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When the Jokes Get You Sent to a Gulag
Not-so-funny examples of humorless dictators.
Adolf Hitler didn’t fear communists, the British Empire, a Soviet winter, or a bullet to the skull. But he did fear mimes.
Not all mimes. Just one. Charlie Chaplin — the one with the toothbrush mustache and the gall to turn him into a punchline.
By the early 1930s, Hitler’s star was on the rise, but so was Chaplin’s — just in a completely different direction. While the future Führer was busy stoking resentment and perfecting his angry-librarian voice, Chaplin was being mobbed by adoring fans… in Berlin. In 1931, German crowds swarmed him like he was a Beatle with a cane.
The Nazis, unsurprisingly, didn’t love this.
They especially didn’t love that Chaplin looked Jewish (He was not). In 1934, Nazi propagandists published a charming little book titled The Jews Are Looking at You, in which Chaplin was described as “a disgusting Jewish acrobat.”
Ivor Montagu, one of Chaplin’s close friends, later said he sent Chaplin a copy of the book. He always believed that’s what lit the fuse for The Great Dictator. You get called a “disgusting Jewish acrobat” by fascists, and you either cry — or you make a movie that mocks their leader into a puddle of impotent rage.
