Making it Better: The future of WP

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"God, God!"
"What, Mose?"
"I'm so worried! My son has christened himself!"
"Oh, I know how you're feeling..."
"What do I do now?"
"Same as me: write a New Testament!"

Actually, "what makes the difference between a Jewish joke and an antisemitic joke?" is a running joke in Poland.
The correct answer is: "the person who tells it"

Disagree. There are some things that are just too horrific to joke about. Unless you know of some good Holocaust jokes that I've missed...

There is an old Yiddish folk saying, “If your heart aches, laugh it off.” For many, this pro-tip especially applies to the Holocaust. When it comes to humor surrounding the topic of the Holocaust, it is critical to remind ourselves that we are not laughing at the severity and devastation of the Holocaust. Rather, as proposed by scholar Terence Des Pres, “[Holocaust] laughter is used to dispel and to embrace, a kind of comic ambiguity that diffuses hostility, on the one hand, and on the other prompts charity toward those who suffered, those who remember, and also those who might simply wish to know.”

Considering the intellectual, educational, creative, and cathartic facets of comedy, it is understandable, even inevitable, that Holocaust humor has become integrated into popular culture. Of course, joking about the Holocaust has the potential to go very, very wrong. But when such jokes are skillfully and mindfully crafted, they serve as a mode of memory transmission with the ability to challenge, enrich, and preserve history.

Don’t believe me? The Holocaust-centered skits, characterizations, and narrative arcs exhibited in these five TV shows explore new ways for Jews — and everyone in our entertainment-focused society — to understand, cope, and heal.

F Is For Family
This animated sitcom loosely based on comedian Bill Burr’s childhood is set in the early ‘70s and centers Nixon-loving Korean War veteran Frank Murphy and his Irish-American family. A period piece of sorts, F Is For Family depicts parenting styles of the era — uninvolved, apathetic, and uncommunicative albeit profanity-laden outbursts. It’s this type of be-home-when-the-street-lights-come-on oversight that leads to middle child Bill’s initial belief that the jovial elderly German neighbor, Otto Holtenwasser, is a Nazi.

Fueled by the neighborhood kid rumors — “He’s Hitler’s little brother and hunts down kids” — Bill is terrified when Mr. Holtenwasser reaches to remove a magnet stuck on his front door and his sleeve slides down, revealing a number tattooed on his arm. “It’s how many people he’s killed! It’s a scoreboard!” Bill cries as he runs away, unaware that his neighbor is a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor, though the audience is able to put it together. “Have a vunderful day children!” Mr. Holtenwaser calls out, waving gleefully. What a sweet old man.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime Video)
The five-time Emmy-award winning show about Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a gregarious upper-class Jewish 1950s housewife turned divorced raunchy stand-up comedian, is already three glorious seasons deep with all eyes peeled for that Season 4 release date (any day now…). Set in the aftermath of World War II, members of the Upper East Side Jewish diaspora live with the recent memory of the Holocaust, but they are only human and some let their egos get the best of them.

In the first episode when Midge’s husband Joel is humiliated from bombing a stand-up set and decides to leave her, he compares his comedy career to their rabbi:

“I’m up there dying and I’m thinking about last week, we’re in temple and the rabbi tells that stupid Sodom and Gomorrah joke, and suddenly the whole synagogue goes nuts!”

“You’re jealous of the Rabbi? He was in Buchenwald, throw him a bone!” says Midge, referring to the concentration camp in Weimar, Germany.

In the second episode, Joel’s yenta father, Moishe, gives a braggadocios dinner toast: “At times of hardship self-sacrifice is necessary. Like the sacrifice I made pulling thirteen Jews out of Germany in 1943.”

Drunk History (Comedy Central)
Senior year of college, I was asked to partake in a Drunk History style web series for the new student-run news site where seniors got drunk and talked about their final projects. I declined, worried it would impact future job prospects. But if I had participated, there is no doubt I would’ve resembled the Drunk History season 5 episode “Heroines.” In one of the segments, comedian and self-proclaimed Jew-Jo (“My father’s Jewish, but my mama’s Jehovah’s witness”) Tiffany Haddish tells the story of Rose Valland, a French assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume, who, during World War II, unbeknownst to the art-looting Nazis, spoke German and memorized all the hiding locations of stolen masterpieces “cause [Hitler] mad he didn’t get into university.”

