The limits of laughter
A controversial documentary probes the boundaries of humour, writes Richard Duckett.
Whether the Holocaust can be a topic for comedy draws a number of different viewpoints from the comedians and other observers that director Ferne Pearlstein interviews in her documentary The Last Laugh, which will make its New Zealand small-screen debut on the Rialto Channel early next month.
Sarah Silverman, known for pushing the envelope in ways some people find outrageous, says, ‘‘It’s important to talk about things that are taboo. Otherwise, they just stay in this dark place, and they become dangerous’’. One of her jokes is, ‘‘What do Jews hate most about the Holocaust? The cost.’’
There were people who thought that Mel Brooks’ movie The Producers, about an intentional effort to produce a Broadway flop titled Springtime For Hitler, was offensive when it was released in 1968. Humour about Hitler and Nazis is ‘‘revenge through ridicule’’, Brooks says.
However, when it comes to the Holocaust, ‘‘I can’t go there’’, he tells Pearlstein. ‘‘I think that’s the biggest surprise for audiences. That’s really fascinating that he has a line,’’ Pearlstein, who lives in New York City, says.
The film is prefaced by a quote from Heinrich Mann: ‘‘Whoever has cried enough, laughs.’’
A lot of the film is centred around Holocaust survivor Renee Firestone. ‘‘Without humour, we wouldn’t have survived,’’ she says. But her friend Elly Gross, also a survivor, doesn’t share the same view. ‘‘I didn’t find any humour at all.’’ Instead, it was all sadness, Gross says.
Asked if she agrees with Mann’s quotation, Pearlstein, who is also the film’s producer, director of photographer and editor, says, ‘‘Yes, but I don’t think it applies to everybody. It’s a personal thing.’’
The Last Laugh premiered in New Zealand at last year’s Documentary Edge Film Festival and has been widely praised for its originality and thoughtfulness.
Clips from films such as The Producers will raise a smile, but scenes such as Firestone recalling a song she heard playing just before she and her family were deported to Auschwitz are very moving.
Then there is the bitterhumour of Firestone’s recollection of the notorious death camp doctor, Josef Mengele, telling her that if she survived the war she should have her tonsils removed because they appeared to be enlarged.
‘‘It has been a film that people love to talk about,’’ Pearlstein says of The Last Laugh. The film has screened at more than 60 film festivals worldwide.
‘‘It’s been doing incredibly well,’’ she says.
Pearlstein had been wanting to make the film for a while, with the origins of the idea for it including she and her friend Kent Kirshenbaum once having a discussion with someone about Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust Maus.
Remembering the experience, Kirshenbaum wrote a paper on the topic The Last Laugh: Humour and the Holocaust while he was studying for his doctorate degree and presented it to Pearlstein when she was in film school with the admonition, ‘‘Make this into a film.’’ That was in 1993.
‘‘I knew it was something I was going to do if I could,’’ Pearlstein says. She wrote her first proposal in 1998.
Pearlstein’s credits include the documentary Suno East & West and she is a director of photography, feature film editor, writer and director whose work has been seen around the world. She is married to writer and director Robert Edwards, with whom she co-wrote The Last Laugh and is also the film’s producing partner.
The proposal remained out there when out of the blue in 2011 funding from a donor came through, Pearlstein says.
With that, getting people to agree to be interviewed for the film was difficult, she says. ‘‘Everybody said ‘no’. You keep
'Comics are the conscience of the people.' Mel Brooks
going back till you get a ‘yes’.
One early ‘‘yes’’ was from Rob Reiner.
‘‘He said, ‘I’ll do it a week from Wednesday’.’’ That meant a trip to the west coast, and Pearlstein looked around for other contacts out there so she could spend a week or two filming. Otherwise, ‘‘We had nothing.’’
Actress and producer Hanala Sagal also agreed, and tipped Pearlstein about Renee Firestone, who lives in the Los Angeles area. ‘‘She [Firestone] has a great sense of humour. There was just an immediate connection.’’ Firestone regularly gives talks about the Holocaust. Just before her 90th birthday she went to Rwanda to counsel survivors there.
Pearlstein says that Brooks, after realising that she had interviewed enough people that he respected, agreed to take part. Silverman was one of the hardest people to get to be interviewed. Brooks helped facilitate her agreement, she says.
‘‘There were doors that kept opening.’’
The Last Laugh itself broadens to consider whether subjects such as Aids and 9/11 can be the subject of jokes.
One consensus seems to be, as Judy Gold puts it, whatever the topic, the joke has ‘‘got to be funny’’.
Otherwise, disaster can ensue, as the film shows some have found out.
On the other hand, Brooks observes: ‘‘Comics are the conscience of the people.’’ - TNS The Last Laugh debuts 8.30pm, Thursday, Rialto Channel.