The Fuhrer was not amused

‘The German sense of humour,’ Mark Twain famously observed, ‘Is no laughing matter.’ Although many Greeks, stretched on the Euro’s rack at Berlin’s behest, may be inclined to agree, Rudolph Herzog’s intriguing study of humour in and against Hitler’s Germany, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany, proves conclusively that the Teutonic funny bone, while it may be difficult to locate, definitely exists.

Herzog, the son of the great German film director Werner Herzog, has written a book that is at once an anthology of German jokes current under the Third Reich, an analysis of their evolution as a weapon of resistance against Nazi rule, an insight into how Europe’s most industrious and inventive people capitulated to an insane ideology, and the witty ways, laced with heavy irony, that they dealt with this major mistake. The jokes in the book, Herzog argues, were the only weapons available to most people to resist their terrible regime.