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(Posted to this site on 11/22/2001)

Humor in the Holocaust:
Its Critical, Cohesive, and Coping Functions
by John Morreall, Ph.D.

       This paper was presented at the 1997 Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, Hearing The Voices: Teaching the Holocaust to future Generations. It is available on a CD-ROM of all Scholars' Conference papers 1990-2000 published by Vista-Intermedia and edited by Marcia Sachs Littell.




"The very idea of humor during the Holocaust may at first seem jarring—incongruous but not funny! In Western culture there is a long tradition of prejudice against humor, especially in connection with anything as tragic as the Holocaust. Tragedy, on stage or in real life, is serious, even sublime, while humor and comedy are "light." In drama, when comedy appears within tragedy, it is usually discounted as mere "comic relief."

But the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, and other dramatists took their comedy more seriously than that. They realized that comedy is not "time out" from the real world; rather it provides another perspective on that world. And that other perspective is no less valuable than the tragic perspective. As Conrad Hyers has suggested, comedy expresses a "stubborn refusal to give tragedy . . . the final say."1"



Fantastic paragraph.