Salutes, Apologies & The Sacred Art of Joking
And how Britain has truly horrifying laws on free speech.
The other day, I saw something I don’t normally see: a fulsome apology.
It was Graham Linehan, co-creater of Father Ted, apologising to Count Dankula who is… well, let me explain using chapter 23 of my book The Sacred Art of Joking which explains the significance of this and I’m laying it all out here. And the advantage of this substack is that I can include videos to enhance and explain the experience. And should you wish to then purchase The Sacred Art of Joking (an audio version is available read by yours truly), then you will find links at regular intervals below.
You might want to settle in for this one. Ready? Here we go:
Springtime for Pug Dogs
One of my favourite movies of all time is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Perhaps it’s because it was 1989 and I was 14. I’ve always loved Harrison Ford’s lone hero persona. Everything is up to him. If he doesn’t get it done, it won’t get done. This is encapsulated at the start of The Last Crusade when the young Indy is separated from his troop of Scouts. He is all alone and concludes, ‘Everybody’s lost but me.’ It’s a good joke.
When Indy grows up, he has enemies: Nazis. When he sees them for the first time in The Last Crusade, busying themselves pushing counters around maps with long poles the way they do in movies, Indy mutters to himself, ‘Nazis. I hate these guys.’
Nazis are the action-movie director’s greatest friend. They have fantastic, distinctive uniforms, some of which even have skulls on them. In fact, one of Mitchell and Webb’s truly great sketches addresses the very fact:
Nazis are fanatically devoted to their cause, and their Führer. And they have really good, well-engineered kit. The most important thing is this: our hero can kill as many of them as you like and still be a goodie. You would have to go a long way to invent better baddies than Nazis.
Harrison Ford was doubly blessed in this regard. As Indiana Jones, he got to shoot Nazis. In Star Wars, he was able to blast away as many Storm Troopers as he liked as well. And let’s be honest: Storm Troopers are Nazis. Even the name is a bit of a lift. Storm Troopers, or Sturmtruppen, were German shock troops in the First World War.
In today’s common parlance, Nazis are still the embodiment of evil. They are the worst people possible. Perhaps the worst imaginable when one considers the mechanization of mass slaughter that they masterminded.
It Belongs in a Museum!
At the time, Indiana Jones could not have known what the Nazis would be capable of. The first three films are set before the Second World War and so his actions against German soldiers are not entirely justified. To Indy, the worst thing about the Nazis is that they are terrible archaeologists, plundering relics that ‘belong in a museum’. They are attempting to co-opt the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail to manipulate the power of God, in whom Indy scarcely believes.
But who cares about the details and the timelines? We can take what we know now and superimpose it on the Nazis of the 1930s. Cinematically, it works. All is well. We don’t watch films rationally. We watch them emotionally.
Common sense and cool-headedness are often thrown out of the window when we encounter moving pictures. This includes YouTube videos like the one made by Count Dankula. So what did he do?
A Dog called Buddha
Count Dankula, the avatar of Mark Meechan from Lanarkshire in Scotland, decided to annoy his girlfriend by making a video about her sweet little pug dog called Buddha. What’s the most offensive, least cute thing a pug dog called Buddha can do? A Nazi salute whenever someone says ‘Sieg heil’. So that’s what he did. He trained Buddha to do just that. He made a three-minute video of the fruits of his labour and put it on YouTube in 2016.
What makes the video especially unpalatable is his continual attempts to get a response from the dog by saying ‘Gas the Jews.’ Defenders of Dankula might argue that this is a meta-joke, since anti-Semitism is so unacceptable that saying such an offensive phrase is funny. But the main joke is that his girlfriend has been pranked and her adorable dog has been ruined in the most extreme way possible.
In 2017, Meechan was arrested for this video and appeared at Airdrie Sheriff Court. He was charged with perpetrating a hate crime under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. We’ll come to whether that is or is not a good law later, but what had Meechan/Dankula actually done?
One could argue that he had only done what Steven Spielberg and hundreds of other movie directors have done in action movies. He co-opted Nazism for its embodiment of wickedness in order to make a piece of entertainment. Spielberg grabbed the Nazis to make a movie about an archaeological hero. Dankula grabbed the Nazis to make a sick joke at the expense of the girlfriend and her dog, Buddha.
Fellow Youtuber Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg did something similar in 2017. As part of a joke to show ‘how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online’, PewDiePie paid two Indian men five dollars to hold up a sign which contained the words ‘Death to All Jews’.1
Many failed to see the joke. Arwa Mahdawi, writing in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ column, was among them. She wrote:
A joke is never just a joke, you see: it always has consequences. Jokes help identify and solidify social divisions. You either get the joke and you’re one of us, or you don’t get it and you’re one of them. Jokes also help normalize unpalatable ideas. And, unconscious though it may have been, PewDiePie has already helped do just that: helped antisemitism become just a little bit more mainstream.
Indy meets the Führer
But where does this end? One could argue – although I’m not sure I would – that Spielberg is doing something similar in the Indiana Jones movies. In The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones finds himself at a Nazi rally in which books are being burned. Disguised as a German soldier and holding a book which contains key secrets about the Holy Grail, Indy is buffeted into the Führer’s path by a surging crowd. He ends up being face to face with Adolf Hitler himself. They both look at the book in Indiana’s hand. Everything stops.
