Beyond the Nazi Kickline: Troubled Humor in Mel Brooks’ The Producers

Serena Jampel

Serena Jampel is a junior at Harvard College studying History and Literature with a secondary field in Folklore and Mythology. Her research spans from Jewish American pop culture to 17th century colonial Massachusetts to the entanglements of West African art — united by an interest in how cultural production influences institutional historical narratives and how folk culture can both resist and promulgate fascism, colonialism, and White supremacy. She credits her intellectual vitality to her Jewish upbringing and remains steadfastly committed to the Jewish value of questioning all things. 

Abstract

“Beyond the Nazi Kickline: Troubled Humor in Mel Brooks’ The Producers” seeks to critically evaluate the use of humor in the 1967 film The Producers. This paper argues that, in his intensely ambivalent portrayal of Jewish characters and his treatment of such a dark topic as the genocidal mania of Hitler, producer Mel Brooks destabilizes the audience, muddling the direction of the joke and its implications. In doing so, Brooks ultimately critiques middle-class America — the audience itself — warning against groupthink and the many forms of fascism that extend into the current day. Drawing from scholarship on the tradition of Jewish humor as well as black humor of the 1960s, I analyze the humor of The Producers from a perspective of identity as well as historical context to provide an evaluation of its comedic success, honing in on key moments from the movie as supporting evidence. Following scholar Dan Ben-Amos on Jewish humor, I dismantle the assumption that The Producers is merely an example of Jewish self-deprecation, arguing that the directionality of the joking leaves the classification of the humor far more complicated. Finally, in analyzing contemporary trends of neo-Nazi joking on the internet, I reevaluate whether or not humor, even when rooted in a historically marginalized identity, is a productive lens through which to critique fascism.

Beyond the Nazi Kickline: Troubled Humor in Mel Brooks’ The Producers

Nazis marching in perfect formation become scantily clad chorus girls high-kicking and Sieg Heiling across the stage. The iron cross, a symbol of Nazi might, becomes a nipple cover for a topless woman swaying and singing in the background.¹ Hitler, played by a buzzed out hippie whose name abbreviates to LSD, gyrates suggestively to a spoken word poem about crushing Poland.² All of these scenes play out in Mel Brooks’ 1967 movie The Producers, which satirizes Nazi Germany with spectacle and absurdity. For many Jewish Americans, Brooks’ work is integral to the distinctly American, proudly Jewish culture that first began to flourish with mass Jewish immigration to the United States in the late 19th century. Despite Brooks’ status as a Jewish comedic icon, and the fact that The Producers reads as Jewish, the word “Jew” is never mentioned, nor are there any recognizable Jewish religious symbols or practices. Nonetheless, Bialystock and Bloom are legibly Jewish in their names and mannerisms, as well as their portrayal of Jewish stereotypes. As such, analysis of this movie and its critique of Nazism must contend with the complexities of Jewish identity on display, exploring the power dynamics of joking about historically oppressed people. At face value, Brooks succeeds in the unlikely project of satirizing Nazi spectacle, and The Producers is undoubtedly a hugely entertaining story. Yet with World War II in relatively recent memory, a comedy film about Jews and Nazis collaborating to offend Broadway audiences is necessarily layered with implications.

Revisiting The Producers, which Brooks remade in 2001 and 2005 as a Broadway musical and a film, respectively, is essential and ominous in 2024. With fascism and antisemitism on the rise, the ability to differentiate between the laughter of critique and the laughter of complicity is paramount. It is possible (and probable) to watch The Producers and laugh nearly constantly—it’s no joke that Brooks has a talent for humor. But underlying the comedy of The Producers is a troubled critique of fascism aimed only partially at Nazi Germany. In its intensely ambivalent portrayal of Jewish characters and its treatment of such a dark topic as the genocidal mania of Hitler, Brooks destabilizes the audience, muddling the direction of the joke and the meaning behind our laughter. In doing so, Brooks ultimately critiques middle-class America—the audience itself—warning against groupthink and the many forms of fascism that extend into the current day.

