Laughing Away the Pain? Benigni’s Inappropriate Fable, Life Is Beautiful

Laughing about anything to do with the Holocaust does not come easily to me. Though laughter is often present in my classes, for the first ten years I taught my most popular class, “Hitler, The Holocaust, and Genocide,” I don’t recollect ever even telling a joke specific to the Holocaust. For the last ten years I have inclined to tell only the following joke.

An Auschwitz inmate declares to his bunkmates, “I predict that Hitler will die on a Jewish holiday!” Their response was an

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emphatic, “How can you know when he will die? There are lots of Jewish holidays, but he could die on any day.” Triumphantly, the prognosticating inmate declares, “Any day Hitler dies will be a Jewish Holiday!”

My recollection is that the journalist Steve Lipman either told me this joke or I read it in his book, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust (1991).

I had trouble laughing while viewing Life Is Beautiful. For those readers who have not seen the movie, I will spell out the story line. The first half of the film is a romantic love story of Guido, a frenetic Italian waiter who quite incidentally happens to be Jewish, falling in love with an aristocratic woman — played by Benigni’s wife. As befits any fairy tale, the clumsy, hyperactive waiter wins the hand of the woman he calls “Princess” who wants to escape an unwanted marriage to a villainous man. The couple rides off on a horse, leaving shambles behind them — a Benigni specialty — to “live happily ever after.” The second half of the film sees the happy family over five years later with their utterly charming, adored little boy. Enter the Nazis.

As Jews, father and son are taken to a concentration camp where the work seems to be carrying anvils back and forth. Unwilling to separate from her family, Princess insists on being taken on the train with them and is taken to the same camp as an inmate. Miraculously, unlike most real young children who are killed upon entry into the camps, the boy is successfully hidden by his father who tells the child that they are playing a game with three rules: the boy must hide while his father is away, he must not cry for his mother, and he must not ask for more food. Points are granted for good behavior, and the child’s reward will be a toy tank. Through the father’s ingenious, self-sacrificing, and heroic efforts, the child survives even the roundup of all remaining Jewish children in the camp. Right before liberation, after finding a new hiding place for his son, the father is killed — off camera. The Nazis flee and an American tank begins the liberation of the camp. The child comes out of hiding, sees the tank, which stops in front of him, and jubilantly declares, “We won” — in reference to the contest, rather than the war. The American tank driver scoops him up and takes him for a ride. Almost immediately, mother and child are reunited to “live happily ever after” despite the aftermath of war. Such is the story line of the fairy tale.

Though I love to laugh and thoroughly enjoy many comic films, the slapstick humor of Life Is Beautiful moved me to grimace more than laugh. It reminded me of the humor of Jerry Lewis which I generally find to be adolescent and tedious. Though this slapstick was much more predominant in the first half of this movie fable, when set in the context of the camp, it was inappropriate and offensive to me. Consequently, my working title of this editor’s introduction to our special issue on “Humor in the Holocaust?,” was “Why It Pained Me So Much to Watch Benigni’s Fairy Tale Set in Hell.” It pained me to see the Holocaust being trivialized and the Nazis portrayed as easily manipulated so that the hero can use, without consequences, the camp public address system to

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send a message to his wife in the women’s section of the camp. Moments like that felt like the American sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” in which the Nazis appear as buffoons easily tricked, without real life consequences, by the American prisoners of war.

Why could I not simply enjoy Life Is Beautiful as a fluffy Italian fable? Is it because of all the survivors I have known, many of who have told their stories in my classes? Was it because of the anxious tone in my immigrant parents’ voices as they worried at what had happened to our relatives under Nazi domination in Poland and Ukraine, and later wrapped CARE packages for the few who survived? Was it the total lack of humor of the camp survivor whose immigration to America from a displaced persons camp in Germany was sponsored by my parents? (For a year they gave him my sweeper job in the family workshop — only they paid him.) Was it that I don’t like humor at funerals and the Holocaust was like a funeral in which nearly a third of the Jews of the world were cremated?

The analogy of humor at a funeral has particular appeal to me. In my early 20s, I was horrified at the jokes that a relative by marriage told as we rode with a group to the cemetery to my Jewish grandmother’s funeral — his laughter seemed cruel even if the jokes were normally inoffensive. Yet, I noted that in mourning Irish-American friends at wakes — in which there are sometimes more smiles and laughs than tears — the humor expressed often had a strong appeal to me. But it did take a long period of getting used to humor being in anyway associated with death and mourning. I have come to realize that not only is there a place for laughter in the face of death, but that it can help with the processes of remembering and healing. The question is always, In what context and what type of humor? Joking and laughing before me as a grieving grandson in the funeral procession for my grandmother was inappropriate, even if she had been ill, old, and ready for death. Likewise, slapstick humor of the Roberto Benigni variety in front of the grieving family at their loved one’s funeral is out of place, but this is how much of the so-called comedy of Life Is Beautiful appears to me. How dare Benigni get people to laugh amidst the memory of the slaughter of my people? Our slaughter is no laughing matter.