Hitler holds out a hand and a minion hands him a pencil. Hitler signs his autograph in the book and moves on. Is this making light of the most evil man of the twentieth century? Did it help Nazism ‘become just a little bit more mainstream’?
What is the difference between Indy’s comic encounter with Hitler and the short-lived sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home!? Adolph Hitler and his wife Eva live next door to the Goldensteins. With hilarious consequences. The programme was commissioned by BSB in 1990 (before it merged with Sky).
Again, the joke is not really about Nazism. There was a caption card at the beginning explaining that Heil Honey I’m Home! was a long-lost US sitcom recently rediscovered in some archives in Burbank, California. The joke is that in the 1950s and 1960s, the Americans were used to turning any domestic situation into a sitcom. Hitler was being used to create the worst possible domestic sitcom imaginable.
The show was cancelled after one episode. Artistically this might have been a mercy, since the idea sounds more like a three-minute sketch than six half-hour episodes when the joke might run a little thin.
The Producers
The makers of Heil Honey I’m Home! might have been mystified that they were cut so short given the lengthy career of Mel Brooks, who portrayed Hitler himself many times and wrote numerous sketches about him, such as ‘Hitler on Ice’ from the movie History of the World Part 1.
Brooks’ biggest hit, however, must surely be The Producers, originally a film from 1967 starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. It was remade as a stage musical in 2001, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. This musical version was in turn shot as a new movie in 2005. What is the premise of the story?
Thanks to a timid accountant, a dishonest, washed-up Broadway producer realizes he can make more money with a flop that closes on the first night than he can with a hit. Therefore, he needs a show that will have to close immediately.
The two trawl though script after script before they find the perfect show: Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden. The producer says that it’s virtually ‘a love letter to Hitler’. The play is written by deranged ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind.2
The play is given to the campest and worst director on Broadway, Roger De Bris, and it is rehearsed and presented to an audience who are initially open-mouthed. A few storm out, saying it’s in bad taste. This is, of course, true. It is. That is the point on many levels. The remaining audience see the outlandish portrayal of Hitler and mistake it for a goofy satire, finding it hilariously funny. The show is a smash hit, a catastrophe for the producers, who go to jail for fraud. This neat one-minute trailer covers a lot of ground:
In short, The Producers portrays a character using Nazism as a convenient shorthand for something offensive that is guaranteed to produce a negative reaction. In their videos, Count Dankula and PewDiePie did essentially the same thing. Dankula was arrested, tried and prosecuted for a hate crime. PewDiePie found his links with Disney and Google were severed, possibly costing millions in lost advertising revenue. Mel Brooks won 12 Tony Awards. In one awards speech he publicly thanked Hitler. Even Dankula could not expect to get away with that. Why is that?
Who’s who?
In Part 1 of The Sacred Art of Joking we see how the actual joke is only part of the story. There is a wider context here which includes the identity of the joker. One cannot help but notice that Mel Brooks is at least two things that Dankula is not.
First, Brooks is a highly respected comedian with a long career and proven track record in comedy. Not only is The Producers on his CV, but also The Young Frankenstein, Space Balls, History of the World Part 1 and Blazing Saddles (but let’s not get into that last one right now). Before that he was a writer for numerous hit TV shows. Mel Brooks is a comedy institution.
Dankula is not in that class and does not claim to be. On his Twitter profile, he describes himself as a ‘professional shitposter’. This seems a fair description. He’s an internet contrarian who pushes the limits of free speech and says anti-social things purely because he can.
Moreover, some people who rushed to his defence are not held in high regard in polite company. While high-profile comedians like Ricky Gervais and David Baddiel were vocal in their criticism of the court’s decision, there was also strong support from Tommy Robinson, formerly of the controversial anti-immigrant English Defence League. Robinson created certain associations in the minds of those looking at Dankula’s case. Regardless of the law and his credible supporters, Dankula was never going to create a good impression in the media or in court. (There was also an entertaining reaction video by Jonathan Pie that is NSFW).
Since I wrote this in The Sacred Art of Joking, I should now add this:
One significant voice in comedy who celebrated Dankula’s conviction was Father Ted co-creater, Graham Linehan, who now finds himself on the receiving end of cancel culture, but we will get to that shortly.
Okay, back to that chapter in the The Sacred Art of Joking:
The second pertinent difference between Dankula and Brooks is that the latter is Jewish. Should that matter? Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. It matters because when Brooks portrays camp goose-stepping Nazis and comic versions of Hitler, it is not credible to say that he is secretly in sympathy with Jew-murdering fascists. Some may find Brooks’ comedy to be in poor taste, as some friends of mine did when they went to see The Producers, partly on my recommendation. But they did not come away feeling they had been to a covert Nazi rally or recruitment drive.3
‘The Limo’ Episode
Being Jewish, in this case, obviously puts one at an advantage when covering material that, in the wrong hands, could be open to the charge of appearing to normalize anti-Semitism. Jerry Seinfeld took full advantage in Series 3, Episode 18 of his eponymous sitcom in an episode entitled ‘The Limo’. Jerry and his friend George return from the airport in a limousine that has been sent for a man called O’Brien. Jerry saw O’Brien unable to get on his plane and knows that he will not be claiming this limo. So George, pretending to be O’Brien and Jerry his friend Murphy, takes it. It is only on the journey that they discover that O’Brien is a high-profile neo-Nazi and Hitler admirer who is going to give a speech at a rally. This is all especially funny since George and Jerry are both Jewish.
