “Time opens up different avenues of thought and acceptance.” However, it’s Silverman who suggests that laughing at such a topic is an act of importance. “Comedy puts light onto darkness and darkness can’t live where there’s light,” she states. “That’s why it’s important to talk about things that are taboo because otherwise they just stay in this dark place and they become dangerous.”
The Last Laugh does right by including the perspective of holocaust survivor Renee Firestone, who now spends her days bringing awareness to similar crimes and acts being committed against races all over the world. Hearing Firestone telling stories of how the her and her fellow prisoners would make up imagined dinner parties while in the camps, comparing recipes, showed how even that small bit of escapism was necessary. “We never laughed though,” she says. “Instead we always ended with ‘but you know it’ll never happen.’” By contrast, actor/comedian Robert Clary, himself a survivor, states how vital humor was to his time in the camps, which included entertaining the prisoners (and sometimes even the guards), who for a brief amount of time all forgot where they were. While Clary justifies the use of humor about the holocaust among many modern-day comedies, in spite of backlash, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-defamation League, is on-hand to explain why, in many circles, such jokes are still considered unacceptable. “We expect more from Jews – a greater sensitivity – and maybe it’s not fair,” he says truthfully. Yet as Firestone beautifully puts it, “I’m glad I’m able to smile and laugh. It would have been a terrible life for 70 years to just cry.”
It shouldn’t be forgotten that film and television have never shied away from making fun of Hitler and Nazi Germany from the very moment it started. The Last Laugh takes the time to highlight this fact by revisiting the likes of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, To Be or Not to Be, and The Three Stooges, all of whom bravely and brazenly made fun of the greatest terror the world had seen up to that point. It becomes interesting to see how reactions to such depictions have greatly altered in the years since, not to mention the cleverness of the comedy and people’s willingness to laugh. Important milestones in finding acceptable ways of laughing at the holocaust are looked at, from Brooks’s The Producers to the moment in Seinfeld where Jerry’s mother yells at her son, “You were making out during Schindler’s List?!” While the film makes a revisiting of Seinfeld’s “soup nazi” all the more provocative, it poses the question about the strength and credibility of Roberto Benigni’s much-divisive Life is Beautiful, which Books describes as “the worst movie ever made. To make a comedy about a concentration camp and to not show what went on there…it’s a great trick, but it’s absolutely ludicrous.”
Eventually, The Last Laugh does become something of a rundown of the different comic representations of the holocaust in film and TV as well as what other social “turfs” should or shouldn’t be crossed. If it seems like there’s too much of a focus on 9/11 and racial humor, the film quickly redeems itself by focusing on Firestone’s life since the holocaust and her detailed memories of what happened. In the end, The Last Laugh shows how laughter can so readily be used as a most powerful way of combating tragedy, pain, and misery. The idea is tossed around with regard to ownership. Who is allowed to laugh at what happened? Comics or survivors? And more than once, the notion is brought up that not laughing at something taboo does nothing but keep tragedy alive. Laughter, regardless of how it’s perceived, is not only a way of facing the darkness of the world, but surviving it. In many ways, having the last laugh is the ultimate revenge.
