By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Dear Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington,
Can you guys maybe start to leave Anne Frank out of your comedy routines? Okay, some of your fans are laughing, but I’m not: why did the Holocaust diarist become a subject for mirth?
Yes, that Anne Frank, the teenage girl who became a symbol of the Holocaust. The claustrophobic years in hiding. The terrible mystery of betrayal, the horrific last weeks, dying of typhoid in a concentration camp. The poignant way in which her diary was found, its restoration to her father, all that was left of a sensitive, intelligent talented child, all that remained of his entire family.
Good subject for a joke, eh, Ricky and Karl?
As you might know, and if you don’t, let me remind you and your agents: In 2009, the BBC received complaints about a quip by the comedian David Mitchell. “What was the last entry in Anne Frank’s diary?” he asked on a Radio Four game show. “It’s my birthday and dad bought me a drum kit.”
Funny? You guys probably thought so.
Ricky, you got your own Anne Frank gag now, too; anyone can view it on YouTube. The Nazis were rubbish, you says, not to think of looking upstairs. They mistook Anne’s typewriter for rats. “She had time to write a novel, mind you, it ends a bit abruptly. No sequel. Lazy.”
Why Anne? What makes comedians like you guys in Britain feel she is an acceptable subject? Why does a BBC producer decide to broadcast Mr Mitchell’s witticism when presumably they would censor a more obvious genocide gag?
According to British writer Keren David, it’s ”because Anne Frank’s story has become the accessible face of the Holocaust. Her diary lacks its true ending. Had she written about the reality of the camps, the starvation, cruelty and disease, she would have a different place in the culture, and most probably her book would not have been so successful. ”
Mrs David, a fellow Brit I might add, adds: ”When people think of Anne Frank, they think of attics, and hiding. They remember her as a teenager who hid away and wrote a book. Quite a funny book, with farts and toilets and kisses. They don’t always remember her wretched death. When they compose a quick tweet about attics and hiding, she’s the girl who comes to mind. The context falls away, because the associations — the attic, the diary — are stronger.”
She notes, and she wrote this in 2009, mind you, [and in 2012, you guys are still doing your sick sick schtick]: “And then there’s the comedian’s instinct which draws him to Anne. A safe way to tell jokes about the piles of corpses. Why would they want to do that? ‘
Keren says: “Maybe because telling jokes is a way of mastering the things which scare us. Watch Ricky Gervais’s body language on YouTube. His flippant voice tells one story, his hunched shoulders and cringing demeanour tells another. He’s not laughing at Anne. He’s laughing at prats who think they can tell jokes about the Holocaust.”
”Laughter defuses the horror, but it also brings us closer. The cleverest jokes make us very uneasy as we laugh. It’s an extremely subtle paradox — very easy to get wrong….” The fine line between funny and offensive is one that TV comedy show producers should be able to judge. It seems though that they sometimes put as much thought into matters of taste and context as a Twittering teenager.
So Ricky and Karl, enough already. It’s time to grow up and throw your genteel British antisemitic snark away. In the gutter. Where it belongs.
Okay?
*
Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com
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And a response to the response from Dan Bloom:
Dear Ricky Gervais:
Your response to my first “open letter” to you was recently published
in the UK media, and I was glad to see you take
the time to respond to me. I know you are a good man, and I know you
value your career in show business, and you are good
at it, too. But in your letter to me, titled “Why it’s kosher to joke
about Anne Frank,” I feel you miss the point and that there
is still a disconnect going on in your mind. Maybe the disconnect is
with me? It’s possible. But let’s wait and see, since
the jury is still out on this one. Maybe all this can be a learning
experience for everyone involved, on both sides of
the Atlantic.
Ricky, let’s be honest. You wrote: “I have had that [Anne Frank joke]
routine for nearly 10 years now. It is about the misunderstanding and
ignorance of what is clearly a tragic and horrific situation. My comic
persona is that of a man who speaks with great arrogance and authority
but who along the way reveals his immense stupidity.”
But Ricky, you know and I know, and every comedian worth his salt
knows, as does every newspaper drama and TV critic, that
your Anne Frank schtick is a scripted, rehearsed, staged “joke” that
your stage persona tries to pass off as comedy, taking Karl
Pilkington in with you, too, as part of the game. You know as well as
I do, Ricky, that Karl is not stupid or dumb and he knows full
well the real history of the Holocaust and the real backstory of the
Anne Frank family. So the “they just wanted to avoid paying rent”
joke does not work sir. Unless your intent is to encourage
antisemitism and Jew-hatred, which I am sure is not your intent.
I am sure some of your best friends are Jews in Britain, and in the
USA, too. Jon Stewart, your good friend in New York, is Jewish.
So I am sure you have no animosity towards Jews and that your staged
and scripted Anne Frank jokes routine, which you
recently repeated on Jon’s TV show in New York, much to his uneasiness
when you fobbed off the “rent” joke as part of your sidekick
Karl’s stupidity.
Ricky, face facts, mate. Stop pretending. Grow up, sir.
Ricky, you are not stupid and you are not ignorant of history, and I
appreciate your response to me in the UK media.
“I can see if you took this routine at face value as my real opinion
on this profound and heroic tragedy, it could be deemed highly
offensive,” you sincerely wrote — or your savvy PR person wrote for
you. “However, this is obviously an absurd comic position with the
audience well in on the joke, fully aware that I am saying the exact
opposite of what every right-minded person thinks.”
