Beth Bonnstetter, in a recent article in the University of Illinois’ Journal of Film and Video, makes the case that Mel Brooks’ beloved Hollywood romps serve up more than laughter. “If The Producers is ‘just entertainment,’ ” she warns, “and ‘Springtime for Hitler’ is simply meant to be funny, then at best, laughing at the Nazis’ flaunting of their power misses the point, and at worst, it is potentially anti-Semitic.” Bonnstetter instructs us to look beyond the laughter when watching films like The Producers, to find a deeper purpose behind Brooks’ comic, over-the-top treatment of otherwise serious subjects. Without this second look into Brooks’ intentions, we might easily mistake them for pure shock-value or even a license to reinforce ugly stereotypes (Bonnstetter 18). The Producers certainly shocks, but in doing so it unveils the power of ridicule to cut the most fearsome tyrants down to size and the power of laughter to quash the most pernicious, hate-filled prejudices.
The Producers debuted in 1968, after a limited release to critics in 1967. The movie rode a wave of triumph and confidence for American Jews in the wake of Israeli victory in the Six-Day War and followed a series of successful Jewish-American films dealing with Jewish subjects or starring recognizably Jewish actors, such as Exodus (1960) and The Graduate (1967). (Dustin Hoffman was in fact Brooks’ original choice for the character of Leo Bloom, but he left when offered The Graduate’s starring role). Building up over decades—a century really—of Jewish struggle for acceptance and achievement in American life, this new-wave of Jewish-American cinema may have convinced Mel Brooks that audiences were ready for his shocking, satirical farce of Hitler and the Nazis (Hoberman & Shandler 224).
Indeed, The Producers, Brook’s first feature film, unapologetically flaunts the “Jewishness” of its principle characters, the scheming musical producer, Max Bialystock, and his nervously complicit accountant, Leo Bloom. It does not bother to shy away from the rather ignoble Jewish stereotypes they represent or from their willingness to commit fraud and profit off a gigantic joke of terrifically poor taste—arranging an intentional Broadway flop titled “Springtime for Hitler”—that serves as the film’s premise. In this way, The Producers “conveys considerable cultural confidence,” but this confidence highlights the irony of having clever Jewish producers create the outlandish fictional performance that Brooks uses to mercilessly and courageously ridicule his Nazi “victims” (Hoberman & Shandler 228-229).
This is the true “aim of The Producers…to posthumously humiliate Adolf Hitler, creating catharsis through laughter.” “Max and Leo are me,” Brooks would later say (Baber 6). “I want to make trouble…I want to say in comic terms, ‘J’accuse!’ ” (Bonnstetter 19). In this, Brooks definitely succeeds. Like the fictional audience in the film, viewers cannot help but stare in stunned, uncomfortable amazement at the elaborate, swastika-ridden dance numbers and listen with both shock and amusement to the music and the absurd lyrics. Eventually, this gives way to feverish, contented laughter at the zany antics of Dick Shaw’s oblivious, swaggering, jive-talking Hitler. Brooks uses humor and showmanship to bring-low the once feared image of Hitler and the deadly power of his German war-machine, all while laying bare the full ugliness of his racial hatred. “The music, choreography, and lavish staging of the title number all serve to satirize the Third Reich’s similarity to show business.” Echoes of Vaudeville minstrel shows and other styles of African-American and American immigrant performance enhance the ridicule with further irony and remind us that all prejudice is equally evil and false, nothing but empty caricature that can be exposed and dispensed with caricature (Baber 6-7).
The Producers demonstrates the value of ridicule to instantly disarm tyranny and the power of laughter to go to the heart of an audience and reveal the folly, the ignorance and the vulgarity of dehumanizing prejudice. Mel Brooks’ comic satire not only entertains, but also informs. It avoids the traps of logic and argumentation, areas where talented propagandists are trained to succeed in rationalizing inequality and brutality by manipulating fear and suspicion with language and suggestion. “If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win. That’s what they do so well; they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter—they can’t win” (Baber 6, MGM). Laughter turns the tables on the oppressor, places him in the berated, demeaning position, where he is powerless to avoid rebuke and retribution from his victims, who now possess a voice with which to deliver them. “Loud and proud,” Brooks’ film “is a rebellion against invisibility, the equivalent of dancing on the Fuhrer’s grave, a sort of twentieth-century Purim play,” complete with the proper reversal of fortune (Hobermand & Shandler 229). Thanks to Brooks, the Jewish comedian “who buried Hitler” with The Producers, “we are now able to laugh at Hitler” instead of fear him (Baber 7).
Further Reading:
Baber, Katherine. “ ‘The Jew who Buried Hitler’: Music and Identity in Mel Brooks’s The Producers.” ISAM Newsletter (American Music Review). Volume 35, Issue 2: Spring 2006.
Bonstetter, Beth. “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film.” University of Illinois Journal of Film and Video. Volume 63, Issue 1: Spring 2011.
Hoberman, J. and Jeffrey Shandler. Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting. Princeton, NJ: The Jewish Museum New York and Princeton University Press. 2003
The Producers. Written and Directed by Mel Brooks. Performances by Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars, Lee Meredith and Christopher Hewett. Embassy Pictures, 1968. Special Edition DVD with Feature and Interviews, MGM 2002.