The Producers follows a greasy Broadway show producer, Max Bialystock, and his timid accountant, Leo Bloom, who realize that by overselling investors, they can make more money with a flop than a hit. Bialystock raises money for the show by seducing “little old ladies,” and Bloom doctors the books until the two have piles of cash they fantasize about spending in Rio de Janeiro. They set out to produce the worst show of all time, ultimately choosing “Springtime for Hitler,” a musical they believe will certainly close on opening night. However, their plan goes awry when the audience decides the show is satirical and gives it glowing reviews. With “Springtime for Hitler” a surprise smash hit, Bialystock and Bloom’s scheme is revealed, and both are sent to prison, where they continue running the same scam with a new show called “Prisoners of Love.”³

For 1967, The Producers was bold and perhaps impertinent. Released less than 20 years after the end of World War II, the memory of the Holocaust was still raw in the minds of many. Brooks himself served in the War and was impacted by the sight of emaciated Jewish refugees in Europe.⁴ As such, the global Jewish community was in a precarious place, scattered and reeling from genocide. Still very much rebuilding after the war, Jews in America did not discuss the Holocaust extensively until the late 1960s.⁵ At the same time, Jewish consciousness and humor blossomed from the 1950s to the 1960s with the emergence of Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce and the creation of highly visible Jewish stories like “Fiddler on the Roof” (1965).⁶ The Producers was Brooks’ first film, and it helped solidify him as an icon of Jewish culture who brought Jewish humor into the mainstream in the late 1960s and 70s.⁷ Additionally, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, occurring during the shooting of The Producers, was a moment of clarity and solidification of the Jewish American identity.⁸ As Kirsten Fermaglich wrote in her chapter, “Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967-2007,” the Jewish American identity in the 1960s “skirted the boundaries between insider and outsider. Jews had power, but they also felt themselves, and portrayed themselves, on the margins outside the mainstream.”⁹ It is this tension between the continued victimization of the Jews and their simultaneous foray into the American mainstream that causes trouble for The Producers. The Producers’ treatment of Jews is ambivalent, simultaneously a gross stereotype and an honest depiction of how mainstream America continues to dismiss the threat of Nazism. The “trouble” is that amongst the near-constant joking, the audience cannot always distinguish when the Jewish characters are the target of the joke.

The two main characters’ embodiments of Jewish stereotypes serve to demonstrate the idiocy of the Nazi himself, who is unable to recognize the enemy even when they are collaborating. Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, is a pudgy, sweaty, money obsessed con who seduces old women in order to finance his plays. His catchphrase is literally bellowing, “I want that money!” and he is shot caressing stacks of dollar bills once his and Bloom’s scheme is in motion.¹ᴼ Leo Bloom, played by Gene Wilder, is an anxious, effeminate accountant prone to fits of hysteria. Their lack of sex appeal, their greediness, and their backstage scheming, as well as their last names, are all stereotypically “Jewish.” In other words, the main characters are walking Jewish caricatures. It is a running gag throughout the movie that the film’s one true Nazi, the playwright Franz Liebkind, does not notice that Bialystock and Bloom are his supposed enemy. His utter ignorance and overblown romanticization of Nazi Germany are what makes their collaboration comedic, and it carefully ensures that the Jews retain power over the narrative, flipping the historical script and letting the Jews make a fool of the Nazi. However, the film’s attempt to mock Nazism was not obvious to everyone. Mel Brooks recalled in an interview about the making of The Producers that some Jewish organizations “were outraged at the beginning,” adding, “they didn’t get the joke.”¹¹ Similarly, in the early stages of production, a Universal Studios executive suggested changing the main number to “Springtime for Mussolini”¹² so as not to offend, completely missing the point of the comedy of Jewish producers creating a purposefully Nazi play. In order for this delicate moment of satire to work, the producers have to be Jewish and the play has to be Nazi to both expose the idiocy of Nazism and give its victims the upper hand. If either of these movements does not come across, then the joke becomes either wildly offensive or incoherent.

