Hitler left it for the last time in mid 1944 to run the final stages of the war from his eastern front headquarters in Poland. Thomas Pigor, a cabaret performer who does a popular chanson about the Führer's aftershave, maintains that the only way to still get any comic mileage out of the Hitler impressions these days is to explore the gap between cardboard cut-out madman and the private human being. "When I do Hitler, I can't start out with the volume at full tilt – people wouldn't find that funny. I give him a low burr – that's where you get some comic potential, in the tension between monstrosity and banality". For additional commentary see Reimer and Reimer, Nazi-retro Film, 145-47 and entries on “Europa Europa” (100-01) and “Agnieszka Holland” (153) in Reimer and Reimer, Historical Dictionary of German Cinema. A few notable examples where this scene is used include Hitler discusses Fegelein with Eva and Eva's secret. In Hitler Rants Parodies' parody, Hitler sends Hermann Fegelein to space and after a suspiciously loud noise when Hitler is talking with Eva they fear for the worst; Fegelein returned to the bunker as assumed later.

Goldstein and McGhee describe over 10 theories of humour from biological to psychological in The Psychology of Humor. Aaron Smuts focuses on four main theories: superiority, relief, incongruity, and play in his internet essay in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vermes's modern Hitler, too, doesn't only spout repellent ideas that would instantly alienate the reader. On the one hand, he rails against parliamentary democracy, decries press freedom, and rejoices at the fact that 65 years after the end of the war, Germany's Jewish population is still only a fifth of what it was in 1933. But on the other, his complaints about hunting, food scandals and drivers racing through inner-city areas would fit perfectly into any modern party manifesto. "That's why many readers thought my Hitler was too real: he was too normal," Vermes says. Oliver Polak is a stand-up comedian who plays with fire. He is Jewish and plays on his Jewishness – he isn’t a German comic who happens to be Jewish but a German comic who highlights his Jewishness.The troll face from this scene has found many uses in the community including Discord server emojis and the logo of Unterganger Central. When the National Socialist German Workers' party (Nazis) assumed power they vowed to cleanse the German theater of all things "un-German," which ostensibly included comedy. During the Third Reich nearly all German theaters, supported by enormous state funding, presented thousands of comedy productions. Perhaps it was a propaganda tool, however only a tiny fraction of these productions were outright propagandist efforts. French playwright and filmmaker, Marcel Pagnol described laughter as a "song of triumph...[that] expresses the laugher's sudden discovery of his own momentary superiority over the person at whom he is laughing. That explains burst of laughter in all times in all countries." Hitler and his followers gladly embraced this triumphal expression. Yet, what did this laughter mean to the Nazi agenda and in what ways did it undermine its goals? Hitler Laughing offers insight into the world of comedy during the Third Reich and its role in the Nazi cultural agenda.

It was then set on fire by retreating SS troops in early May, and looted after Allied troops reached the area. What has comedy at the expense of the Nazis consisted of? Jokes that were off-hand, or glib, weren’t there to diminish the horror of the regime, but to forever draw attention to its risibility, to never aggrandise the perpetrators. Peter Cook, for instance, went big on insouciance. “Hitler was a very peculiar person, wasn’t he?” he once drawled. “He was another dominator… And he was a wonderful ballroom dancer. The only trouble was, he was very short…”Current restrictions in implementation requires that you group all the descriptions and links contiguous (i.e. nothing else in between them from start to finish) Perhaps those letters provide enough justification if you wonder – as Charlie Chaplin did after he learned about the atrocities of the Nazis – whether it was morally appropriate to ridicule them, as he did in The Great Dictator. Theodor Adorno insisted that anti-fascist satire fails to grasp or depict reality and, worse still, it ignores or trivialises the gravity of National Socialism. But did not laughter at least remind people of what it means to be human? Didn’t the mere existence of the satirical programmes display faith in the intellect and, above all, the humanity of the audience?

This cumulates in a scene when Hitler climbs in bed with Grunbaum and his wife, and she really tries to smother the German leader. Reininghaus says here, the film goes awry.This was not the United States, Poland, South Africa. This was Germany. The twenty and thirty-somethings in the studio audience, the children and grandchildren of Nazi lieutenants and SS troops, were not just laughing at Hitler, they were roaring. (29) In a number of interviews, Levy justifies the use of humour even when treating subjects such as Hitler and the Holocaust, arguing that laughter can diminish Hitler’s hold on the public’s imagination. For Levy, too much authenticity and believability in a portrayal of Hitler, even if that portrayal is critical, create a cult-figure. Laughing at Hitler can prevent that from happening. (36) Moreover, Levi comments that given the exaggerated theatricality to which the Nazis were prone, they parody themselves. He relies on the received historical image of Nazism as transmitted by texts, photos and film archives of the period to show that his portrayal derives from reality, for the Nazis were in Levy’s opinion self-caricatures. (37) Whether Hitler and the Nazis are intrinsically funny is not in dispute, nor is whether comedy is suitable for dealing with historical trauma, over seventy years of comedy and laughing at Hitler suggests they are and it is. The question asked directly and indirectly by detractors and supporters of the film is whether Levy’s comedy helps viewers overcome the trauma of the past or simply ignore it. In search of a Hitler beyond the caricatures, he decided to read Mein Kampf for the first time. "It's written in the style of someone who doesn't normally write: pompous and snivelling, lots of animal metaphors. If one word would do but Hitler knows three, he will use all three." My fellow Germans! It is over! Darkness will descend and envelop us. The sun will no longer warm us. The German people will be destroyed. Is that what you want? [The crowd responds “No” and Hitler continues to lip synch Grünbaum’s words. ] No, we want to lie on the Adriatic, soaking up the sun with bodies that deprivation and defeat have turned to steel. The German soul is a clean soul. We are proud of that! We have to look to the future with united strength. Let us not forget the many problems that we have already solved: those involving communists and those concerning homosexuals! Above all, however, we have solved the Jewish problem. (42)