Poking fun at the Nazis
QUESTION Did The Three Stooges make a film mocking Hitler before Charlie Chaplin did?
YES, slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges made a film mocking Hitler, which was released in 1940, ten months before Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.
The Three Stooges started in vaudeville in 1923 and had various line-ups over the decades. The mainstays were Larry Fine and Moe Howard, with the Third Stooge played by Moe’s brothers Shemp and Curly, Joe Besser and Joe DeRita.
Their first feature film was 1930’s Soup To Nuts, when they were billed as The Racketeers. Between 1934 and 1958, they made more than 200 shorts — the longest series of two-reel sound comedies.
The film You Nazty Spy! was released on January 19, 1940, and was their 44th short film. Moe Howard played Moe Hailstone (the Adolf Hitler role) with Curly as Field Marshal Gallstone (Herman Goering) and Larry Fine as Minister of Propaganda Pebble (Joseph Goebbels).
The film starts with the disclaimer: ‘Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons living or dead is a miracle.’ It satirised the Nazis at a time when the U.S. was neutral.
The Great Dictator, which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced and starred in as Adenoid Hynkel (Hitler), was released in the U.S. on October 15, 1940.
The Three Stooges continued with the war theme in 1941’s I’ll Never Heil Again followed by Back From The Front in 1943.
Curly suffered a stroke in 1946 and his brother Shemp returned to take his place. He continued until his death in 1955, when first Besser and finally DeRita joined as ‘Curly Joe’ in 1956. The Three Stooges’ last film was Kook’s Tour in 1970.
Clive Gill, Wimborne, Dorset.
QUESTION Is it true that one- tenth of Icelanders are published authors?
ICELAND is a nation of book lovers, but the idea that one in ten of its population has published a book is fanciful. This claim was given credence in the 2013 BBC magazine article Iceland: Where One In Ten People Will Publish A Book. However, there are no figures to back up this statistic.
According to a study by the International Publishers Association (IPA), Iceland published 900 new titles (ignoring translations) in 2015. This is in line with similar figures from the Iceland Review in 2010. While this isn’t bad for a country of 330,000 people, it equates to less than 0.3 per cent of the population.
In an IPA league table, Iceland is a creditable second in terms of new titles published per million people, with 2,628. The most erudite nation is Britain, with 2,710 titles per million people.
Iceland’s love of books has been traced to a tradition called Jolabokaflod — Christmas book flood. This began once Iceland had gained its independence from Denmark in 1944. Paper was one of the few commodities not rationed during the war, so books became the principal Christmas gift.
Every year since 1944, the Icelandic book trade has published a catalogue that is sent to every household in midNovember during the Reykjavik Book Fair. People use it to order books to give to friends and family at Christmas.
J. P. Daniels, Birmingham.
QUESTION In numerology, 888 is said to correspond to the name Jesus. How was this calculated?
NUMEROLOGY is the disparaging term applied to the practice of calculating a number for a word or name by assigning values to each of its letters.
It is most commonly associated with the biblical Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) languages.
Typically, values are allocated sequentially to the letters of an alphabet in the ranges one to nine (zero is not used), then ten to 90 and finally 100, 200 and so on.
For example, the word ‘fox’ has a value of 6+60+600 = 666, which is the number of the beast in the New Testament Book of Revelation.
The practice arose before a separate set of numerals had been invented to meet the needs of commerce.
Thus, a letter from the units group might be combined with another from the tens and, where necessary, one or more from the hundreds.
Such combinations would occasionally produce a valid word, prompting those of an inquisitive nature to dabble in the reverse process — converting a word or expression to a number. The results would be compared in the hope of finding numerical connections.
The next step saw words and names invented, or their spellings modified, to enhance mystical numerical properties.
This led to the reference to the number 666 in Revelation, with the prelude ‘. . . so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name’ (Rev 13:17).
The Greek form of the name Jesus (IESOUS) produces a value of 888. On the same basis, the Greek form of Christ (XRISTOS) has a value of 1,480.
The value of 888 in the spelling of Jesus may be the best explanation for the universal adoption of that name, despite St Matthew’s Gospel announcing that ‘...his name shall be called Emmanuel’ (Matt 1:23).
Mainstream scholars show scant interest in the role that numerology may have played as a motivation to Biblical authors of old.