In threading this needle, the broader satire of The Producers is made immediately less effective when, at the comedic climax of the movie, the audience decides “Springtime for Hitler” itself is a satirical smash hit. After all, the only reason Bialystock and Bloom believed “Springtime for Hitler” would flop in the first place was because they themselves found it offensive and in poor taste. The question of why Brooks included a fictional audience to react to the obviously ridiculous “Springtime for Hitler” is answered by their unified and exaggerated reactions. The audience’s dumbfoundedness and immediate rebuke of the one person who clapped signals a performance of shock or of offense. When one stylishly dressed audience member leaves the theater in a huff, saying, “Talk about bad taste,” Bialystock and Bloom laugh, just two wily Jews making a buck off the sympathetic middle class.¹³ But when LSD takes the stage as Hitler, the audience runs back into the theater with uproarious laughter like artillery fire.¹⁴ As Fermaglich has argued, “Brooks’ portrait, moreover, of the uptight and tasteless middle-class audience uproariously embracing the play ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ presents the American bourgeoisie as insensitive, tasteless, and so amoral that they might be willing to embrace fascism itself if it were presented in a palatable or funny form, in much the same way that the real Hitler had initially seemed to many a harmless comic nobody in Weimar Germany.”¹⁵ The discordance between Bloom and Bialystock’s intentions and the actual outcome, which lies at the very heart of the movie, is what shifts the critique from German Nazism of World War II to the sinister seeds of fascism within American society.

By comparison, for Renata Adler, a New York Times movie critic writing about the film’s premiere, the audience’s laughter was a “terrible and irreversible mistake” that “turned the real audience in the theater off as though a fuse had blown.”¹⁶ However, rather than identifying the cause of her discomfort with the critique of middle-class theatergoers, her reasoning is that the fictional audience sidelines the real audience, catching onto a joke that was meant to be between the fictional producers and the real audience about the hilarity of the content of “Springtime for Hitler.” What Adler does not account for is that Bloom and Bialystock are Jewish producers attempting to lampoon Nazism, while Brooks is a Jewish director attempting to mock the American middle class and its susceptibility to fascism. The goal of one is housed within the other, which is why the movie has two audiences, one real and one fictional. Adler does not see the broader goals of Brooks, paying attention only to the effectiveness of Bloom and Bialystock. Perhaps for Fermaglich, the ability to recognize Brooks’ high-level critique is due to the historical distance of the author from the actual audience of the 1960s, allowing  her to see past the in-your-face depiction of Nazi Germany that would have felt much more urgent to Adler. Adler concludes that The Producers “leaves one alternately picking up one’s coat to leave and sitting back to laugh,” which is exactly the point, a mirror of how the fictional audience behaves—getting up to leave and ultimately “sitting back to laugh.”¹⁷ The discomfort of the real audience, Adler included, is the uncanny of being cloned on screen, of recognizing oneself as the butt of a shrewd and biting joke.

The merging of the real audience and the fictional audience reveals how Brooks’ critique of fascism operates. Dick Zijp conducted a study of Dutch comedians who use humor to “unmask the audience as a proto-fascist mass.”¹⁸ The Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen also uses this strategy in his popular mockumentary, Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. These comedians get laughs by intentionally provoking their audiences to transgress social taboos. Zijp writes, “By confronting the audience with their willingness to laugh at a racist and antisemitic joke, [one comedian] already hints at the connection between (unified) laughter and totalitarianism.”¹⁹ He adds, “The audience is thus not only willing to laugh at racist jokes, but—even worse—is not even aware of the political implications of their own laughter.”²ᴼ This is the underlying reason why the fictional audience’ s laughter in The Producers was so unsettling to Adler and Fermaglich. It is because of the willingness to set aside the offense—felt so palpably just minutes before—for the sake of laughing along with a group.

Despite some discomfort, real-life audiences do laugh at The Producers. Adler’s review also notes, “Some of [the movie] is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way.”²¹ The movie is, as objectively as comedy can be, hysterical. And once the whole audience is laughing together, the offense of any particular group is no longer important. Beyond the central “joke” of making fun of Nazis, the film takes aim at hippies, gay people, and women, as well as Scandinavians, the elderly, theatergoers, and many other groups. At times it feels like Brooks’ goal was to offend as many people as possible. Perhaps the more obvious explanation for the laughter in the movie is as part of the “black humor” literary and social movement prominent in the 1960s.²² Arising in response to major cultural movements and conditions such as the Civil Rights Movement, the protests of the Vietnam War, the rising counterculture that glorified drug use and hedonistic behavior, and fear of nuclear fallout after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the recent memory of World War II, black humor seeks catharsis in the nihilism of morbid uncertainty.²³ As literary scholar Max Schulz writes, black humor “condemns man to a dying world.”²⁴ As such, black humor can partially explain why, as a premise, we feel inclined to laugh at spectacularized Nazis—because they are both upsetting and unstoppable, so what can we do but laugh? But placing The Producers within the black humor movement does not fully explain away its troubling comedic undercurrent.

