War Comedy - when will we go back to realizing how funny war is?

I recently saw two TV episodes, one of Hogan's Heroes, and one of McHale's Navy. I had forgotten just how funny death and destruction can be. War comedies seem to be one of the strangest of genres, far stranger than horror or the most fictional of science fiction. Making funny characters out of nazis seems to be lost on contemporary audiences. Will it make a return any time soon?

Do movies like Stalag 17, Operation Petticoat, MASH or Men Who Stare at Goats, have a future in them and why or why not?

I remember Kelly's Heroes (1970) being a mix of war, action and comedy.

And then there was the highly underrated Which Way to the Front? (1970)

I better stop because I'm just thinking of one after another now!

Jojo Rabbit came out in 2019.

Aw. Typed a 4-pages long response, ended up disagreeing with me.

But in short :

No matter the intention, laughing about a thing can offend both those who glorify it ("how dare you disrespect it") and those who oppose it ("how dare you make light of it"). In a time and age where online crowds easily snowball against each others, with the rallying cries of "burn it all down" and "how dare you even criticize it", maybe better play it safe for a while. Until we learn to snap out of binary grand posturing.

Satire and dark humor, especially on sensitive subjects, aren't really welcome, nowadays. They used to serve a given discourse, to promote an author's opinion, but now we analyze them beyond it, and denounce them beyond their explicit intents. We look at implicit representations, unintended messages, etc. Which opens two fronts instead of one (for instance : disrespect for the culprits, disrespect for the victims). What's left is an uncomfortable, unforgiving tightrope.

Hopefully this is just a cultural moment, and we'll eventually go back to daring. To leaving the responsibility of misinterpretations to the public itself. To accepting that no work is pure, and that impurities don't disqualify it. And to funding all those masterpieces that "couldn't be made today".

(Because, if you ask me, La Vita e Bella is a damn good movie.)

"1941" - Many hate it, but I quite enjoyed it. " Catch-22" is another one with mixed reviews. You could add "Slaughterhouse 5" , but that is more fantasy than war.

Does In the Loop count?

The way I see it, if you're going to attempt to make comedy out of difficult subject matter (especially in a way that is liable - if not guaranteed - to end up being "offensive"), then you're setting yourself a really high bar to clear and it shouldn't be surprising that so many people's attempts to clear that bar quite simply fail to do so. It's not that satire and dark humour aren't welcome, it's that (as with so many kinds of art/entertainment) so much of it tends to be quite simply bad for one reason or another. Maybe an author is going for basic shock value and nothing else. Maybe an author ostensibly means well but their good intentions are buried by the poor quality of the final product (by this logic, you should have laughed at every single comedy you've ever seen because you know that they are trying to make you laugh). Maybe this is just the nature of art where no single piece of work is guaranteed to please everyone (much less the artworks that actively trade in potential controversy) - for all the talk of snapping out of "binary grand posturing", I could definitely argue that this post assumes a binary of "offended" and "not offended" that doesn't take into account that there might actually be good reason to take offence at a particular work.

Take Jojo Rabbit (which was mentioned earlier in the thread since it's arguably the most famous recent example of a war comedy). This film came out less than two years ago, is a self-proclaimed "anti-hate satire" about a Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend is a cartoonish version of Hitler and who befriends a Jew hiding in his house, and earned all sorts of acclaim/awards up to and including an Oscar. That's the opposite of "not welcome" in terms of broader film culture, but that doesn't automatically mean that literally everyone will like it or think that it is actually a well-made satire about Nazis and the Holocaust (I definitely come down on the side of it not being a good film for a variety of reasons). As a result, I don't think that there's some current cultural moment where filmmakers are afraid to be daring - besides, isn't the whole point of a dare that it's difficult and most likely going to fail? It shouldn't be surprising when a "daring" film fails, then. Even the "couldn't be made today" line doesn't even fly considering that a comedy icon like Jerry Lewis made a Holocaust film back in 1972 and then refused to let people see it for over fifty years.

Anyway, yeah, war comedy. Tough to nail down at the best of times so no surprise that they're uncommon and tend not to be very good.

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I can't imagine that JoJo Rabbit would have happened without the much earlier The Producers. It's worth noting that director Mel Brooks grew up Jewish, was in the Battle of the Bulge and had one of the scariest assignments in any war, defusing unexploded bombs. He got out of that gig by taking joining an entertainment corps. He'd seen worse things than most of us can ever imagine, so that crazy song and dance sequence, Springtime for Hitler, really must rank way up there with "funny war episodes". I saw it years after it was new, not knowing what it was and had a facial expression not unlike the audience in the movie, until I realized that the rest of the audience thought it was funny too. It's been parodied since then, but I also recall an interview with Mel that took place around the time that a Broadway version was launched in which he said that, if he'd let the Nazis take away his sense of outrageous humor, they might as well have killed him.

Then there is the 2019 iteration of Catch 22. It’s a show but arguably the best-known war satire. I prefer the ‘70s version, but still, it’s there.

One of the darkest and most cynical of war comedies was Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. Considering the fate of the world at the end of the movie, I can see why there never was a sequel.

I'd much rather laugh at war than fight one.

People should maybe try to get offended about more important things.

I would think there’s nothing more important than war if one is in the middle of one. Cannot even imagine the people of Syria having a laugh about their circumstances just at the moment. Just to name one war-devastated place.

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Not sure which comedy you're referring to. White Helmets?

Comedy is notoriously execution-dependent. Bad comedy is offensive on general principle. I don't believe that it's in the subject matter, but the context and craft of the wit, that comedy should be judged. As has been pointed out, certain tragedies, expecially contemporary ones, have a higher bar for sensitivity. A comedy about the ****storm in Syria could be funny, but it would need to be very funny indeed, and hopefully hit the right targets (like Tulsi Gabbard maybe).

It use to be that people had balls and could poke fun at anything, even war. Nowadays we're all a bunch of pusses. I bet 3 out of 5 people are offended my opinion

I don’t think everyone is a bunch of pussies. Society is just capitulating to the perpetually offended.

Well said! Though I guess if one capitulates against their own beliefs just to appease the crowd, then one would be a pussy.

I'll reiterate my point: Society might be better off if more people directed their offended energies into those people who drop chlorine bombs on children, as well as their denialist enablers, than into movies that may remind them of how little of the news they bother to read.

Sure. We’ll be lucky if there are any beliefs left at this rate.

Just continuing with a list of "war comedies" that haven't already been mentioned (just ones off the top of my head & not all deal with the subject of war per se, or take place during a war, but may just be military comedies)...

Gunga Din (1939)
You're in the Army Now (1941)
To Be or Not To Be (1942)
At War with the Army (1950)
Mister Roberts (1955)
No Time for Sergeants (1958)
The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960)
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966)
Private Benjamin (1980)
Stripes (1981)
To Be or Not To Be (1983)
Good Morning Viet Nam (1987)
Hot Shots (1991)
In the Army Now (1994)
Canadian Bacon (1995)
Down Periscope (1996)
Wag the Dog (1997)
Three Kings (1999)
Inglorious Basterds (2009)

You used an emoji instead of using the proper punctuation. That really offends me!

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