Hitler Goes Motown

Am I the only one who finds this youtube video kinda creepy?

Yes, Charlie Chaplin lampooned Hitler decades ago in The Great Dictator (1940). But the critical edge was plain to see. This video, which has Der Fuehrer singing the theme song to The Jeffersons , is more in the spirit of Mel Brooks, who gave Nazism a campy spin in The Producers (1968).  It’s a deflating move, taking evil and turning it into something silly.

But I tend to worry. Is evil being trivialized? Yes, probably. But is that a bad thing?  I think of St. Paul’s mocking words, “where, O Death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). It’s hard to say that verse with the right intonation. We shouldn’t imagine ourselves immune from evil—and we certainly don’t want to let down our guard. But we also should avoid allowing evil to dominate our minds, as if it really had the power to win out in the end.

St. Augustine reasoned that because everything is created by God and is good, evil must be nothingness, the negation of reality. Therefore, it’s not surprising that evil can become comical—there’s something absurd in weird goal of evil, which is to become powerful enough (real enough) to destroy reality.

So, yes, I’m unsettled by the video. But I’m also unsettled at funerals by the Church’s insistence that death has no final power.