Black humor functions only when a particular power dynamic is in place—that of the small and weak railing against forces greater than they are. Upon closer inspection, The Producers does not categorically reject Nazism, though it certainly lampoons it. Nor is its central argument about Jewishness immediately legible. Much of this murkiness is due to the use of comedy—who is laughing at whom, and to what end? The ability to laugh despite not knowing exactly where the movie stands indicates a susceptibility to authoritarianism, or a willingness to set aside morals for the sake of a majority authority. Black humor was a release valve that gave people a way to find comedy in darkness and uncertainty, a way to gain narrative control during a decade of extraordinary upheaval. Where The Producers deviates from black humor is its inability to clearly define power and who holds it in the movie, which then makes our laughter not based in subversion, but rather in the sensation of laughing along with a crowd.

The complexity of The Producers lies in the underlying strategy of how Brooks, as explained by Zijp, coaxes us into complicity through laughter. This becomes clear when we analyze in what direction the movie’s critique faces. As Dan Ben-Amos in “The ‘Myth’ of Jewish Humor” concludes, the defining characteristic of Jewish joking (though he is careful to note that Jewish humor is not inherently Jewish but a reflection of certain given socio-economic environmental factors²⁵) is as “a vehicle for verbal aggression towards those from whom the narrator distinguishes himself unequivocally.”²⁶ In The Producers, Brooks distinguishes himself from other Jews as well as stereotypes of Jews, the well-heeled but morally corrupt patrons and producers of Broadway, and even his own audience for subjecting themselves to his mind games and laughing anyway. Whether we are laughing because we find it funny to see the Nazi fanatic (Liebkind) laid low, only to realize upon further examination that, through his play “Springtime for Hitler,” he gains mainstream success, or if we only laugh along with the fictional audience until we realize how the satirical interpretation diminishes the horrors of Nazism, the only certainty is that Brooks is laughing at us.

What is unclear and troubling in The Producers is whether, when it comes down to it, we are laughing at or with Bialystock and Bloom, and what the movie is therefore saying about Jewish identity. There is precedent in Jewish culture for satirizing or mocking the enemy, which elucidates Bialystock and Bloom’s purpose and allows us to laugh with them. In the Jewish holiday of Purim, it is customary to portray the story’s villain Haman (another genocidal maniac set on exterminating the Jews) as campy and over-the-top.²⁷ As such, one of the most “Jewish” things the film does is take something terrible—the Nazi regime and its racist and genocidal views—and turn it into a source of entertainment. At its core, this strategy works to defang the enemy and lessen its psychological power. However, while this might be the intent of Brooks, his characters do not set out to create a satire at all. The pair of producers end the film teary-eyed and defeated, and further, they are dealt with in a way that would satisfy the antisemite—exposed for their scheming and greediness, made to look foolish, threatened with death, and ultimately stripped of all assets. That they keep conning the other prisoners in the final scene of the movie is not a sign of resilience, but evidence that the Jews will stop at nothing for money and are therefore best contained outside of general society.²⁸ The Jewish tradition of disempowering the enemy through laughter, and Brooks’ own Jewish identity save the movie from dismissal as purely offensive, but the nuance is too great for the audience to grapple with in the second after the punchline.

