TONYS FOR THE PRODUCERS

Now that "The Producers" has been awarded a record number of Tonys and the Broadway show is sold out for years in advance and everybody (it seems) is raving about it, it is time someone took a look at the phenomenon of the mass appeal of tastelessness. There's no accounting for taste, as they say, and analyzing the psychology of humor can take the humor out of it. According to Freud, exposing some hidden anti-social tendency in a harmless surprise makes a person laugh. The process is very mysterious and by anthropomorphizing, it sometimes looks to us like cats, dogs and chimpanzees can smile as well. What do they think is so funny? What is funny?

A man slips and falls on a banana peel and that is funny. That is the basis of slapstick--- pratfalls. Why is it funny, sometimes, to see another person in an awkward position? The Germans called it 'schadenfreude,' literally, shameful joy--- taking satisfaction in someone else's misfortune. It is 'schadenfreude' to be happy that grandpa died and I can buy a BMW with my inheritance money. It is 'schadenfreude' to be glad when someone I can't stand is hurt in an automobile accident. Schadenfreude is so unfriendly and anti-social that most people hide the feeling, either consciously or unconsciously.

What does 'schadenfreude' have to do with "The Producers?" I think the collective glee of the audience and critics of Mel Brooks' remake of his 1967 movie is 'schadenfreude." The movie was outrageous at the time, and even considered courageous, but it was viewed as so funny that the humor outweighed the outrage. It did the seeming impossible, making a comedy out of a spoof of Hitler, the Nazi party, the Gestapo, and such notables as Goebbels, Goering and Himmler. Of course they left out Eichmann. Hard to find something funny about him. But Hitler, yes. In the movie, Hitler wanted to smash France and smash England, and he was frustrated that he couldn't smash Germany. Hilarious! Brooks again skillfully avoids the fact of Hitler wanting to exterminate every last European Jew and as many other assorted Gypsy and Slavic 'vermin' the German death machine could exterminate.

I find it hard to see what can possibly be funny about Hitler or the Nazis, the Swastika or the German uniform. In order to give in to laughter, to fun, to enjoyment of an evening of expensive ($100) entertainment, the audience has to forget about or dissociate the show from the realities of World War II and the Holocaust. Many critics have praised Mel Brooks for his ingenuity in spoofing the apparently un-spoof-able. One critic went so far as to assert that Mel Brooks buried Hitler. All I can see is that Mel Brooks revived Hitler. In the show, Hitler is not such a bad guy after all, just a little wild and crazy, almost a sympathetic character, he is so endearing in his delusions of grandeur. This is not the same man who exploited German anti-Semitism and advocated killing Jewish babies, along with their brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. This is the same man who danced a jig on the Champs Elysée on the fall of France, whose SS ferreted out Anne Frank and had her murdered, along with the rest of her family.

Some explain the phenomenon of "The Producers" as a backlash to the overly sensitive restrictions of political-correctness, which advocates extreme sensitivity to the feelings of members of disadvantaged and minority groups, even to the point of infringing on the rights to free speech. Little thought is given to the suppressed revulsion of many Jews and sympathetic others, that Hitler and Nazi Germany have been lightened up for the purpose of entertainment and making lots of money. And shamefully, the producers of the show are Jews, rationalizing that they are doing the world a service by making us laugh. They are laughing all the way to the bank, listing dangerously close to the recurrent stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew.

Roger Ebert is a great movie reviewer, and his reviews go back almost four decades. Because of the recent phenomenon of the Broadway show revival of "The Producers," he reviewed the film again and had this to say:

"This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness an audacity so liberating that not even "There's Something About Many" rivals it. The movie was like a bomb going off inside the audience's sense of propriety. There is such rapacity in its heroes, such gleeful fraud, such greed, such lust, such a willingness to compromise every principle, that we cave in and go along."

Think about it--- a bomb going off in our sense of propriety... a willingness to compromise every principle... we cave in and go along.

I cannot help but wonder whether our collective caving in and going along with media outrageousness has destroyed our sense of outrage, our sense of propriety. I also wonder whether this "caving in" on values, principles, morals and priorities has contributed to parents accepting outrageous behavior from their kids. The lack of a sense of propriety seemingly condones and enables ultimately destructive behavior, possibly leading to the current spate of school shootings, kids killing kids in neighborhoods, rampant cocaine addiction and the AIDS epidemic.

Perhaps it's time to think more deeply about what's funny, what we are laughing at and making light of. It's time to pay more attention to what is going on around us and time to stop caving in. It's time to stop sleep-walking and wake up.

Dr Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the Wayne County Medical Society. He welcomes comments at his email address--- vbloom@comcast.net.