In December 1944, when The Monuments Men (“and women”) arrive to retrieve the artwork, Valland provides them with vital information and “[saves] over 60,000 pieces of culture!” She also snitches on [Hitler’s] main man Herman Göring hoarding 200 million dollars worth of art. “He’s so ratchet!” Haddish says, telling it like it is. She even throws in a little revisionist history: “Hitler killed himself, they say. I think he hanging out with Tupac.”

Key & Peele (Comedy Central)
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch comedy series has been off-air for almost five years now, but the show is still a beloved modern classic, especially “Awesome Hitler Story.” In this Key & Peele sketch, Modern Family’s Ty Burrell reprises his Season 1 role as SS Colonel Hans Mueller. When three stray U.S. soldiers are ambushed by Nazis in an abandoned hotel, the only unscathed soldier (Key) plays dead while Commander Mueller, who’s meant to be securing the hotel, gets distracted telling a dutiful SS solider (Peele) an awesome story about running into Hitler at the market (“It was the weekend, and the little hairs on the side of his mustache were starting to grow”).

Key, hungry and irritated by sunlight, wiggles around and sneaks a bite of his chocolate ration. Peele sees everything and tries warning Commander Mueller. “Do you speak during the cinema? The story has a build!” Too ignorant and irritated by his soldier’s insubordination, Commander Mueller shoots Peele and continues telling the other SS the best part of story. “As Hitler was taking his leave of me he said, ‘Well there’s no point in getting bread if you’re not going to get’ and at the same time Hitler said cheese, I said cheese, and Hitler and I both said, ‘Jinx!’” Ordinary men, indeed.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW)
It’s been a little over a year since the series finale of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a musical comedy created by and starring Rachel Bloom as ivy league-educated lawyer and hopeless romantic Rebecca Bunch. Two of the shows main themes are mental illness and Jewish identity, and both are explored in the song “Remember That We Suffered,” co-written by the late Adam Schlesinger. In the episode, Rebecca returns home to Scarsdale, New York to attend her cousin’s bar mitzvah and tries explaining to her non-Jewish boyfriend Josh that “people like us [i.e. Jews] only know how to be miserable” while he joins Rabbi Shari (Patti LuPone) and Rebecca’s mom, Naomi (Tovah Feldshuh) singing to the tune of “Hava Nagila.”

In the song, the guests remind themselves of how much the Jewish people have suffered, mentioning iconic Jewish cultural figures like Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg, music groups the Beastie Boys and Haim, and the one and only Adolf Hitler. The mention of these first four individuals isn’t just meant to be a marker of Jewish success and influence in the entertainment industry, and the last isn’t included just for shock. These cultural references serve as an aide to exploring the concept of inherited trauma — epigenetics — and Holocaust memory contained in the lyrics. The messages relayed in “Remember That We Suffered” are of awe and respect for the past, yes, but also one of autonomy and resilience, which is why Rabbi Shari leaves a glum Rebecca with, “Our people are not responsible for your life. You are.”

Sex, death, race, religion — seemingly nothing’s off-limits to comedians. Only one subject seems taboo, even for the likes of Louis C.K. and Chris Rock: the Holocaust.

Ferne Pearlstein, director of the documentary “The Last Laugh,” found this out the hard way when she had difficulty raising money for her movie. “People told me I had a great idea and I should let them know when [other] people invested,” she says of her film, which premieres March 3 and focuses on humor in and out of the Nazi concentration camps.

It took her 18 years, but she raised the money for her modestly budgeted independent film, for which she corralled a Who’s Who of comics — Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Gilbert Gottfried and Larry Charles among them — to speak about the unspeakable.

Mel Brooks, the man who wrote “The Producers” and its show-stopping song “Springtime for Hitler,” explained where he draws the line: He mocks the Nazis, but considers the Holocaust itself off-limits.

Joan Rivers had no such boundaries: During 2013’s “Fashion Police” Oscars wrap-up, she focused on Heidi Klum, quipping, “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into ovens.”

Contemporary jokes about Hitler and his henchmen are put into perspective by the film’s most interesting revelation: Humor, however dark, helped some endure the misery of the camps.