The outcome of both the confusion over Brooks’ treatment of Jewish identity and the systematic destabilizing of the audience’s morals is that we laugh when real danger befalls the movie’s Jews. As Bloom and Bialystock regroup after realizing their plan has been foiled, they receive a message saying, “Congratulations! ‘Hitler’ will run forever!”²⁹ The producers’ goal, to create a play so offensive it closed on opening night, utterly backfires. This is the single line that cracks open Brooks’ satire, revealing that it is the audiences’ complicity in Nazism—their readiness to laugh rather than see fascism as a legitimate threat—that will allow for its proliferation. “Hitler,” or Nazism, will literally last forever in the dark recesses of American society, living on as a sequined, embattled joke, but living on nonetheless. Bialystock and Bloom are condemned to live in a world that continues to dismiss the threat against themselves as Jews. The only person Bialystock and Bloom succeed in offending is Franz Liebkind, the Nazi playwright, who genuinely admires Hitler and therefore resents the audience’s laughter. In a moment rife with slapstick comedy and undergirded with genuine terror, Liebkind starts shooting wildly at the pair as they hide under a desk, saying, “Don’t you understand? You must die.”³ᴼ The two Jews of the movie are reduced to targets of a raving Nazi who is angry with them for mocking Nazism. The real audience can continue to laugh along, forgetting that the play-within-a-play is over and the real Nazi has come to life. Their goal has backfired even more than the real audience notices, as the comedic setup allows us to keep laughing at fascism, even as a deranged Nazi threatens to kill two unarmed Jews. At this point, it is not just the fictional audience whose morals are corrupted for the sake of entertainment, but our own.

With Nazism finding new footholds since the birth of the internet, our willingness to trivialize fascism has dire implications. Communications Professor Tina Askanius conducted a study of neo-Nazi meme accounts in Sweden and determined that “humorous ambiguities” allowed users “to blur the boundaries between the extreme, meta-political, and populist right and to circumvent the lines of legality regulating hate speech.”³¹ It is the medium of comedy, and its reliance on tone, delivery, and intent that allows Nazism not only to proliferate but to avoid capture. As film critic A.O. Scott opined in the New York Times, the politically empowered Nazi is unthinkable in The Producers.³² Franz Liebkind and “Springtime for Hitler” portray Nazism as laughable, idiotic, and bumbling. Even when Liebkind trains a gun on the movie’s protagonists, reverting to the historical power dynamic, the slapstick elements of wrestling for the gun diffuse the true terror of the scene. As we laugh at the on-screen Nazis, we become more and more complicit in their ideologies, willing to be entertained by Jewish stereotypes and even Jewish downfall. The satire is humorous, but it masks a moral corruption that cannot be easily dismissed. As Zijp writes, “…critique does not always live up to its promise of emancipation and has maybe never done so.”³³ Though satire and humor can expose hypocrisy and be an effective tool for political critique, humor is perhaps too subjective, too open to interpretation to be useful in the gravest circumstances. In September 2023, VICE reported that neo-Nazi activity in the United States is growing at alarming rates, with emboldened White supremacist groups waving swastika flags in Florida suburbs and threatening drag queens, refugees, Black people: and other historically marginalized groups.³⁴ In other words, maybe it’s time to take the Nazi threat seriously.

Endnotes

[1] Brooks, Mel. The Producers. 1967. 1 hr, 24 mins. 58:48.

[2] The Producers, 1:02:21

[3] The Producers.

[4] Vergun, David. “Actor, Comedian Mel Brooks Served in Army in World War II.” U.S. Department of Defense, October 29, 2021.

[5] Fermaglich, Kirsten. “Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967-2007.” American Studies (Lawrence) 48, no. 4 (2007): 59–87. https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.0.0035. 65.

[6] Caplan, Jennifer. “American Jewish Humor.” Religion Compass 16, no. 11–12 (2022): e12455. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12455. 5.

[7] Fermaglich, “Mel Brooks’ The Producers,” 77.

[8] Fermaglich, 67.

[9] Fermaglich, 64.

[10] The Producers, 18:51 and 37:05.

[11] Mel Brooks, The Producers, Making Of. Vol. 1 of 7, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYU23JMiLVk. 3:00.

[12] Mel Brooks, The Producers, Making Of, 1 of 7:5:28.

[13] The Producers, 1:00:36.

[14] The Producers, 1:01:40.

[15] Fermaglich, “Mel Brooks’ The Producers,” 62.

[16] Adler, Renata. “Brooks’s Black Comedy Stars Zero Mostel.” Screen: ‘The Producers’ at Fine Arts. The New York Times, March 19, 1968, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1968/03/19/archives/screen-the-producers-at-fine-arts.html.

