Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Heil Humor

Comedy expresses "a stubborn refusal
to give tragedy…the final say.” (1)

By Diane Petryk-Bloom

The morning after Halloween every television network except Al Jazeera had a news crew either staked out on my stoop or calling the house.

By noon, they had all congregated outside my son’s high school, Leon M. Goldstein in Sheepshead Bay.

The news, that would be played on top of John Kerry’s gaff about poor study habits being the fast track to Iraq, was my son’s Halloween costume of the previous day.

Months earlier, in much the same way Charlie Chaplin noticed in 1937 that, with his little mustache, he could play Hitler, my son, Walter Petryk, 16, looked as his mustache and decided, with a little trimming, he could play both.

In the weeks before Halloween, he assiduously planned for the dual role.
Why? Creating a nifty costume has been a competitive sport for us since Walter’s first Halloweens in western North Carolina, near the Pisgah National Forest, in a county appropriately named Transylvania. Bearing the name that was also that of Dracula’s stomping grounds gave the county impetus to do Halloween in grand style and so it did. It’s a city-wide festival in Brevard, the county seat, including a downtown parade and costume competition for the kids and families.

At age 3, Walter won a ribbon in the “TV or storybook character” category for his Davy Crockett outfit and the next year took a prize for his Zorro. The year a little combat soldier edged out his Mr. Spock was seriously upsetting – to us both. I had almost had to go to outer space to find those ears!

His 5th grade Sherlock Holmes developed as serendipitously as the others. Costumes always suggested themselves by what we had on hand or stumbled upon. Then we sought out the iconic elements. It was the fringed shirt my mother made out of a burlap bag that my brother wore in 1955, billowing out of a trunk, that suggested a new age Davy. It set us off on a hunt for the coonskin cap. Zorro’s hat appeared in a garage sale and then we looked for a black cape, black mask and plastic sword. The “Don Diego” shirt from a western wear store made it special.

Likewise, the Sherlock Holmesian deerstalker cap we found at a thrift shop set us off on a hunt for the characteristic drop-step pipe. We had a seamstress make the cape out of an old houndstooth-pattern wrap skirt I happened to have.

Even that off-the-rack Spiderman the next year needed web-shooters, red gloves and matching shoes with web lines carefully applied.

In this respect, “Hitler” was no different. Once you get three iconic elements, you’re recognizable. With Hitler, it’s obviously the toothbrush mustache, swastika armband and an Iron Cross medal. Believe it or not, you only need to Google “swastika arm band” and you find this store in Wisconsin…. Add jodpurs, belt and boots. I spent the Saturday before Halloween mixing fabric dye and testing swatches preparing to turn an old beige coat into what we thought approximated Hitler’s mustard-colored blazer, but it really wasn’t essential to the costume.

Of course we knew it was a leap from fictional heroes to world-class, villain out of history. When my son announced his intention, my first response was, flat-out, “no.”

My husband said “Oi.”

We knew it was possible someone would jump to the mistaken conclusion that the costume was worn out of adoration rather than mock-the-villian intent, but we decided to allow Walter his artistic freedom. As my son explained to the news media at the time, he was influenced by Mel Brooks not Mein Kampf.

On Halloween he traveled to school in bowler hat, black coat and carried a cane, as Charlie Chaplin. The Hitler costume was never intended for the world at large. It was for his friends within the somewhat cloistered environment of his school. When he got there, he pealed off Chaplin and unveiled Hitler. His friends were waiting for him, for they knew what he had planned. They all thought it turned out great and a female friend was so delighted, he said, she hugged him. A Jewish girl.

At the school he would have been seen by a few hundred students at most and caused little stir, not worldwide headlines, probably, if Marilyn Horan, his English teacher 2nd hour, had not seen fit to have him removed from her class.

It is my understanding the school may take steps if they have palpable evidence someone’s attire might cause a disturbance. But the first hour of the day had passed with no sign of disturbance. Horan, apparently, acted out of personal prejudice rather than any such concern. Dean Paul Puglia told Walter that Horan said the costume made her sick to her stomach. This is not evidence of pending melee in the halls.

Freedom of expression as we know it in America, gives us a right to express ourselves in ways that may revolt others. It wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t. What’s revolting to someone one day – gays out of the closet, say – can become socially acceptable in short order. Or, foreign concepts, like the desirability of cooking dogs or female genital mutilation, will remain taboo. Society decides – but only after it hears the debate.