Ricky, you must be careful when you joke about the Holocaust. Go to
google and see how many people who still hate Jews and feel the
Holocaust didn’t go far enough lap up your Anne Frank jokes as more
ammunition to use against Jewish people today! Wake up, mate!
Ricky, a friend of mine in New York, Rudy Shur, a veteran book publisher and
the son of Holocaust survivors, read your letter to me and said:
“Ricky misses the point. Perhaps he wouldn’t think it’s so funny if it were
his parents being pursued by the Nazis or having almost all of his
family shot and killed or dying in concentration camps — such as my
own mother’s family and my father’s family. I was born in 1946 in an
American-run Displaced Person’s Camp outside of Munich, Germany. I
grew up never quite seeing the humorous side of the Nazis. In terms of
comedy, I myself often get accused of finding comedy in places where
no comedy is to be found. And I feel you can make a joke about
anything. It just depends on what the joke is. Comedy comes from a
good or a bad place, and the problem is in its interpretation, with
some people confusing the subject of a joke with the joke’s real
target. The target of these Ricky Gervais ‘rent’ jokes and
‘typewriting in the attic’ jokes about Anne Frank is Mr. Gervais’
ignorance.”
Rudy goes on to say: “The fact is that stupidity in some cases is an
excuse for insensitive or lame jokes, however not in this case
of the Ann Frank jokes told me Gervais and Pilkington. Why not crack a
joke about African-Americans being hung from trees in the
American South or gay teenagers being murdered in Britain or America
or of children in India dying of AIDS.
Maybe Mr Gervais’ stupidity knows no bounds? That’s why they pay him
the big bucks,
right? Or maybe an apology might be in order to the millions of relatives
whose families wound up being slaughtered by the ‘stupid’ Nazis?
Danielle Berrin, writing on this topic in a newspaper in Los Angeles
the other day,
commented also on how uncomfortable Jon Stewart was with your Anne
Frank routine.
“What I think Stewart detected in Gervais’s comedy was
blatant dispassion towards the Holocaust, a cool, impassive
detachment,” Berrin wrote. “This does not, by any means, mean Gervais
would have been
a Nazi, but it does make you wonder if he might have been a bystander.
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of
moral crisis, do nothing,” the Italian poet Dante Alighieri once
wrote, Berrin reminds us. “Ignorance leads
to indifference which permits moral atrocity to go on unchallenged.”
So Ricky, mate, I feel you still don’t get it. One more time, sir,
please think about this, off in a corner, without
your public relations crew around to keep you calm and collected.
Ponder all this one more time, and read
what my friend Rudy said above.
You don’t owe me an apology at all, since we hardly know each other.
You might, however, offer an apology to
Anne Frank and her family. And at the same time, Ricky, you might also
offer an apology to Jon Stewart
in New York, not just in writing but maybe face to face, mano a mano,
on his Daily Show stage in Manhattan
for all the world to see. How about it?
Then we can call it a day.
Cheers,
Danny Bloom
Editor’s Note: Ricky Gervais replied to this column via the Jewish Chronicle of London, which in turn generated more stories in the United Kingdom. Here are two links:
http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/66593/ricky-gervais-why-its-kosher-joke-about-anne-frank
http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2012/04/19/15246/gervais_accused_of_anti-semiticism#ixzz1sWklJafI
Dear Yiftach,
Yours is a very good comment and I appreciate your taking the time to write in. I respect your ideas and your POV, although for now we can agree to diagree on all this.
1. I am not accusing Joan Rivers (she also makes disgusting Anne Frank jokes). I got the video, it’s online now, from 2 years ago, worse than Ricky) or Ricky or Karl or Jon Stewart Leibowitz of being antisemites. They are all comedians. Comedians do comedy. Some comedy is tasteful, some comedy is tasteless. Anne Frank jokes in any form are tasteless.
2. Karl is NOT stupid, this is all a stage act, a script, they have been doing this “joke” for yaers now, since 2005 at least, and Karl is the fall guy, the foil, but it’s all an in-joke. See? An act. Funny? Not in my book. and not when Brits do it.
3. I have been trying to reach Keren David by email but so far she refuses to answer my 145 emails. She knows about all this much better than I do and her 2009 op-ed in UK was great. I am sure she supports me. Ask her. her email is in the google book.
4. Mel Brooks. Springtime for Hitler in the Producers: i must say Yiftach, that show and movie made me very uncomfortable. But yes, I laughed at some lines and i could SEE what Mel was diriving at with his biting humor. Parody is cool.
5. the JTA wire just picked up this story from “6 Degrees” blog
6. see Jta or google it, now on global JTA wire
7. this story has legs, the Reuters entertainment reporter in LA said he will do something on this, as will several top columnists around the USA, bothpro and con
1. Don’t throw accusations of antisemitism around without serious evidence. In our community, that’s the worst kind of crying wolf.
2. Not sure how much you know about Karl Pilkington, but if he, Gervais, and Stephen Merchant (Gervais’s comedy writing partner) are to be believed, and there’s no evidence to suggest they shouldn’t, he isn’t trying to be funny about the Holocaust or anything else. He really is that dim, making him a perfect foil for Gervais, who’s brilliant and biting.
3. It seems to me that your whole argument is crushed by Keren David’s commentary that you directly quote. She points out the true power of humor to make us at least slightly uncomfortable (at times very much so). Are you familiar with Mel Brooks’s The Producers? Do you level the same criticism at “Springtime for Hitler”?