[17] Adler.

[18] Zijp, Dick. “‘Those Who Laugh as a Body Today, Will March as a Body Tomorrow’: Critical Comedy and the Politics of Community.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2022): 422–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221087295.

[19] Zijp.

[20] Zijp.

[21] Adler, “Screen.”

[22] Schulz, Max F. Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties; a Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World. Athens, Ohio University Press, 1973. http://archive.org/details/blackhumorfictio00maxf.

[23] Schulz, 8.

[24] Schulz, 8.

[25] Ben-Amos, Dan. “The ‘Myth’ of Jewish Humor.” Western Folklore 32, no. 2 (1973): 112–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/1498323.117.

[26] Ben-Amos, 123.

[27] Wisse, Ruth R. No Joke:Making Jewish Humor. Course Book. Library of Jewish Ideas. Princeton: University Press, 2013. 23.

[28] The Producers, 1:22:18.

[29] The Producers, 1:10:38.

[30] The Producers, 1:12:51.

[31] Askanius, Tina. “On Frogs, Monkeys, and Execution Memes: Exploring the Humor-Hate Nexus at the Intersection of Neo-Nazi and Alt-Right Movements in Sweden.” Television & New Media 22, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982234.

[32] Scott, A. O. “When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us.” The New York Times, October 16, 2019, sec. Movies. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/movies/the-producers-jojo-rabbit.html.

[33] Zijp, “‘Those Who Laugh as a Body Today, Will March as a Body Tomorrow.’”

[34] Owen, Tess, and Mack Lamoureux. “As 2024 Looms, Neo-Nazis Are Returning to the Streets.” Vice, September 14, 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7byyd/2024-election-neo-nazis-visible-on-streets.

Works Cited

Adler, Renata. “Brooks’s Black Comedy Stars Zero Mostel”. Screen: ‘The Producers’ at Fine Arts. The New York Times, March 19, 1968, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1968/03/19/archives/screen-the-producers-at-fine-arts.html.

Askanius, Tina. “On Frogs, Monkeys, and Execution Memes: Exploring the Humor-Hate Nexus at the Intersection of Neo-Nazi and Alt-Right Movements in Sweden.” Television & New Media 22, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982234.

Ben-Amos, Dan. “The ‘Myth’ of Jewish Humor.” Western Folklore 32, no. 2 (1973): 112–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/1498323.

Bouzereau, Laurent. Mel Brooks, The Producers, Making Of. Vol. 1 of 7, 2012. Clip from Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYU23JMiLVk.

Brooks, Mel. The Producers. 1967. 1 hr, 24 mins.

Caplan, Jennifer. “American Jewish Humor.” Religion Compass 16, no. 11–12 (2022): e12455. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12455.

Fermaglich, Kirsten. “Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967-2007.” American Studies (Lawrence) 48, no. 4 (2007): 59–87. https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.0.0035.

Owen, Tess, and Mack Lamoureux. “As 2024 Looms, Neo-Nazis Are Returning to the Streets.” Vice, September 14, 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7byyd/2024-election-neo-nazis-visible-on-streets.

Schulz, Max F. Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties; a Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World. Athens, Ohio University Press, 1973. http://archive.org/details/blackhumorfictio00maxf.

Scott, A. O. “When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us.” The New York Times, October 16, 2019, sec. Movies. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/movies/the-producers-jojo-rabbit.html.

Vergun, David. “Actor, Comedian Mel Brooks Served in Army in World War II.” U.S. Department of Defense, October 29, 2021. https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/2882521/actor-comedian-m el-brooks-served-in-army-in-world-war-ii/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.defense.gov%2FNew s%2FFeature-Stories%2FStory%2FArticle%2F2882521%2Factor-comedian-mel-brooks- served-in-army-in-world-war-ii%2F.

Wisse, Ruth R. No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. Course Book. Library of Jewish Ideas. Princeton: University Press, 2013.

Zijp, Dick. “‘Those Who Laugh as a Body Today, Will March as a Body Tomorrow’: Critical Comedy and the Politics of Community.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2022): 422–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221087295.