BY AARON BARLOW

One of the greatest examples of a reaction to totalitarianism is comedian Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator (1940). This very funny—when it is not tragic—movie ends with a speech resonating even in today’s political milieu. Here’s a bit from it:

The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

This speech would not be half as effective and affecting were it not for the comedy that went on in the movie before  it.

Today, we Americans really have lost our way—in part, because we have abandoned our senses of humor. We can no longer joke in the face of tragedy or use the funny aspect of anything, not even to draw attention to the tragic. The consequences are just too great. We are seeing this today particularly in our colleges and schools, where faculty can no longer risk telling jokes.

To be able to comprehend the immense tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we need to be able to laugh. Otherwise, the inhumanity overwhelms us and we shut off exploration of its horrors. But we have begun to refuse to laugh—itself a tragedy: again, without humor, we cannot understand horror. Nor can we survive it, the point of Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film (itself criticized for making light of the Holocaust) Life Is Beautiful.

Response to devastation of any sort but especially to purposeful destruction crosses the full range of human emotion, and it must. To rebuild lives, we must laugh and cry as we work to understand what happened to us, as we learn to look loss full in the face and surmount it. Americans used to be good at this. Spike Jones, for example, made fun of Hitler in 1942 with “Der Fuehrer’s Face” with each “heil” followed by a raspberry.

Though Hitler was one of the most destructive people in history, the tradition of making fun of him and his followers, that had already began by the time of Chaplin’s film, carried through the 1960s without diminution. Peter Seller’s Dr. Strangelove with his attempts to suppress the Nazi salute, Arte Johnson’s petite and bespectacled German soldier on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In with his catch-phrase “Very Interesting… “ followed by a different caveat almost every time (“but not funny” is one I recall), the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, and Mel Brooks’ masterful film The Producers: these are but a few examples, all of them using humor (some better than others, admittedly) to help explore human nature, the Holocaust and responses to it. Use of the Holocaust in comedy to make serious points continued into the seventies, where the forearm of the character Maude, in Harold and Maude, shows a concentration-camp tattoo. This tradition is now gone.

Today, when we are stripping humor from our lives, none of these would be acceptable. Any mention of Hitler or the Holocaust must be accusatory or self-righteous—or it is wrong. Any mention of either in a bad joke is worse—a fireable offense.

Until last month, there was a genial math teacher at Friends Seminary, a private school in Manhattan. Ben Frisch, a Quaker of Jewish background, had taught there for some thirty years. But now he is gone.

Why?

The son of a man who had left Austria in the 1930s due, in part, to the rise of anti-Semitism, who lost family in the Holocaust, Ben has always been aware of the tragedy of the 1940s and grew up watching as his father tried to cope—as his society tried to cope—often through humor such as the popular-culture examples above. A late baby-boomer, Ben grew up during the 1960s, when jokes held an easier place in our lives and taking offense (for both good and bad) was not quite the weapon it has since become.

On Valentine’s Day, while demonstrating the look of an obtuse angle, Ben noted to the class a similarity between what he had drawn on the board to a Nazi salute. Then, much like Spike Jones (though probably minus the comb serving as a Hitleresque moustache), Ben parodied that salute and said, “Sieg Heil.” Apparently, he immediately realized that such a thing won’t do in today’s environment, so he tried to turn it into a ‘teachable moment,’ explaining to his students something about the Holocaust.

Later, word of this got to school administrators and Ben was suspended.

And, soon after, he was fired.

Ben and my brother attended Quaker retreats together in the 1970s. I got to know Ben when I taught at a Quaker school in Brooklyn. He soon bought a house down the block from me and we would nod on the street, though we never became close. He is, I know, an excellent teacher and is always on the lookout to protect others—including his fellow teachers (until his firing, he was the head of the teachers’ union at Friends Seminary).

This Sunday, The New York Times published a piece on Frisch’s firing titled “Someone Went Too Far at Friends Seminary, but Who?” Aside from its rather pathetic attempt to provide ‘balance,’ the article sets out the situation fairly well. Toward the end, it quotes one sanctimonious parent: “I would have been gravely disappointed if the school had kept him and would have been extremely unhappy and uncomfortable to have my child in that classroom next year” and balances that with the words of another, “If a ban on certain subjects for humor is now in effect at Friends Seminary, clear warning should be given — especially given the dire consequences for infractions.”  Ginia Bellafante, the Times reporter opines:

What Mr. Frisch did was thoughtless and dumb…. At the same time an adherence to the values of forgiveness and restorative justice that institutions like Friends promote would seem to demand a path — reprimand, rehabilitation — other than firing someone who made people uncomfortable.

That’s true but, as one raised a Quaker (though no longer one), I can tell you that Bellafante does not understand Quaker tradition. Forgiveness and restorative justice, as Bellafante clearly imagines them, have not always been part of the Quaker tradition (just

explore the relationship between founder George Fox and his follower James Naylor).

That aside, what Frisch did is not a fireable offense in any educational environment. Which raises the question: Why was Frisch fired, really?

In most cases where a teacher is fired for tweets, for jokes or for other ‘inappropriate’ verbal behavior, there is an underlying reason separate from the putative. I wonder, in this case, if it were not Frisch’s union activities that got him canned. Mark Oppenheimer, writing for Tablet, makes a good case for another reason:

The simple answer has something to do with the political culture of 2018, where the urge to take offense, or to fake-take offense to prospectively be on the right side of those who might take offense, guarantees regular, thoughtless, itchy-trigger-finger pink-slipping. But a deeper, more troubling answer is that well-meaning philo-Semites and assimilated Jews, the kind of people who run schools like Friends Seminary, have more respect for imagined Jewish sensitivities than for Jews’ actual history and culture.

The great American comedic tradition is heavily dependent on Jews, for whom humor has long been a part of a successful cultural means of coping with tragedy. My feeling, though, is that, in this case, the problem is greater than a lack of cultural understanding. It is a bit more pernicious.

Agitators and organizers are being hounded out of our educational institutions. What is wanted, today, is a passive faculty.

And that is why Frisch is gone.