02-03-2021, 02:40 PM
(02-03-2021, 01:41 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Communists have no sense of humor.
Humor goes badly in totalitarian minds. I recall reading The Man in the High Castle, with the hero lamenting that there was little humor available. Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante... no Marx brothers, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Carl Reiner, Don Adams, Jerry Lewis, Alan King, Harvey Korman, Joan Rivers... see the connection? Philip K. Dick didn't mention Lucille Ball, Don Knotts, Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Tim Conway, either, but they needed Jewish writers. I doubt that Monty Python-like sketches would survive in the Third Reich.
The Soviet system was good for jokes, but telling them was not good for freedom, let alone holding a desirable job. A spoof that I saw of the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic showed the absurdities of the system, but one line in that spoof went "Regime jokes get jail detention"...
I doubt that it is safe to crack much of a joke in Iran, Syria, or North Korea. I doubt that comedians poked much fun at Apartheid, either.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.