Copyright by Jodi Heather Egerton 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Jodi Heather Egerton Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Kush mir in tokhes!”: Humor and Hollywood in Holocaust Films of the 1990s Committee: _________________________ Mia Carter, Co-Supervisor _________________________ Ann Cvetkovich, Co-Supervisor _________________________ Pascale Bos _________________________ John Ruszkiewicz _________________________ Phillip Barrish “Kush mir in tokhes!”: Humor and Hollywood in Holocaust Films of the 1990s by Jodi Heather Egerton, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2006 Dedication For Grandma Gertie and Grandma Gert, for filling me with our stories. For Owen, my beloved storyteller. For Arden, the next storyteller. Acknowledgements Thank you to Ann Cvetkovich and Mia Carter, for your unending support and insight, to Sabrina Barton and Phil Barrish, for guiding me especially in the early stages of the project, to Pascale Bos, for the scoop, and to John Ruszkiewicz, for helping me to discover who I am as a teacher and a scholar. Thank you to my early academic mentors, Abbe Blum, Nat Anderson, Alan Kuharski and Tom Blackburn, and my early academic colleagues Rachel Henighan, Megin Charner, and Liza Ewen, my Swarthmore community who continue to inspire me. Thank you to Joyce Montalbano, my second and fifth grade teacher, who honored the spark she saw in me and showed me the excitement of an intellectual challenge. Thank you to Eliana Schonberg and Ashley Shannon, because I can’t imagine any of this without you. Thank you to my Defense Peanut Gallery—Lisa Avery, Allison Perlman, Carrie Contey, Melanie Haupt, Eliana and Owen—for surrounding me with your love and support. And thank you to Jamie Duke and Karen Brown, for loving on my little girl as I defended. Thank you to my dissertation group—Alyssa Harad, Chris Strickling, Casey McKittrick, Lisa Avery, Lee Rumbarger Kris Hogan, Jennifer Williams, Lynn Makau, and Alison Perry—thank you for reading and thank you for sharing. Thank you to my comedy friends, for the laughter, the play, the joy. And thank you to Les McGehee, for the many hours of rich discussions about this project. v Thank you to the women of AustinMama.com, because knowing that over 700 mamas are cheering you on is an amazing, empowering, astonishing thing. And thank you to Kim Lane for nourishing it all. Thank you to Marcela, Jody, and Melanie, for the mamalove. Thank you to Dr. Carrie, for knowing me so well so soon—I can’t wait for what comes next. And thank you to Lanell, for holding the space. Thank you to Fay Wigams, for always knowing where I am. Thank you to my fabulous extended family, always ready with their love and support, especially Maddy, Ed, Scott, Gareth, Karen, Simon, Trevor, Gwyn, Annwen and Allen. Thank you to Fetus Stewart for holding out just a few extra days so your mum’s doula could finish her dissertation. Thank you to Jenna, for your love, and for following your dreams. Thank you to Brett, for going just slow enough that I could get this degree before you, which is important because I’m the big sister and I’m supposed to do things first. Thank you to John and Judith, for letting me join the ranks of the Dr. J. Egertons, and for being the best in-laws I can imagine (although Owen says his are tough to beat). Thank you to Mom and Dad, my biggest cheerleaders, always there with extra love, extra encouragement, extra support, and extra ice cream. Thank you to Owen, for all of it. More than you know. So much of you is in this project, more than just “crush.” Thank you to Arden. Thank you, sweet girl. Wow. vi “Kush mir in tokhes!”: Humor and Hollywood in Holocaust Films of the 1990s Publication No. _____________ Jodi Heather Egerton, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Co-Supervisors: Mia Carter and Ann Cvetkovich This project examines the rhetorical strategies at play in four films which intertwine humor in a Holocaust narrative. I argue that humor can be a creative and powerful tool that speaks when straightforward language is impossible. I also consider critically the potential for humor to be offensive or belittling to a tragedy whose ramifications are far from past. Humor subverts expectations. Audience members expecting a Holocaust film prepare themselves to cry, shriek, or groan. Humor, then, functions as a disjuncture, a break from the comfort of “knowing” what to expect from a “Holocaust film.” I explore the ways that humor can draw the Holocaust out of the realm of cliché, to confront it from new and uncomfortable angles, to render its horrors vital once again. Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar models the dangers of creating a fictional, comedic Holocaust film based on the Hollywood epic style seen in films like Schindler's vii List. Kassovitz’s film rewrites Jurek Becker’s darkly comic novel, turning Robin Williams’s Jakob into a clownish hero-figure who keeps the ghetto alive with hope. The comic depictions in Life Is Beautiful have been received by some scholars as an affront to historical, ethical, and aesthetic sensibilities. I argue that the first half of the film effectively uses comedy to expose the absurdity of fascism. In the concentration camp scenes, however, Life is Beautiful embraces the Schindler’s List paradigms of the Hollywood epic, which undoes the effective and irreverent humor of the early scenes. My final two chapters analyze Genghis Cohn and Mendel, films created outside of Hollywood which flout the many Hollywood conventions I’ve explored in the previous two chapters. While Jakob the Liar and Life is Beautiful are set within the sites of atrocity themselves and use humor as a method of survival or sustained hope, Genghis Cohn and Mendel move beyond the Holocaust to explore the aftermath and the recovery in the decades that follow. Genghis Cohn and Mendel use humor to access and create memory, and to develop a history—personal and collective—of the Holocaust and its victims after the fact. viii Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………1 Schindler, Laughing: Jakob the Liar, Robin Williams, and the Hollywood Hero………………………35 A Thousand Points: Humor, Clowning, and the Game in Life is Beautiful………………………........61 The Ghost and The Puppet: Genghis Cohn and the Transformative Power of Humor and Memory……….104 “Did you hear about Moishe?”: The Joke and the Expression and Construction of Memory in Alexander Røsler’s Mendel………………………………………….140 Springtime for Hitler: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………179 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….190 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………202 ix Introduction 1 Film reviewer David Denby penned a quick 300 word pan of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful for the November 16, 1998 issue of The New Yorker. “I love this happy, noisy, virile clown,” he wrote, “and I wish that I could say that his much honored film Life is Beautiful was anything but a mistake.”2 Denby’s review sounds disappointed, but not impassioned, and is included almost as an afterthought, tacked onto the end of a column in which he devotes four times the amount of space each to reviews of Elizabeth and the Denzel Washington-Bruce Willis terrorist action adventure The Siege. Three months later, in the March 15, 1999 New Yorker, Denby returns to Life is Beautiful, this time with a full-length column and with a full-page drawing by Art Spiegelman depicting an emaciated man in concentration camp stripes and a yellow star sitting in a cell and clutching an Oscar statuette, a look of stunned horror on his face. This 1 review begins almost apologetically, attempting to explain both his short review of the film in the fall, and his need to return to it months later. When I saw it last October the laughter died in my throat; I came out of the theatre feeling ash-gray, as if my soul had been mugged. I wrote out a full review for this magazine, but, with so many other movies opening, I decided to cut my pan to a mere three hundred words. At that length, the review raised more questions than it answered, and failed to engage the obvious enthusiasm that many people felt for the picture. Life is Beautiful has won awards all over the world; it has been nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, and has now earned more at the box-office than any foreign-language movie ever shown in America. The reviews in this country were predominantly but by no means universally favorable, and I run into naysayers here and there. But I also keep hearing about people who think the movie is “wonderful.” The picture appears to fill, for its many admirers, some sort of need. It’s time to look at Life is Beautiful again.3 Denby then offers a detailed analysis of the film, concluding with the condemning remark that, “Life is Beautiful is a benign form of Holocaust denial. The audience comes away feeling relieved and happy and rewards Benigni for allowing it, at last, to escape.” As Denby notes, he was not alone in both his reaction to the film and his surprise at the large-scale popular embracement of it. Richard Alleva writes in Commonweal that the film “…muffles horror, even aestheticizes it…it gives the audience permission to laugh and sob and applaud and, quite possibly, breathe a sigh of relief.”4 John Simon condemns the lack of realistic portrayals of the Holocaust, arguing that the film is “totally 2 unbelievable and downright stupid.”5 Writing for Time, Richard Schickel calls Life is Beautiful “[a] farce [that] trivializes the horror of the Holocaust.”6 I open this project with the admission that I was one of those who thought the film was “wonderful.” My long, somewhat tumultuous relationship with Life is Beautiful begins on Christmas night, a time perhaps ordinary or even stereotypical for the opening of many literary works but unusual for a dissertation about the Holocaust written by a Jewish woman.