From Charlie Chaplin to Jojo Rabbit: an unlikely history of Nazi comedies

“In time of war, it’s typical, sometimes even useful, to demonize your enemy … Caricatures and jokes, not always in the best of taste, rise to the forefront because it’s our way of relieving aggression.” Those words come from film historian Leonard Maltin, as he gives a bit of cultural context in a recorded introduction to the 1943 Disney short Der Fuehrer’s Face. In the nine-minute cartoon, Donald Duck awakens in Nazi Germany as a good little member of the Third Reich, sieg-heiling in feverish devotion to a sparingly depicted Adolf Hitler. His daily routine goes from austere to nightmarish – from eating a wooden-bread-and-sliced-single-bean sandwich to running himself ragged at a hallucinatory munitions factory – until the “real” Donald wakes up in the US of A, full of tearful gratitude to be a free American.

Related: Jojo Rabbit review – Scarlett Johansson lifts smug Hitler comedy

To a modern audience, the nazified perversion of a character we know and love may scan as shocking, but Disney’s blithe attitude toward anti-fascist satire fits into a longstanding tradition in the pop culture of the States. The Looney Tunes offered a rejoinder to Disney’s short with Daffy the Commando, in which Daffy Duck assumes the role of an Allied soldier and bashes Hitler’s head in with a mallet. Jump forward to the present, and Taika Waititi’s new film Jojo Rabbit is the latest to apply wry levity to second world war-era Germany, following a meek member of the Deutsches Jungvolk and casting the director as the kid’s mental projection of Hitler. Half imaginary friend and half devil on the shoulder, Waititi’s performance offers an altogether undignified take on the genocidal maniac as a broadside against his beliefs.

Waititi is far from the first to do so, however, and far from the best to have done it. His film ultimately assumes a stolid about-face, attempting to seriously reckon with the gravity of widespread loss and the horrors of war. But taking the hot air out of Hitler with pure, militarized goofiness has proven even more affecting, and as quintessentially American as apple pie. Ever since The Three Stooges shot the spoof You Nazty Spy! over four days in late 1939, it’s been open season on the failed artist and architect of genocide. Making a real-life supervillain into someone to be sniggered at instead of feared or scorned helps along the process of national healing that follows the relief of aggression Maltin mentioned. Even before the wounds have healed, it feels good just to laugh.

Charlie Chaplin famously declared in his autobiography that if he had had a fuller notion of the inhumanity playing out in the concentration camps, he’d have never made 1940’s The Great Dictator. He claimed that he “could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis” had he been aware, effectively recanting the humanistic comedy that featured him in dual roles as a Jewish barber in the ghetto and effete military commander “Adenoid Hynkel”. All due respect to one of the greatest cinematic talents to have ever lived, but his sensitivity has been misapplied. The sequences that he worried might trivialize the suffering of those caught up in the Holocaust – the most memorable being a dainty ballet between Adenoid (a word meaning a mass of tissue blocking air passage between the back of the nose and the throat) and a glowing oversized globe he bounces around like a trained seal – only get their laughs at the expense of those in power. There’s nothing wrong with jokes about tragedy, so long as they have got the right butt.

Chaplin’s film concludes by dropping the bit and delivering an earnest monologue about the tantamount importance of goodness and decency. The man was always a sentimentalist at heart, and while that doesn’t necessarily weaken his film, its successors would advance this strain of satire by going all in on irony. Mel Brooks’ The Producers imagined the fictitious musical Springtime for Hitler, a work so supremely offensive that it would surely disgust Broadway and provide the flop the protagonists’ get-rich-quick scheme requires. Of course, the gag turns out to be on them; audiences had just started to warm up to the idea of weaponized bad taste and they’d stumbled into a hit.

The rest of the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s extrapolated this idea and put it into practice on low-rent B-pictures termed “Nazisploitation”. Many angled for sexiness over all else – though there’s still plenty to chuckle at in the likes of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS – and plenty of others took more purposefully comic aim at the absurdity of the de-platformed Nazis. One such trashy delight would be They Saved Hitler’s Brain, a crackerjack 1968 adventure concerning a plot to defrost Hitler’s cryogenically frozen head, which has been hidden deep in the jungles of South America. It’s one of those so-bad-it’s-good movies in on the game, able to poke fun at the harebrained Aryan experimenters from a couple decades’ worth of safe remove. Films closer to our modern moment would evince a nostalgia for this anything-goes era, such as the 2012 release Iron Sky, which envisioned a colony of techno-Nazis establishing a base on the moon.

These films make Hitler out to be a punching bag by playing up his well-known qualities of insecurity, impotent rage, and ineffectuality, though that’s hardly a foolproof strategy. (Take Saturday Night Live’s recurring character Gay Hitler, his sketches predicated on the noxious idea that nothing could be more humiliating than being a homosexual man.) Even so, there’s a catharsis to the act of dissing one of the most evil men to have ever lived, a feeling articulated in characteristically blunt fashion by Jojo Rabbit with a defiant “Fuck off, Hitler!” Others have chosen to go the more indirect route, subjecting him to indignities in the hopes of tarnishing his memory. In either case, silliness has been the modus operandi, a pox on a historical figure desperate to be respected – a matter complicated by the Trump of it all.

Reality has grown so ridiculous as to render that once-lethal antic spirit redundant, leaving deadpan the new recourse. (No political cartoon depicting Donald Trump as a screaming orange infant reflects as poorly on him as his actual conduct.) The most effective Hitler satire in recent memory would have to be Look Who’s Back, a mockumentary giving sober consideration to how today’s society would receive a revived Hitler. He’s not bumbling or foolish in this instance, just a fish-out-of-water getting used to the surf unsettlingly quickly. The film plays his second coming straight, pairing the risen Hitler with a film-maker convinced the guy’s a committed actor, and the rest of the world meets him halfway. The final shots make the disquieting connection between today’s nationalist movements and Hitler’s legacy, ending with his chilling words: “I can work with this.” The magic works here in reverse, finding the plausibility in an implausible scenario instead of teasing the fanciful out from the real; Waititi and Chaplin’s idealism has been replaced with a deep cynicism. With the real-world stakes presently too high for comfort, the only laughs to be had are the bitter ones.

• Jojo Rabbit is out in the US on 18 October and in the UK on 3 January