Sometimes I cry during comedies. Ok, all the time I cry during comedies. Most of the time, I get more emotional during comedies than I do dramas. The use of humor to cope with trauma and pain, to me, can be just as powerful and beautiful as attending a religious service. But that being said, I’ve wept openly during everything from Bridesmaids to Superbad to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. I’m moved to tears by the parallels comedic films have to my own life and the ways in which they brought a smile to my face when I needed it. I’ll admit it, I’m a very annoying person to watch a movie with.
I think the first comedic film I ever saw was The Great Dictator. A bizarre choice for parents wanting to introduce their toddler to the joys of comedy, but their choice nonetheless. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) satirizes Hitler and The Third Reich. Such a heavy topic for such a young age. But I do think Chaplin is a great place to start when you dive into the history of comedy, so my parents did at least have a method to their madness. It’s not only one of the most famous comedies of all time, but it’s also one of the most famous in its genre: the “Holocaust humor” genre.
A lot of the comedic movies I remember watching in my childhood embody Holocaust humor in one way or another. It’s a subgenre of comedy that illustrates the symbiotic relationship between healing and humor. After the Holocaust a lot of Jews struggled to make sense of the nonsensical. Unable to fully wrap their minds around the atrocities committed against them, humor became their defense mechanism. From The Great Dictator, I was launched into a world of movies created by Jewish filmmakers who used the art of farce to put into practice the old Yiddish saying, “lachen mit yashtsherkes” which means quite literally “laughing with lizards” or more colloquially “laughing through the tears”.
Holocaust humor became a form of catharsis for Jews, with hundreds of comedic Holocaust movies coming out over the decades since. However, it seems inevitably that all focus on the Holocaust humor genre centers around the same few select movies: The Great Dictator, The Producers, and Inglorious Bastards. Great films, to be sure, but I think there’s a Holocaust comedy that has been excluded from this classics lists, and it just may be one of the most telling films of the genre.
I remember being 16 and watching Harold and Maude for the first time. I remember crying, and laughing, and immediately pressing rewind and watching the movie again. It’s a film that demands to be watched twice. Harold (Bud Cort), a death obsessed, Tim-Burton-character-come-to-life man in his early 20s, meets a 79-year-old ray of sunshine named Maude (Ruth Gordon) while at a funeral. Becoming a dynamic duo, Harold and Maude go on adventures, fall in love, and share in the splendor of life’s little moments. Harold feels lost and misunderstood. His obsession with death is driven by his unfamiliarity with what it means to be alive. He doesn’t feel seen by the people in his life. He lashes out by faking his own death, driving a hearse around town, and terrorizing the people who love him. Maude, by her own example, teaches Harold how to find his own joy in life. She is the grandmother of all manic pixie dream girls.
It’s a movie that demands to be watched again and a movie that demands to have friends dragged to a screening at a local theater for four straight showings. But despite my six-hour chain smoke of Harold and Maude in the theater in 2019, the movie actually came out in the 1970s, at the crossroads of two generational sufferings. Young people felt unsure of the future, unwilling to follow in their parent’s corporate footsteps; while older people were carrying around the weight and trauma of the Great Depression and World War II. This is something that can be easily forgotten when viewing the movie today. A lot of modern criticism of the film neglects the notion that this film is very much a product of its time. In the ‘70s, the Holocaust had only happened 20 years prior, making the trauma of it still fresh in everyone’s mind.
Aside from the hijinks and romance, there is an important detail in the movie that is so fleeting it can be missed by a first-time viewer. Maude is a Holocaust survivor. A single shot reveals her tattoo from Auschwitz where she lost her family and husband. In one poignant scene in the movie, Maude shares with Harold that after the war she moved to America and decided to fight the power every single day through her actions and her treatment of others. No longer interested in large protests or movements for social justice, Maude has reverted to creating change through relationships, connections, and a reclamation of her own happiness.
“Let’s have a toast, Harold,” she said. “To you. As the Irish say, ‘May the path be straight because your feet have trod it.’”
“Thank you,” said Harold and sipped his drink.
“It’s nice.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
He smiled at her.
She smiled back.
He settled into his chair and gestured above the fireplace. “What’s that up there?”
“My umbrella?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, that’s just an old relic. I found it when I was packing to come to America. It used to be my defense on picket lines, and rallies, and political meetings—being dragged off by the police or attacked by the thugs of oppression.” She laughed. “A long time ago.”
“What were you fighting for?” asked Harold.
“Oh, big issues. Liberty. Rights. Justice. Kings died and kingdoms fell. You know, I don’t regret the kingdoms—I see no sense in borders and nations and patriotism—but I do miss the kings. When I was a girl in Vienna, I was taken to the palace for a garden party. I can still see the sunshine on the fountains, the parasols, and the flashing uniforms of the young officers. I thought then I would marry a soldier.” She chucked. “My, my, how Frederick would chide me about that. He, of course, was so serious, so very tall and proper. Being a doctor at the university, and in the government, he thought dignity was in how you wore your hat. That’s how we met. I knocked off his hat. With a snowball in the Volksgarten.” She smiled as she remembered. “But that was all…” – she gazed into the fire— “before.”
As Harold looked at her, she suddenly seemed very small and fragile. He felt tongue-tied and uncertain.
“So, you don’t use the umbrella anymore?” he said, breaking the silence.
She looked at him. “No,” she said softly. “Not anymore.”
“No more revolts?”