“I went to a survivor who was the emcee of a comedy show at Auschwitz,” says Pearlstein, whose family came to America ahead of World War II. “These shows took place behind the barracks and prisoners told jokes that could have cost them their lives.” Pearlstein recalls the daughter of a survivor whose father told her, “If you were funny before the camps, you were funny in the camps.”

One of those she interviewed was Robert Clary, who played the French POW Corporal Louis LeBeau on the ’60s TV show “Hogan’s Heroes.” A survivor of Buchenwald himself, Clary (born Robert Max Widerman) was criticized for appearing in a sitcom about a German prisoner of war camp (the “concentration” part went unmentioned).

Clary, who recently turned 90, told Pearlstein that entertaining under duress kept him alive. “He lost his entire family [to the Nazis] and would not have survived if he couldn’t sing,” Pearlstein says about the actor, who kept his captors at Buchenwald amused. “He was spunky and funny, and being able to make people laugh . . . saved his life.”

Has he posted some things he should have thought about more? Yes. But why are we not showing him how to make it different?

If everyone would please take a deep breath. I am going to post my observations and it will probably alienate everyone. These are just my humble opinions. The use of the word "you" in this post is the editorial you, not any specific you.

So much of what is taking place on this thread, while interesting and probably productive in its own way, is not applicable to developing the preferable tone that we want for WP.

In the beginning, so many threads were about Fnord. Some of us, including myself, tried to remind people that were Fnord to be banned or disappeared, the group would have to find someone or something else to argue about.

This is in fact, what happened. It went from zealous fnord bashing to zealous sly supporting. And this included criticism of anyone who saw it differently. Does anyone else see the pattern here?

Those of you engaged in the emotional repartee, do you really think that others could express their own opinion, nuance, consideration in light of your posts?

As in most of life, especially aspie life, there are opinions and mind sets that are different from yours. How many people can you think of who contribute regularly and productively to the fora and are NOT participating here. I don't know why, but it could be they don't want to be jumped on for having a different opinion or experience.

I observe that funeral has not had his concerns heard. I respect that. Regardless of how clear it may be to others, he needs to have his concerns heard and addressed and not just be blown off. Countless people are running to protect one member and ignoring the concerns of another. (and we are protecting the white member and dismissing the nonwhite member????? Just an observation) Everyone has said they want the rules to be understood and respected by all. This means the people you disagree with also. All this talk about respecting others and their points of view just goes out the window when we get upset about something.

The problem is that no one can understand another's point of view entirely. That is why we have to listen carefully and think hard about what someone is saying.

I also see some emotional dumping on Alex. I understand why. In many ways, he has failed this community he started, but no longer tends to. That said, he is also an aspie. As someone else pointed out, he is now living in a community where the discussions on many topics are liberal and understood. Has he posted some things he should have thought about more? Yes. But why are we not showing him how to make it different?

Here is where people are really going to get upset. I don't know what actions Alex took against Sly and the actions may have been entirely wrong...but...Alex is correct in the way we white people use language, (he posted why,) thinking it is not a tribal problem (thank you, Pepe), when it is institutionalized. Institutionalized means, by definition, that we can't see it. We on WP don't need to understand why sly's post was extremely offensive, if we don't understand the new levels of understanding that are going on in America regarding race. The post was offensive to black people in America and in an ideal world, someone would explain to him why it was offensive.

And while Alex may have "ruined" the discussion here, what his actions (unintentionally) did was expose once again, the problems we as autists have relating to each other.

That said, Amity and Tem are correct that we need to move forward. Some "wrongs" will not be righted at this point. But we still need to set them aside and try to put in place something that will be of assistance.

Alex, you have had several suggestions made toward improving the site and I suggest that you acknowledge them and implement them.

Everyone else, please stop the histrionics. Going on the warpath about issues does not help if we are working on having a community. Having a community means you don't always get what you want.

It means, for all of us, accepting and loving each of us as the individual we are. No one is perfect. People make mistakes. I personally make a lot of mistakes. I really do love every person in this thread and I appreciate so much of what each of you has to offer. Even when you disagree with me.

Much as I will concede that I disagree with FXE on many things, I don't think we need to make that into a racial issue. Now that it's been mentioned, I faintly remember reading that he's some manner of NA, but that's not exactly at the forefront of my mind when reading his posts.

There’s too much “either you’re with us absolutely, or you’re not with us at all,” in society these days.

Native American.

Native American.