JONATHAN CHAIT MAY 19, 2011
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[Guest post by Ruth Franklin:]
In Cannes the other day Lars von Trier proved, grossly and witlessly, that no amount of irony can catch up with an expression of sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis. Now a similarly pathetic attempt at cute Holocaust humor has appeared in The Daily Beast. The online publication posted a screed by Dale Peck about the death of the book business in which he complained about the industry’s stagnancy. Peck’s pugnacious style is well known, and was honed in the pages of this magazine. But the tagline at the top of Peck’s piece was, even by his hatchet’s standards, a shocker. “[I]f I have to read another book about the Holocaust, I’ll kill a Jew myself,” Peck trumpeted in boldface type. How funny. (Perhaps The New Republic owes Rick Moody an apology.)
And the grim little episode gets worse. Apparently Peck’s editors had second thoughts about the quality of his joke, because an hour later it had been removed. What makes their bowdlerization of Peck’s piece especially noteworthy is that a large part of the piece was a complaint about the recent bowdlerization of Mark Twain by certain stupid publishers. So Peck disgraced himself once, and his editors disgraced themselves twice. Nice work. (But the matter will not be so quickly forgotten: a cached version of the article, with the line intact, is available here.)
15 comments
I hold out hope that the disgusting joke by Peck distracts Marty's Angry Little Fan Club from the inevitable angry response to TNR bloggers' forthcoming comments about his Middle East speech, but I doubt it. Either way, this Peck character shows a stunning callousness here.... there are some of us that still have, in our families, the scars of something that Peck made into a joke. Not. Cool.
- RJSampson1
May 19, 2011 at 3:09pm
It is just beyond disgusting to make jokes like this. An entire people suffered a horrible genocide, the terminal point of which is now only sixty-six years ago. I am a Gentile, but I have long been philo-Semitic and I have always experienced a tremendous sorrow when I contemplate the Holocaust ever since I learned about it growing up. And I cannot even imagine what the sorrow was like for those who perished, for those who experienced the death camps and survived, and for the loved ones at a safe distance of the two aforementioned categories. You just have to be cretin to make a joke like this. I really liked Dale Peck's book on overrated and trendy writers and I think the book still holds up well. But Dale Peck himself doesn't hold up well.
- liberalref
May 19, 2011 at 3:37pm
I'm a big fan of gallows humor, but I second Libref. Some things are just beyond the pale. And some people are beyond reprehensible.
- Tristan
May 19, 2011 at 3:47pm
Yeah, it's STILL too soon to try to make this joke. I suspect it will ALWAYS be too soon to try to make this joke.
- AllanL5
May 19, 2011 at 4:01pm
Is it too soon to point out that the guy has the germ of a decent point, in that the Holocaust is perhaps a tad overexposed in mainstream (i.e. not scholarly) literature, not to mention film? Is a five-year moratorium too much to ask? I know we're supposed to Never Forget, but I'm also pretty sure the body of work already out there is massive enough to earn us a breather, at least as far as popular culture is concerned. A topic which only permits a person with an ordinary amount of empathy and compassion to feel horrified and depressed can only sustain so much cultural scrutiny -- and libref urges us to remember that it "only" ended sixty-six years ago? That's two entire generations! Are we so sure there's a "better" Holocaust story out there still left to tell?
- austinexpat
May 19, 2011 at 5:05pm
Dale Peck is obviously no Nazi or Jew-hater, but he goofed big-time here. I'm generally of the belief [tiny minority belief though it is] that any joke is okay, no matter how offensive the subject matter, if it is funny enough. Yes, that includes the Holocaust. The problem is that no one has ever come up with a Holocaust joke funny enough to justify the offense caused. Perhaps no one ever will. [Not holding my breath for a funny joke about the Killing Fields either.]
- DC Spence
May 19, 2011 at 5:06pm
oy gevalt.
- miceelf
May 19, 2011 at 5:22pm
I agree 100% with DC Spence. We should all hold our cards a little closer to our chest when it comes to tasteless jokes. The real problem was that this was a terrible joke that reminded us of the subject matter much more than it elevated us with wit.
- alphprol
May 19, 2011 at 5:42pm
A century would still be far too close to the stench that was the Holocaust. As Allan poignantly suggests, it will always be too soon for such jokes.
- liberalref
May 19, 2011 at 9:17pm
I generally agree with the spirit of the comments here. The only thing that worries me is that the sacred usually provokes the profane and it's a question whether that should or shouldn't be suppressed in the name of collective solemnity, as austinexpat's post notes. There was a wandering close to the sacred/profane edge in the Seinfeld episode about Jerry and his girlfriend making out at the back of the movie theater during "Schindler's List." I thought it was neatly done -- I don't know if they got serious complaints -- and touched on exactly that problem about humor and the Holocaust. It depends a bit on who does it and a lot on how it's done. Survivors of camps sometimes have a specific satirical perspective about their experience -- maybe it's a kind of principle that irony doesn't cease to be part of human life even in extreme circumstances. But it's not something open to everyone, of course. I remember Marek Edelman of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fame explaining that he had hated meeting American Jews after the war because their mixture of guilt and reverence was so oppressive to him. He kept wanting to say something that would shock them because that would rescue him from the unbearable atmosphere.
- ironyroad
May 19, 2011 at 10:16pm
Your comment is beautiful and discerning, irony. Thank you very much for that. The experience of Marek Edelman is highly instructive. You don't want to treat survivors of hell as museum pieces. I would just add that camp survivors are entitled to their jokes, bitter, sardonic, cathartic, etc. But others are not entitled, at least not in public fora. I understand gallows humor, black humor, and the like, but one needs to tread extremely carefully in these minefields.
- liberalref
May 20, 2011 at 1:11pm
Agreed, libref.
- ironyroad
May 20, 2011 at 2:08pm
Well, it comes down to a free speech issue. Doesn't it? Dale Peck obviously loves to make gallows humor jokes. And he offended a great many people. Now he'll have to live with his stupid behavior, even if the joke was erased, which I thought was a rather Orwellian gesture. And the damage had been done. That said, I understand Peck's point about political correct revisionism in literature. Replacing the n-word for slave in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn diminishes the narrative and how Huck eventually views Jim as a fellow human and not as a slave. But Peck's comment about Jews and the Holocaust was really beyond the pale. But that's what free speech is all about. So Pale exercised his free speech and has to live with the consequences of his words.
- rewiredhogdog
June 11, 2011 at 12:55pm
I read the Holocaust books. I've taught my son and my students to "never forget." But have we truly taken the lessons of the Holocaust to heart? Shouldn't "never forget" encompass a mandate to prevent future genocides, not simply to dwell on past ones? Where were we in Cambodia? The Balkans? Africa?
- Beanfields
July 8, 2011 at 2:33pm
The left's de facto alliance with Islam has led it to embrace anti-Semitism. The Left is at war with western civilization. It is a bizarre, suicidal, stance, a stance to which, sadly, Jews are especially prone.
- bulbman1066
October 4, 2011 at 2:14am