Given it is Jerry Seinfeld’s show, there is no question of his attempting to normalize, or give a voice to, anti-Semitism. Neither is Spielberg, the maker of Schindler’s List, going to be credibly accused of the same thing for his levity about Hitler in The Last Crusade.
An Odious Criminal Act
Count Dankula is not Jewish. His prosecutors in court were able to suggest that Dankula’s video was ‘an odious criminal act that was dressed up to look like a joke’. His motives were mixed, they argued, or could credibly be construed as such. Therefore, he must be found guilty. The sheriff agreed. I do not. Here’s what I think, in case you’re wondering.
I would happily concede that the joke was misjudged and abhorrent. Technically, it works as a joke, given the incongruity with the pug dog called Buddha – and that the intensity and insensitivity of the language is totally disproportionate. It’s not a joke I would do. But that doesn’t mean that he should not have done it, although I do think less of him for having done so. I also suspect he is uninterested in my opinion of him.
I would have no problem with YouTube, as the host of the video, taking it down since they are a private company (although they are often unclear on their rules and apply them inconsistently). Similarly, Disney and Google were within their rights to sever their links with PewDiePie, even though they should have realized what they were signing up to when they made a deal with him in the first place.
I think the Communications Act of 2003 is a bad law. It is worrying that the only proof required for a conviction is not demonstrable harm, or even clear intent, but the possibility of a joke ‘being construed’ as offensive. Many jokes with clearly noble or harmless intentions could be worthy of a guilty verdict.
Many have applauded the prosecution of contrarian Dankula, but may yet live to see this law enacted against people they like and respect. Or it may be used against them themselves if a joke they have made on Twitter in the past is suddenly branded hate speech.
Some said that Dankula should have known better. The Charlie Hebdo case highlights why this an unhelpful comment in the wider context.
Je ne suis pas Charlie
When two gunmen killed 12 people and injured another 11 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in broad daylight for jokes about Islam’s prophet, the world was horrified and appalled. The phrase ‘Je suis Charlie’ circulated the internet and found its way on to placards and t-shirts, as a mark of solidarity for the dead.
President François Hollande called the shootings a ‘terrorist attack of the most extreme barbarity’, describing those who had been killed as ‘heroes’.4 He declared a day of national mourning. World leaders turned out.
But soon, other comments began to emerge, questioning the wisdom of Charlie Hebdo’s targeting of Islam. In 2012, after another controversial incident, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters,
"We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the Prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this . . . We don’t question the right of something like this to be published, we just question the judgment behind the decision to publish it."5
What is the use of having the right to do something if there will never be a time when that right can be exercised? Does this not go at least some way to condoning the inexcusable murder of those who make jokes we do not like? Surely the right to free speech must be defended? In his preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote, ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ These words are now inscribed on the wall of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House next to a stature of Orwell.
It is difficult to defend free speech, including jokes in poor taste or considered blasphemous, without at least looking as though you partly agree with the joke or find it funny. This is why many do not bother. No one would choose Dankula to be the poster boy for free speech. Rights and freedoms are eroded. The result is politicians rush in with vague laws like the Communications Act 2003. Even if the law were less vague, I would still argue that all Dankula has done is the well-worn comedy trick of grabbing the Nazi trope as many have done before him and will continue to do in the future. He’s done it crudely and unpleasantly, but should that be a crime? I don’t think so.
So here’s the final update on this chapter and the reason why I mention it:
Graham Linehan, a strident critic of trans-culture, especially where it pertains to the safety of women in women-only spaces, has found himself receiving similar and even more expensive treatment than Count Dankula. Not only was Linehan banned from Twitter, but plans for stage production of Father Ted have been shelved, meaning Linehan loses out on a large amount of income far in excess of any court fine.
To his credit, Linehan has had the grace to admit he was wrong about Count Dankula. Weasel words are common. Proper apologies are pretty rare. So here is his laudable, funny and fulsome apology:
There is a lovely irony here. In looking up PewDiePie videos on YouTube, I was immediately confronted with an automatically generated advert – for Fiverr, the kind of website PewDiePie was satirizing with his controversial video.
This is an unusually subtle joke as Liebkind means ‘lovechild’, a bastard. I have only just noticed this despite having seen the West End version of the show once and the movies many times over many years.
Brooks’ comedies about Nazis are not always so brash. In 1983, he produced a remake of a 1942 film To Be or Not To Be, combining slapstick comedy with some raw emotion about the crimes of the Nazi regime in Poland.
‘1 of 3 Suspects in Paris Shootings Surrenders’, Voice of America, 7 January 2015.
White House briefing, 20 September 2012.