For better and worse, the Holocaust is no longer the sole property of the Jewish people. Not only is it the subject of brilliant, mass market films created by Jewish film makers like Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List, but it is also the metaphor for the problems of survival amidst genocide and all the horrors of the modern world. To modern minds, Hitler and the Nazis represent the epitome of evil (note that the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton was staged on Hitler’s birthday even though one of the two shooters had a Jewish mother) and the Holocaust represents the epitome of survival under extreme situations.

Of course, the Holocaust was never really the sole property of the Jewish people since it is a historical phenomenon open to all to use as part of the bloody fabric of history. Dramas and action adventure films use the Nazis, Nazi persecution of Jews, and sometimes even the camps as a backdrop. The award-winning acceptance of Life Is Beautiful in Israel, Italy, and the United States illustrates that, however ambivalent survivors, their children, Holocaust scholars, and I may be about this transformation, the Shoah is now fair game for comedic film makers. While it may seem to me that Benigni’s opus is too much like the comedy of the Three Stooges in front of the grieving family and the open coffin, that is not how most people felt.

The Holocaust is a hot commodity in Hollywood, especially in anticipation of the Oscar Awards where films on the Shoah do quite well. Benigni’s film was successful in North America even with subtitles — which is no mean feat. Those few of my students who say it, liked the film and found it uplifting as did most people I queried. The heavy criticism of it on the Holocaust Listserve, where I requested papers on the subject, was not typical.

The success of Life Is Beautiful evoked psychohistorical as well as personal reactions. Why is humor amidst the horror of the Holocaust now acceptable in society? Are we tired of crying for the innocent dead of World War II in our age of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo? Is there a generational reason: Do younger viewers have very different psychic reactions than those who are more connected to the experience of World War II? Is laughing part of a healing process? After all, the Western World continues to process the dual shocks of 1945 wrought by the loss of a sense of human goodness and scientific benevolence wrought by the beginning of the nuclear age and the revelations of the Nazi atrocities. These are some of the questions I ask

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and will continue to ask. To help me and the reader understand some of these issues, I sent out a call for papers suggesting a variety of possible themes, not all of which were psychological.

Sander J. Gilman, formerly of Cornell and now of the University of Chicago, also helped my understanding in a talk he gave to the Ramapo College History Club in early May. The Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professor of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology, probed the role of humor in the Holocaust by comparing East German Ernest Becker’s Jacob the Liar (1974) and Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. He seemed to prefer the East German film and is looking forward to the remake of it next year with Robin Williams in the starring role.

Regarding Life Is Beautiful, Gilman pointed out to what extent the film is very much an Italian myth of the Jews being fully integrated into their society and a very Italian Catholic story of the mother and child as the Virgin Mary and the Christ child surviving while Joseph (Guido) sacrifices himself for the good of the family and society. The Holocaust is merely like a stage backdrop. Among many other important points, Gilman raised the issues of anxiety, of humor as a psychic compensation — a coping mechanism — and of the sense of absurdity which led some survivors to recount that upon arrival in the camps all they could do was laugh. He also wondered if humor defused the Shoah.

Some of my colleagues and I thought Sander Gilman’s presentation had flashes of brilliance. The History Club students, who included many from my Holocaust classes, did not like it because it went right over their heads — there were just too many new ideas and too much new material to absorb in 45 minutes. There may be another element at work with the students as well. Instruction about the Holocaust is now required in public education in New Jersey, which is a mixed blessing. My students now bring more prior knowledge to the class, but to many the Shoah no longer seems out of the ordinary. Could the same thing be happening in society? Is that the reason the public is more open to the exploration of other approaches, including comedy?

Appropriate humor has its place in the depiction of the Holocaust, just as Steve Lipman and others have shown that it had its place among survivors and even in the camps. In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin used humor as a weapon to mock Hitler; though, as Gilman pointed out, had the great comedian realized just how terrible the treatment of Jews was, he might not have made the film. Laughter can be a powerful weapon used for good or bad. The people in Auschwitz were so terrorized, starved, and beaten down that the scope for humor was certainly much less than in normal society. Yet even there, as Lipman notes, Viktor Frankl — the Austrian psychiatrist — advised prisoners to think of a humorous anecdote every day. It is good advice for our lives as well.

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