“Oh, indeed!” said Maude, sparking back to her old self. “Every day. But I don’t need a defense anymore. I embrace! Still fighting for the big issues but now in my small, individual way.”
Maude’s biggest act of rebellion is in her decision to live. She refuses to back away from life. She refuses to let those who took her home, her love, and her family away from her win. She is reclaiming her power.
Maude’s Jewishness is not lost on a viewer from 1971 when the film came out. It was also not lost on a friend of mine I brought to one of my four theater viewings who upon seeing Maude’s Auschwitz tattoo looked at me and said at full volume so everyone else in the theater could hear, “Of COURSE Maude is Jewish.” Although not widely accepted back in 1971, Maude’s character reflects her generation in the 1970s – trying to find peace and joy in the smallest of moments, appreciating the life she so narrowly was allowed to live. Through their intimacy, Maude achieves her radical goal of creating a genuine human connection with Harold. She teaches him not only how to live, but also the value of laughing when all you really feel like doing is crying. This is a trick that has saved her in her darkest moments.
Despite being a comedy, Harold and Maude is a film saturated in pain. It extends the “laugh so you don’t cry” idea to generational suffering. Harold’s fake suicides can be seen as a joke to some, but to more astute observers they are an expression of deep misery that have no way out other than through comedic beats. This is a very Jewish expression of pain. Harold’s obsession with death is not trivialized through comedy, but rather it is relayed to the audience in a way that shows Harold’s own unfamiliarity with the concept of death. Harold feels dead on the inside, but he really doesn’t know what loss is. He knows what it feels like to feel disregarded and overlooked but not what it feels like to have love taken away from him. Death is something so familiar to Maude she has become desensitized to the idea. She plans out her own death in accordance to how long she thinks a good life takes to live. When she reaches that marker, she’ll be ready to go – on her own terms. Harold will remain, having learned a powerful life lesson. It isn’t until Harold experiences real death, or loss, that he is able to see the value of life – both his and others.
Harold and Maude are a metaphor for the life cycle. Harold is life obsessed with death and Maude is death obsessed with life. Together they are able to reach equilibrium and close the gap between two generations, both lost and grieving. When one human leaves the Earth, another takes their place carrying on their legacy and bringing the same passion for life. Harold will pass on Maude’s teachings to another and when he passes away, that person will teach someone what Harold taught them. Without having to carry her umbrella to the picket line, Maude has made a change in human nature. This metaphor can be seen in the scene where Maude sees a tree that is suffocating in the city. “Harold. We have got to do something about this life!” Maude exclaims before positing the idea that she and Harold take the tree from the city and move it into a forest where it can get better air and sunlight. Maude doesn’t say she has to do something about a tree, she says she has to do something about a life. In the same way that she rescues the tree, allowing it to continue living, she rescues Harold and allows him to live as well.
Humor is something that came naturally to those reeling after the Holocaust. The art of humor was a way to express their pain, and through that expression a new way of feeling was taught to a younger generation. This is similar to the lessons Maude teaches Harold. She teaches him the value of good humor and the value of laughing so he doesn’t cry. At the end of Harold and Maude, Maude kills herself because she decides it is her time to go. Harold, of course, is distraught and angry at her. He says, “You can’t die! I love you!” To which Maude replies, “Good. Now go and love some more.” So, he does. He pushes his hearse off of a cliff, signifying his decision to start living, following Maude’s example. In this act Harold uses creative expression to work through his pain because through humor, as Maude taught Harold, is where we discover the true joys of life, our strength, and our resiliency.
Harold and Maude is a Holocaust humor film that transcends the genre. It gives us a story of love and loss that showed its audience when it came out how young people in the ‘70s had much more in common with older people than they may have previously thought. There was a lot they could learn from those who had been through hell and decided to not let it overtake them. But to future viewers, the film represents the translation of Holocaust humor into a modern context, showing how Holocaust humor is not always explicitly about the Holocaust.
Now 81 years after the Holocaust, Holocaust humor can seem like a lost art. Aside from Taika Watiti’s Jo Jo Rabbit, commercially successful Holocaust comedies are few and far between. At the core of every Holocaust comedy is the message, “laugh through the tears”, a theme that has transcended the genre and become a staple of many dark comedies. Through all of the lessons we watch Maude teach Harold, we see how Holocaust humor moves through generations. It may no longer look like overt jokes about Hitler like in The Great Dictator, but it takes pain and spins it on its head; it takes trauma and uses comedy to cope. The core of Holocaust comedies has been translated into modern issues and provided grievers with the same kind of coping mechanisms.
The humor in Harold and Maude is never discussed in relation to its Jewishness despite having a Jewish director and a Jewish star. Ruth Gordon, who was typecast as a “Jewish mother” almost her entire career. This movie was a welcome departure, but it was also risky. Gallows humor can be tricky because it toes the line of offensive and radical. Harold and Maude shows how the goal of Holocaust humor, and all humor that laughs us through the tears, is one of the most rebellious acts of defiance there is.
The beauty of watching a movie like Harold and Maude is experiencing first-hand the transformative and revolutionary nature of comedy. Humor has a long history of power. Harold and Maude find their power by “laughing through the tears”. It’s a beautiful sentiment that brings generations together and connects those experiencing the same kind of pain. The movie did this in the ‘70s, when it was released, and it’s still doing it today with a new generation of viewers. So be careful out there, or next thing you know you’ll find yourself being forced to be one of those new generation viewers sitting next to me at a limited run screening of Harold and Maude. And maybe we’ll both shed a few tears; for Maude and for the history of comedy.
