There are very few taboos left in comedy. Boundary-pushers like “South Park” have been taking on hot-button topics for decades, and so-called equal opportunity offenders like Ricky Gervais and Seth MacFarlane have made huge careers by saying anti-PC things. Sacha Baron Cohen can set an entire scene inside the vagina of an elephant, and include a giant elephant penis, and no one blinks an eye.
But there are some lines that few are willing to cross, and the new documentary “The Last Laugh,” from director Fearne Pearlstein, examines one in particular: the Holocaust. The mass murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany was a demonstration of inhumanity on an unfathomable scale, one of the greatest shames of the human race, and for many, especially those who survived it, the idea of jokes about or involving the Holocaust is beyond the pale. The question of whether one can, or should, put the subject at the centre of comedy is at the center of “The Last Laugh.”
Premiering originally at Tribeca but resurfacing at the BFI London Film Festival this week, Pearlstein’s film is a multi-faceted look at the subject, taking in not just recent jokes about the Holocaust from “Family Guy” and Joan Rivers, but also from films like the Oscar-winning “Life Is Beautiful,” and even the cabarets held in Auschwitz and other camps by those who were held there.
The list of interviewees are expansive, with an emphasis on comedians, but the film places a particular focus on two subjects. The first is comedy legend Mel Brooks, who made his name in movies with “The Producers,” a comedy about the production of a musical called “Springtime for Hitler.” The other is Renee Firestone, a survivor of Auschwitz who has spoken publicly for decades to raise awareness about her experiences. She’s not a comic, she’s not even particularly funny in the footage that we see, but while the shadow of her experiences has always followed her, it has never allowed the darkness to envelop her.
She’s the focus of two of the film’s best scenes: the first, as she shares a dinner with “Hogan’s Heroes” actor Robert Clare (who devastatingly recalls how twelve members of his immediate family died in the camps), the second on a gondola ride in Vegas with another survivor, one who says that she’s never been able to find joy in life because of the memory of all those who weren’t able to. But Pearlstein also smartly uses Firestone as a sort of litmus test, with a number of moments where her daughter shows her YouTube clips of comedians telling jokes involving the Holocaust and asking if she can find them funny (the answer is usually no, but Firestone is never quite outraged either).
The film becomes a persuasive argument for the power of comedy, with the director showing how humor became a coping mechanism for natural clowns like Clare in the camps (including some remarkable archive footage of a cabaret performed in a transit camp), a tool of catharsis for Catskill comics after the war, and an act of vengeance for someone like Brooks, whose mockery of Hitler in “The Producers” gave him, quite literally, the last laugh.
But the film has a bigger gaze than that, serving as a well-rounded examination of where our individual lines lie. One interviewee makes the point that by the time “The Producers” became a Broadway musical, its satirical power had been dulled, while Brooks himself admits that, while he could make light of the Inquisition (in his film “History Of The World Pt. 1”), the Holocaust was something he could never make a subject of comedy. There are no easy answers to these questions, and the film laudably doesn’t try to provide any.
It’s not the most visually inventive documentary ever made, and you could argue that it has some scope creep in at some points. But for the most part, the breadth of its examination of the subject is welcome, and by the end, it ends up feeling like as definitive a film on comedy and the Holocaust as you could ever want. [B+]
Click here for our complete coverage of the 2016 BFI London Film Festival
