Can Swastikas Be Funny?

Cartoon fans are no doubt familiar with the work of Sam Gross, an iconoclastic artist who frequently contributed to National Lampoon during its glory days in the 1970s. (My all-time personal favorite of his cartoons: A couple dining in a restaurant serving frog legs, who watch as a legless frog emerges from the kitchen pushing himself along on a dolly.)

In other words, bordering on very bad taste, but almost always funny.

Now, Gross is pushing that to the limit with his latest book, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons.

The cartoons include a squid giving the Nazi salute to a man who is wearing a swastika armband; a man wearing a swastika telling a like-garbed friend that their pet parrot “talks, but only if you torture him"; a swastika-adorned, match-selling woman on a snowy street telling a friend “I joined because you get to keep warm during the book burnings."

As the New York Jewish Week reports, the controversy has already begun:

“Another symbol falling — now all bets are off,” says essayist-novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who often writes about Holocaust themes. Another symbol of terror in a setting of comedy. Work like Gross’, he says, “trivializes [survivors’] history. It traumatizes people.” Rosenbaum asks, “What’s next?” What aspect of the Holocaust will be the next to become the subject of levity? The tattooed arms? The tortures? “The gassings themselves?” he suggests.

But Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, co-author of The Big Book of Jewish Humor disagrees. The generation laughing at Hitler has the last laugh, he says. “We’re here dancing on his grave.”

For Gross’ part, he says, “I wasn’t trying to horrify anybody.” He simply wanted to “demystify” the swastika, to strip it of its emotional power.