Some might say we heard more than enough of Hitler by 1945. But when talk is taboo, myth tends to overtake reality. In Germany, the post-war perception grew that Hitler was a god-like genius. About ten years ago a Turkish immigrant named Serdar Somuncu burst that myth by performing “Hitler.” Some thought he was inconceivably offensive and immoral. But it is pretty well-established now that his performances have torn apart the erroneous image of Hitler that had made him up to be something he wasn’t.

Somuncu will read from Mein Kampf, which is still banned in Germany, and some of the passages, he says, “are so weird, so stupid, that simply reading them straight will burst audiences into prolonged laughter.

“Here was a book that was supposed to be so evil, so seductive, yet it was ridiculous.”
By showing up the banality of Hitler and the absurdity of his writing style, Somuncu put post-war healing in fast forward for Germany and not only that. He has dialogued with those young Germans who have far-right, neo-Nazi tendencies. Some of them have learned to laugh at themselves. One told him to call his next show “Hitler Kebab” and he did.

Here, The New York Post reported on our student Hitler getting “das boot” on its front page the next morning and then everybody wanted a piece of the story.

It became a textbook case of American pack journalism. Not only ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and Channel 11, but Inside Edition and The O’Reilly Factor followed the Post. The Associated Press sent the story around the world and it appeared from the LA Times to the Jerusalem Post. The neighborhood newspapers jumped on the bandwagon as well.

Not even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, could have done a better job than the herd mentality here-- the very point I tried to make on Bill O’Reilly’s program. Was there really anything important to report in this incident, or was it a case of media wallowing in its own reflection? Hitler didn’t kill people first hand – he whipped up mass emotion so other people killed people for him.

Mass emotion was being whipped up here to protest something that didn’t need to be protested – a kid in a Halloween costume. Offensive to some, maybe. A local story, maybe. But how do you balance one 16-year-old in a Hitler costume on Halloween, with Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad stating his very real desire to lob a nuke into Tel Aviv? Or with Al Qaeda’s rising star Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir’s expressing thirst for much more American blood? In the costume one may find a sorrowful echo of a past holocaust; the others blare out determination to surpass it with a ghastliness yet unseen.

Walter’s object was to create a good costume and lampoon that ridiculous, perverted little man.

The Post photographer asked Walter to pose and act out expressions. They were theatrical, in no way reflecting his own personality or beliefs. Of course, the Post published the most inflammatory looking expression on their front page. Aren’t people sophisticated enough to know that?

They also had to search hard for the “angry” students and then wrote headlines that led the uncritical reader to believe there was a whole school up in arms. No reporter tried to quantify the “anger” or objectors. How many students were angry versus how many students though it was funny or just had no problem with it? My guess is it was 98 percent of the student body approved or had no problem with the costume and maybe 2 percent objected. I may be wrong, but if so, show me some numbers.

Then remember, our heritage is to fight for a person’s right of expression even if we deplore what they say. In this case, wear. For that reason, Joel Levy of the New York office of the Anti-Defamation League, was 180 degrees wrong when he said Walter’s costume was “anti the values of Western democracy” (as he was quoted in the Courier newspapers). It is precisely the values of Western democracy that allow speech and demonstration, and art, whatever anybody thinks about their offensive or erroneous nature.

Phillipa Strum explains these values in her brilliant book, When the Nazis Came to Skokie. You would think Levy would have read that one.

As this goes to press, Bangladesh journalist Salah Choudhury is on trial for his life. His “crime” is for suggesting that Jews and Christians might not be “pigs” and “monkeys” after all. So when TV reporter Ellen Marks asked me how I felt, after passerby Michael Loweth angrily chided my son for his choice of costume, I said I was delighted. I was delighted that the man could have his say, and my son could stand there and have his, without either of them coming to harm. That’s the wisdom of the West.

Of course Hitler’s image still evokes strong emotion. It should. But it’s going to be inescapable – maybe forever. On November 18 my son and I went to a performance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan. The Sky Maul sketch involved a catalog of imaginary products. The Hitler nightlight-that-turns-into-a-werewolf for children’s rooms was one of them.

Being mocked, historians write, is one thing Hitler feared most. He had a horror of being laughed at and viciously punished those who did. Between 1933 and 1945, five thousand death sentences were handed down by his “People’s Court” for treason, a large number of them for anti-Nazi humor, according to scholar John Morreall.

Maybe that’s why the 1960s sit-com Hogan’s Heroes, set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, was acceptable, and why we laughed at it. Because they made the bumbling Colonel Klink (portrayed by Jewish actor Werner Klemperer) and the goofy Sergeant Schultz into buffoons. This fiction does not take away from the horrors that took place. But it puts the enemy in their place. It tells them we know they’re bumblers and we defeated them and we can do it again.

