Some things simply aren't funny. At least they're not funny to me.
That's what I heard myself saying the other day. A student had asked me what I thought of Mel Brooks' hit musical, The Producers. (Last November, I saw Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick do the shtick that helped earn the musical a record-setting twelve Tony Awards, including Best Musical.) Brooks' music is serviceable but lightweight. The choreography is impressive, but I've seen better on Broadway. The acting is top-flight, even though Lane should have taken his doctor's advice and given his vocal cords a rest.
But I didn't like The Producers. More to the point, I didn't like the concept around which the musical was built: to rewrite the history of 1930s Germany and turn Adolf Hitler into a victorious, high-stepping singing clown. "Springtime for Hitler and Germany," an impossibly handsome blond SS soldier croons, extolling the virtues of all those "hotsy-totsy Nazis" goose-stepping their way into theatrical and revisionist history. The musical-within-a-musical is supposed to fail; after all, according to one lyric, "half the audience was Jews." But it succeeds despite its tastelessness. It's Brooks at his most irreverent and unapologetic.
Obviously, my failure to "appreciate" The Producers puts me squarely in the minority. Tickets are next to impossible to get. Audiences are splitting their sides. But I'm sorry. I fail to see how Nazi Germany can ever be funny.
Here at Dartmouth, we've experienced first-hand just how humorless Hitler is. Whoever planted that swastika on a student's door a few days back may have meant it in jest. After all, it's only a stupid sign. After all, no one here worships Hitler (who, in Brooks' musical, sings, "Heil myself").
Then I think of Howard, a friend of mine who is about 15 years older than I. He was delighted to hear that Dartmouth had hired me, a member of two minority groups Hitler despised. When Howard was looking at colleges in the late 1950s, he deliberately overlooked Dartmouth. Jews were verboten back then, he said. And whether that was never explicitly stated, implicitly he felt that to be so.
Now, at the beginning of a new century, we have audiences in New York lining up to be entertained by a sanitized real-life human butcher. Here in 2002, we have a member of tomorrow's elite busily practicing the art of intimidation and manipulation, maybe for a laugh.
It's not funny. It never was. And it never will be.
The student who asked me about The Producers also asked about Cabaret, another musical that treats the rise of the Nazis. Should we laugh when the emcee sings to a gorilla, "If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn't look Jewish at all?" Or should we be horrified that anyone, anywhere would have the audacity to harbor such thoughts in the first place? Should we examine our own bigotries that turn others into sub-humans who exist solely as punchlines to our jokes and pranks?
Cabaret indicts us; The Producers excuses us. And for this, I cannot excuse Mel Brooks.
Yet I can imagine a future Mel Brooks bringing Osama bin Laden to the Great White Way. I can see the big production number: women clad in burkhas doing a can-can, Taliban fighters kissing their Kalishnikovs and the Strong Horse belting out a hymn to himself, while images of the World Trade Center, in a video loop, constantly collapse in the background. "September for Osama and Afghanistan."
That will never be funny. And it never should be.
Meanwhile, one student here feels less safe because another student acts irresponsibly (and continues to act irresponsibly by not coming forward). I think of the victories Howard and I feel. I think of the lessons my student and I derive from thoughtful theater. And I think of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been duped by Mel Brooks.
Humor helps us make sense of the senseless, true enough. But humor should not excuse the inexcusable or inure us to the pain of others, especially pain that we inflict, knowingly or not.
This is why I hope The Producers will sink like a stone. And this is why I hope we all will constantly work at being kind to each other here. Perhaps the student who anonymously sent a message of hatred will anonymously send a note of apology. It won't excuse the inexcusable. But it will acknowledge that some things simply aren't and never will be funny.
