I'm not particularly fond of Shoah jokes, yet there is one I cannot forget: Why was Auschwitz an optimistic place? Because all the pessimists were already in New York by then.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Larry David finds a way to make jokes about the Holocaust. It would never have occurred to me. And it was funny.
In the 20th century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology, born of neopaganism, gave rise to the attempt, planned and systematically carried out by the regime, to exterminate European Jews. The result has passed into history as the Shoah.
I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
I've always felt that there's a Catskills comic who lives in my head and is constantly trying to get out. There's all these jokes that have been passed down from Jewish generation to Jewish generation, which I love but which I've always made fun of.
The people in New York - their humor is on a level that goes, uh, very deep, you know?
I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.
Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.
One of the marvelous things about Churchill is that whatever he was doing, whether fighting or arguing or despairing or bouncing about full of energy, jokes are never far away.