(I spelt ‘humor’ Britishly to let you know that this time I am not kidding. I promise.)

Fascist humour included not only sick practical jokes but verbal ones as well. Quoting Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany, chapter I:

The vast majority of political jokes during [the Fascist era] were basically uncritical of the system, playing on the human weaknesses of [anticommunist] leaders rather than on the crimes they were committing. Imperial Marshal Hermann Göring, for instance, was a popular target because of his pompous appearance and his love of glamour and medals. One typical joke ran:

Göring recently added an arrow to the many medals on his chest. It’s there as a directional sign: “To be continued on my back.”

Chapter III:

In official [Fascist] ideology, there was hardly any sin worse than homosexuality. In the male‐dominated militarized social order of the new régime, there was no room for “femininity.” And a number of stock “gay jokes” were adapted to feature Röhm personally. One example played on the German Po, baby talk for “ass,” also the name of a river in Italy:

Did you hear Röhm is taking his next holiday in Italy? He wants to spent a few days enjoying the warmth of the Po.

The quips had not been created for Röhm personally; they had already been pointed at similar figures under other governments in German history. They were only political insofar as they were recycled in order to highlight Röhm’s fatal weakness for his party comrades.

[…]

Long after the end of World War II and the demise of the Third Reich, a generation of Germans kept insisting that they knew nothing of the [Fascists’] crimes. But the jokes popular in the early years when the [anticommunist] régime was still consolidating its power suggest that such claims were untrue, even from the beginning of [1933].

Chapter IV:

Another popular theme was Jewish rapacity and greed, and Der Stürmer’s readership came up with endless variations on it in the jokes they invented:

Pinkus and a Gentile are attacked in the forest, and as the highwaymen are about to frisk them, Pinkus takes out his wallet and says to his fellow victim: “Ah, I just remembered. I owe you 500 schillings.”

Jokes of this sort were in constant circulation and reinforced and confirmed popular anti‐Jewish stereotypes. And though the readership of the Stürmer may have collected and passed them on, anti‐Jewish jokes were also told by apolitical Germans. They were a symptom of the latent anti‐Semitism that had survived beneath the surface of German society and long before [1933 they] had laid the groundwork for the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich.

The line between harmless kidding and defamatory jokes full of resentment was blurry, and not every joke‐teller may have been aware of when he crossed the border from mere bad taste to injuriousness.

Nonetheless, even naïvely repeated clichés helped ostracize the once completely integrated Jewish minority. Once Jews were seen by the public as outsiders or intruders, the authorities could do with them what they wanted. In this sense, no anti‐Jewish joke, however mild, was harmless. Moreover, making light of Jews against the backdrop of their persecution, disappropriation, and forced exile was heartless and cyclical, and it gave a gloss of legitimacy to those acts of injustice.

The difference between [Fascist]‐era jokes about money‐mad Jews and the jokes about tightwad Scotsmen that were popular after the war (many of the latter were adaptations of the former), was that the Scots were not a persecuted minority in Germany, nor was there widespread resentment against them.

Jews were not only moneygrubbers, according to [Fascist German] wits, they were also Communists—another anti‐Semitic cliché. The following joke, recorded by a housewife in Westphalia, was very popular. It was probably invented by a [Fascist] newspaper editor:

Trotsky, Lenin, and Litvinov are walking through a small Russian town, and the children on the street shout, “We know who you are, we know who you are.” Trotsky turns proudly to his companions and says, “You see how famous we are. Even kids recognize us.” Whereupon the children run away, shouting, “You’re Jews, you’re Jews.”

Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, like Trotsky, did have a Jewish background, and that made him a favorite target for anti‐Semitic propagandists; the [Reich’s] press referred to him as “the Jew Finkelstein.” To the [German anticommunists], Litvinov embodied everything that was wrong with the world and was living proof of the intrinsic connection between Bolshevism and Jewishness. [Under Fascism], he was seen not as a human being but as a grotesque two‐dimensional parody of one—an evil cartoon.

There were even jokes that laughed at anti‐Jewish violence, and these were told not just by hardcore [NSDAP] supporters, but also by hordes of willing opportunists and March violets. According to one example, recorded in a variety of sources, the word RADIO stood for “Rein Arischer Darf Itzig Ohrfeigen”—“a pure Aryan is allowed to box Isaac’s ears.”

Fervent [Fascists] by no means had a monopoly on this kind of tasteless cynicism. The violent fantasies of most [German anticommunists] were shared by many “nonpolitical” Germans. The constant stream of anti‐Semitic propaganda likely contributed to this, but ordinary Germans seemed to have come up with the majority of anti‐Jewish jokes on their own—a troubling indication of a fundamental animosity toward Jews and Jewishness.

By no means was humor in [the Third Reich] confined to “whispered jokes” critical of the régime. The majority of jokes about contemporary affairs were entirely harmless and without any political message. But there was also a plethora of jokes colored by [Fascism], although after World War II nobody wanted to remember those. In contrast, judging by the recollections of those who were there, popular humor that was openly critical of the government was relatively rare.

Unsurprisingly, donning ‘Jewface’ (especially for theatric purposes) was phenomenal under Fascism. One example from Edward B. Westermann’s Drunk on Genocide, page 123:

Members of Police Battalion 101 integrated a skit depicting a policeman dressed as a Jewish smuggler during their 1940 Christmas celebration in Łódź, Poland. At the time of the party, the policemen had spent a month guarding the city’s Jewish ghetto, duty that included the shooting of Jews who were involved in smuggling or who came too close to the wire surrounding the ghetto. This picture epitomizes an act of ritual humiliation and the amusement taken by the perpetrators as they celebrated their duties involving the persecution and killing of Polish Jews.

The Chancellor hisself (sometimes misperceived as a humorless individual) joked on occasion:

Now I do not always do things just as the others want them done. I consider what the others probably believe, and then do the opposite on principle. So if Mr. Stalin expected that we would attack in the center, I did not want to attack in the center, not only because Mr. Stalin probably believed I would, but because I didn't care about it any more at all. But I wanted to come to the Volga, to a definite place, to a definite city. It accidentally bears the name of Stalin himself, but do not think that I went after it on that account.

The audience laughed. Whether or not the Chancellor laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, on the other hand, remains a mystery.

Humour became a means of facilitating oppression, yet the reverse is also true: many of Fascism’s victims used humour as a crude coping mechanism. When you are trapped in a prison and death is almost certainly near, there is usually not much that you can do but make light of the situation. Quoting Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, chapter 10:

Dark jokes had a similar function, with sarcasm and gallows humor becoming typical traits of KL veterans. “The discovery of this humor,” David Rousset wrote later, “enabled many of us to survive.”^93^ Humor was a defense mechanism that distanced prisoners—however briefly—from the horror of the KL.

Nothing was off‐limits, neither the food (in Sachsenhausen, a disgusting herring paste was known as “cat shit”), the SS humiliations (in Dachau, a strip shaved across the prisoners’ closely cropped hair was known as a “lice motorway”), nor death itself (in Buchenwald, prisoners joked about the shape of the clouds coming from the crematorium). There were plenty of jokes about fellow prisoners, as well, not least the new arrivals.

Those who expected that they would soon be released were goaded by more experienced prisoners: “The first fifteen years are the hardest. Then a man gets used to it.” In this way, the old hands bolstered their status as hard‐bitten veterans, standing above the newcomers, who still had everything to learn about the camps.^94^

Further reading: Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust

Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945

Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940–1945

It Kept Us Alive: Humor in the Holocaust

Jewish Humor in the Holocaust: Humor As a Survival Strategy

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany