The Laughter of Life and Death. Personal Stories of the Occupation, Ghettos and Concentration Camps to Educate and Remember
Przemysław P Grzybowski strefa.academia.edu
P.P.Grzybowski: The Laughter of Life and Death. Personal Stories of the Occupation, Ghettos and Concentration Camps to Educate and Remember. trans. Agata Cienciała, John Eric Starnes, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego, Bydgoszcz 2020. 276
The research on which this article is based, attempts to portray the role and function of humor during the period of the Holocaust and to examine what types of humor were used by the Jews in the Holocaust. The interviews were conducted as semi-open ethnographic interviews with 55 Israeli Jewish Holocaust survivors (31 women and 24 men), who were in their teens or twenties during the Holocaust and were imprisoned in ghettos, concentration camps and/or work camps and experienced or used humor. The main question in all interviews was: “Can you tell about humor during the Holocaust?” Humor was defined as “anything that made you laugh or smile.” Results yielded that humor during the Holocaust served primarily as a defense mechanism.

Internet Site: Humor and laughter can help strengthen and heal mental and physical health, but can it assist in dealing with a trauma as severe as the Holocaust? The book demonstrates how humor helped in coping with the terrible reality. Interviews with survivors describe horrific events, intertwined with macabre humor. Humor during the Holocaust did not lessen the objective experiences but alleviated the emotional response to the horrors. The author classifies the types of humor, and studies their functions in the ghettos, concentration camps and death camps. Included in the book are humorous ditties, songs and cabaret sketches, as well as the unique stories of two ghetto clowns.

In Germany, the years of the Great War were a time for laughter. If we take a look at the production and consumption of goods that were designed to make people laugh – humour commodities – we get the impression that until November 1918 many Germans were eager to pay for papers, plays, or performances that promised a chance for laughter. By distinguishing and at the same time parallelising laughter provoked by conventional comic material and laughter about topics related to the war experience, I wish to promote a broadened view on the question of humour in wartime. One can subsume these findings under two different perspectives, a semiotic perspective and one which I call selfreferential. By semiotic I mean all the functions following from the semantic potential of funny texts.The paper contrasts this analytic perspective with a different reading; it is based on the assumption that generally humorous communication and laughter are used in everyday life for attaining goals that are partially or even to a great extent independent of the concrete semantics of the texts. One might call it a symbolic and selfreferential use of humour insofar as it aims above all at generating socio-emotional effects in the persons or the groups who laugh. To put it simpler: Laughing can be an end in itself, and it can serve as a means for mood management irrespective of its cause. The paper draws on analytical proposals by Mary Douglas, Max Weber, Anton Zijderveld, Willibald Ruch and others to elaborate on the idea of laughing in and at war as a selfreferential praxis.

Peter Barnes's historical play, Laughter! (1978) deals with the notion of laughter in a critical way through its representation of two parts, Tsar and Auschwitz. Laughter in Barnes's play does not solely function to relieve misery or pain, but, rather intensifies the suffering of the characters who are exposed to various challenging situations in the course of the play. Through the analysis of ideology and the use of power, the aim of this article is, therefore, to discuss the portrayal of laughter and its problematic nature with its double sides in Barnes's play Laughter! in order to reveal how laughter can also be a source of agony and misery rather than elation and happiness.