Sixty-six years ago fans mobbed Charlie Chaplin at the premier of The Great Dictator in Manhattan, a movie he had to fight to get made. It was a box office smash. “I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race,” he said.

May Hitler ever remain an icon of evil against which we can direct humorous pot shots. If he is surpassed, it may be that western civilization’s vigilance was far too distracted by trivialities.
On the Monday after Halloween, the phone rang at our house – again. This time it wasn’t another network news team or talk show recruiter. The voice was far more sinister.
Throaty and threatening, the caller elongated his words: “H e l l o…. this is Dr. Josef Mengele…”
I paused.

“Oh, Hi Bruce,” I said after a second, recognizing even the disguised voice of my husband’s childhood friend, Bruce Volat, now of Silver Springs, MD. Bruce used to beat up on my husband when they were little boys growing up on a middle class block in Buffalo, New York. A little later, Bruce became his mensch.

“I saw you on TV,” he said, referring to my appearance on the O’Reilly Factor with Walter. “Some people can’t take a joke.”

What, I wondered later, separates Bruce, who would playfully imitate Auschwitz’ Angel of Death – the evil Dr. Mengele who carried out hideous experiments on concentration camp prisoners -- and those who yelled insults, spouted epithets, and uttered denunciations at a kid in a Halloween costume? What separates Walter’s classmates, who laughed and enjoyed the artistry of the costume, the vast majority of them, and the Goldstein’s PTA president, Penny Berman, who vowed to lead a march to denounce him? (It was later changed to a march of “respect and tolerance” when cooler heads prevailed).

What separates them isn’t having personally experienced a tragedy linked to the Nazis or not. My husband’s family lost a hundred members or more in the Holocaust. Bruce’s relatives did, too. One of our relatives lost all her family and survived only because she was hidden in a Catholic home.

It isn’t knowledge of history, either. These kids studied World War II in 10th grade. Walter and I made a trip to England the following summer and toured Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms in London and he absorbed everything about Britain during the Blitz. But that also included the British sense of humor.

In one of my favorite movies of all time – Pimpernel Smith – which was made during World War II – a Nazi General, a Reichminister, is depicted pooring over a book. “Know your enemy,” he tells an underling. “I am told the English have a secret weapon, their sense of humor, and I am determined to find out all about it.” He then reads passages from P.G. Wodehouse, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and the humor Magazine Punch and declares them all “painful rubbish.”

“They have no sense of humor,” he says. He looks forward to the day he is put in charge of German-occupied London, when, he says, “he will see to it there is no talk of sense of humor.”

Now that’s funny. But the Reichminister would never get it. There is, writes Josh Schonwald in his essay on Somuncu, a tradition for Germans to disdain humor in response to their history.

For the British, the ancient Greek and Shakespearian humor legacy provides a perspective on the real world. No subject was off-limits, even the gods.

“In the Anglo tradition, later embraced by the Americans,” Schonwald writes, “comedy, even in the 1700s, was irreverent, zany, a source of anxiety relief.” German humor tended to ridicule the disturber of social order, not embrace the agitator seeking relief.

Even in Dachau, a play satirizing the Nazis was performed for six weeks in 1943, with SS Officers as front row guests. A camp survivor, wrote Morreall, said many prisoners who laughed with a full heart never lived to see freedom again. But the actors gave them strength to endure what they had to endure while they lived.

In short, three things separate those who can laugh at a Hitler costume and those who are insulted, offended, and say they are hurt:

The ability to separate fiction and reality, the ability to maintain sense of proportion; and an understanding of western values of free speech and artistic expression.

Surprisingly, American citizens often can’t separate their TV characters from reality. They ask actors who play doctors to diagnose their medical ills. Klemperer (Col. Klink) was once dis-invited to lead a parade in California after locals objected to a “Nazi” taking part. Realty was, his family had to flee the Nazis.

Likewise, a Halloween costume is not a reality. It espouses no views. If it did, we wouldn’t allow those staples of the holiday, witches and devils, to trick or treat at our doorsteps. Likewise, monsters with rats crawling out of their bloody eyesockets or grim reapers. But these are fictional , you say? Well check your Bible or Torah or Koran. Do they not indicate the Devil or Satan is real? Those who believe such teachings, they must be offended.

