Grant Taylor: Hitler liked to paint. That doesn’t make it wrong.
I’m nowhere near as brilliant as Mel Brooks or Larry David, but I am Jewish and that does seem to allow me the right to laugh at certain references to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. A friend at a recent poker game, said to me honestly one day, “I don’t get why that stuff is funny” and we discussed it a bit. I’ve written about it previously in my review of Mel Brooks’ original Producers movie; I’ve detailed my reasons for loving Hogan’s Heroes on many occasions (If someone knows what I did with my Col. Klink bobblehead, please know that I miss it desperately and hope it now has a good home). Basically, it’s old ground and I’m not going to rehash it. Just know that when the “pre-gay” child in the finale of this year’s Curb Your Enthusiasm made a pillow shammy with a swastika on it that I was laughing even though I’ve watched enough of Larry David to have seen it coming in the first three minutes of the episode.
Another person at my weekly poker game is for some reason called Non-Jewish Andrew, which seemed fine to me until I was told that he has reacted angrily on more than one occasion at being mistaken for a Jew. For now I’ll just file that away with my amazement that the second worst slur you can throw at a Jewish person in America these days seems to be merely the word “Jew”.
And of course, Mel Gibson gets a pass from me because the term “sugartits” has brought me more pleasure than all of his movies combined.
So it’s late and I’m a little light headed and the wonderful entity that is my pal “Gray Day” is sitting next to me in his usual drunken losing state, when for some reason he decides to ask me if I’ve ever seen Ferris Buellar’s Day Off. This is absurd for any number of reasons.
1. Anyone who even remotely knows me knows that I’ve seen that movie at least 37 times
2. By the time it’s left his mouth, he’s forgotten why he’s even brought it up
and
3. Although I clearly knew what he was saying when it came out of his slurring mouth, it sure sounded as if he had said, “Have you ever seen ‘The Fuhrer’s Day Off’,” which instantly struck me as the funniest thing I’ve heard all year.
It immediately sounded to me like one of those brilliant screenplays that all of Hollywood knows is genius, but no one has the guts to produce, because we Jews of course run all of Hollywood.
Is it possible that Hitler could have had a day where he just let all that anger and anti-Semitism go and just dedicated a park or passed out soup to the homeless? Even Ice Cube had a day where he didn’t have to use his AK.
I have no doubt that Charlie Kaufman could do something brilliant with this concept.
Just that title – “The Fuhrer’s Day Off” had us in stitches for at least 15 minutes when of course I took it way too far and compared it to that wonderfully insane video where Sarah Palin is pardoning that one lucky turkey while a soon to be infamous farmhand is in the background going about his usual day of shoving dead turkeys into what looks like a wood chipper.
&
This is probably a good place to stop, before Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is calling for my resignation and or apology.
Finally, I’d like to point out that Doug Stanhope, who remains as he has been for years the best stand up comedian alive, managed to pull off the near impossible on his No Refunds DVD, when he managed to make anti-Semitism from a non-Jewish source, both inventive and hilarious. Oh it’s offensive (nearly all great Stanhope is), but it’s something I’m not sure any other non-Jewish comic could pull off.
Like Doug, please, please, please be offended by this post because I continue to languish in obscurity (perhaps deserved) and could also use all of the publicity that I can get.
For more Jewish nonsense from me see “Hank Williams Jr. Exposes the Modern Chasm in American Jewry”
