Wednesday, November 15, 2017

NOTHING FUNNY IN CONCENTRATION CAMP HUMOR


 Larry David’s shtick on a recent Saturday Night Live, “Pick-up lines in Hitler’s concentration camps,” crossed the bounds of human decency in such a way that it is hard to find the words to express my disgust and repulsions.

I have always admired Larry David’s offbeat humor, but his attempt to make a joke about people about to be gassed is beyond disgusting. In fact, I don’t know whether there is a word in the English language to describe the repugnance of what he said.

Some 6 million Jews died and another 11 million people lost their lives Nazi camps. Where is there any humor in this?

Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Czesław Miłosz lived in Warsaw during the war and witnessed the massacre of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Milosz wrote:

“In the spring of 1943, on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw, standing on the balcony, we could hear screaming from the ghetto…. This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It travelled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye.”

There is no humor in people being massacred in camps, schools, churches, Charlottesville, or shopping malls. There is nothing funny, absolutely nothing, in Mr. David’s shameful comedy. (To be continued)


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