At a Tennessee High School a couple years ago, a student who came dressed as Jesus was ejected while the Hitler and Satan-attired were virtually ignored. Jesus was “blasphemy,” but Hitler was just another costume there. Are we going to start drawing up lists of banned costumes? If Hitler is out, what about Osama Bin Laden? There was at least one of him in my neighborhood this year. The little suicide bomber outfits okay? While we’re at it, I really don’t approve of Marie Antoinette… Whoa.

Clowns and Princesses not withstanding, what is the primary adjective for Halloween? It’s “scary” isn’t it? Nothing about dressing as a witch or devil or any other goblin is a testament to adoration of that goblin, is it? A child does not sign a paper somewhere saying: “I am Susie Jones and I approve of this character.”

Secondly, a good sense of proportion wouldn’t allow a Halloween matter to trump urgent geopolitical issues, where missteps could cost the lives of millions. My husband, Howard Bloom, tried to approach PTA leader Berman, both by email and at the march, about channeling her energies and those of her constituents, toward stopping the holocaust Amadinejad and his compatriots have planned. She preferred jousting with phantoms and thus gave students a lesson in fiddling while Rome burns.

Her respect was absent, her tolerance forced upon her. Worst of all, she showed disdain for one of our most cherished rights -- free speech.

The third thing that separates those who could laugh and those who couldn’t is the belief in -- and understanding of -- free speech. If you waiver on the Hitler costume, I submit that the day someone doesn’t have the right to wear that get-up is the day you won’t be able to go to the church of your choice or not go; the day you won’t be able to read what you want, watch what you want, study what you want, or report on your research if you do. Not unless it’s politically correct. The day my son doesn’t have the right to wear a Hitler costume is the day you take the first steps toward creating a new facist state.

It may be ironic, but his right to dress up as Hitler helps insure there never will be another Hitler – here anyway.

Why shouldn’t people be protected from insult, offense, blasphemy, what-ever speech they don’t like? Because, as people like Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson have said in words similar, “In a free marketplace of ideas, the truth will win out.” That means, if someone speaks for Nazism, the people to whom it is repugnant can also speak. People can choose and will usually opt for justice and good sense, but only if they can hear all the debate.

My flipside of the Voltaire/Jefferson idea is: “In a closed market of ideas, false notions stick forever.” Stop and think of what would happen to science if researchers and thinkers were not allowed to discuss their ideas and theories without fear. Legitimate l science would come to a stop.

So there are those who laugh at a mock Hitler and those who don’t. Each has his right to his or her attitude. But the laughers have the advantage. Here’s why:

First, humor can focus attention on what is wrong. As it did during the dark days of the Holocaust, Morreall points out, humor can create solidarity among those fighting oppression. And it can help the oppressed get through their trials without going insane.

Despite the efforts of rare Islamic comedians like Shazia Mirza, we know Muslims don’t laugh much. They are counting on our short-range thinking, our scruples and our freedoms to defeat us. But we have that secret weapon the Reichminister in Pimpernel Smith couldn’t understand: laughter. Laughter, even in the face of terror and gore. It really bugs them.

The essence of all humor appears to be incongruity. To find something funny is to spot the incongruity, as Morreall explains in his essay “Humor in the Holocaust: Its critical, Cohesive and Coping Functions,” 1997.

“Jokes, for example,” he says, “typically lead our minds along path A, and then at the punch line, send them off onto path B. Our train of thought is derailed, and if we enjoy the mental jolt, we laugh.”

My son’s “Hitler” was very incongruous in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, at a school named after a Jewish educator. And as we saw, not everyone enjoys incongruity.

“Enjoying incongruity rather than reacting with fear, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions, requires a certain playfulness and motional disengagement, Morreall writes.

“To see humor in situations, especially our own problems, we have to adopt a higher, more rational perspective. Humans are the only species that laughs because we are the only animals whose minds can rise above the here and now…”
Walter’s friends at Leon M. Goldstein are very smart kids, indeed.
###

(footnote for opening quote:)
M. Conrad Hyers, “The Dialectic of the Sacred and the Comic,” in M. Conrad Hyers, ed., Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), p. 232.

The Great Muckrakers

Tuesday November 28, 2006

This blog is created in memory of journalism's great and heroic muckrakers:
Ida Tarbell; Lincoln Steffens; Ray Stannard Baker (from my alma mater -- Michigan State University); Nellie Bly, Ida Wells; Upton Sinclair; Charles Edward Russell; Edward R. Murrow; Eric Sevareid; Drew Pearson; Jack Anderson; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; Oriana Fallaci; Greg Palast; Christopher Hitchens, and those yet to make their name and save us from the folly of our peers.