Should we be laughing at dictators?

Columns

Published: 05 May. 2024, 19:59

Should we be laughing at dictators?

Michael Green
The author is CEO of the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Last month North Korea released a new musical hit praising Kim Jong-un as “Friendly Father” which featured thousands of uniformed North Korean soldiers and party members bouncing up and down in unison to the sugary yet militaristic melody. On the same day Taylor Swift released her new album, though I doubt she is worried about much competition from the Friendly Father.

The whole thing was ridiculous, of course, but will anybody ridicule Kim for the idiotic levels his cult of personality has reached? Maybe they should.

Humor has long been a weapon that terrifies dictators.

North Korea has embarked on a new campaign to praise its leader Kim Jong-un, as seen in its newly released video titled “Friendly Father.”
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In the 1940 comedy The Great Dictator, the actor Charlie Chaplin portrayed a laughable Adolf Hitler-like figure. This was before the United States was in the war, and the isolationist America First Movement was urging neutrality. Headlined by flying hero Charles Lindbergh, The America First Movement had drawn large crowds across the country who harboured anti-war and anti-European views but also often sympathized with Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini whose authoritarianism they admired and contrasted to the progressive agenda of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (Trump’s supporters evoke all of this by naming their foreign policy “America First” and showing similar disdain for Europe and sympathy for Vladmir Putin). Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator burst their bubble by making Hitler an object of ridicule rather than admiration. Among the best scenes in this hilarious movie is one portraying the Hitler character’s first meeting with an Italian dictator made to look like Mussolini. To ensure propagandists gave the German leader the spotlight, Chaplin’s character saws the legs off the Italian dictator’s chair so that he would be sitting only inches from the ground with Chaplin towering over him. The slapstick scenes that followed delighted American audiences and will still make people laugh. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards in Hollywood and remains a classic in the genre. The theme was also picked up by other comics at the time, including the Three Stooges who put out a movie mocking Mussolini and Hitler called “You Natzy Spy.”

At the time Chaplin began filming the movie, the British government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was pursuing the policy of appeasement towards Hitler. London announced that it would not allow the film to be shown lest it upset the Nazi regime in Berlin. This was a shameful, if forgotten, chapter in the larger disaster that was appeasement. By the time the film was released in 1940, however, Britain was at war with Germany and British audiences were treated to Chaplin’s comic roasting of their enemy. History is never kind to democracies that self-censor criticism of dictators. When comedy is censored, the governments of the day look particularly petty and small-minded. All too often progressive governments and scholars have made this same mistake with respect to the regime in Pyongyang. It is taken as an article of faith by many that one must show respect to dictators to advance diplomacy. Perhaps that is true for diplomats to some extent, but free societies should always be free to laugh at the excesses of dictators and their cults of personality. Humor is part of what makes free societies stronger. And free.

A powerful example is Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine who was a professional comedian before becoming President and leader of his country’s brave resistance against Putin’s brutal invasion. Zelensky has deployed humor with great strategic effect. When he was offered an escape from the capital of Kiev by NATO forces at the beginning of the invasion, he defiantly and humorously declared to the world, “I need ammunition … not a ride.” NATO and the other democracies gave him the ammunition and Ukrainian forces humiliated the Russian army. Zelensky constantly mocks Putin, who remains vulnerable to comic derision like all dictators. When Russian forces were routed but Putin continued to maintain that the so-called “Special Operation” was proceeding according to plan, Zelensky asked sarcastically how many dead Russian soldiers were part of that plan. His humor has been a powerful demonstration of his contemptful defiance of Moscow and has inspired the free world.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has displayed an authoritarian leader’s typical fear of being mocked. When Chinese citizens began using the image of Winnie the Pooh — the fat bumbling cartoon bear — as a proxy online for their view of Xi and his growing cult of personality, the Chinese Communist Party banned all images of the lovable Disney character. That a widely popular character in a children’s story would so frighten the leadership in Zhongnanhai was telling.

Donald Trump reveals his own authoritarian tendencies when he attacks American comedians who mock his many mockable attributes.

Real democratic leaders do not fear humor. I remember visiting Warsaw in the 1980s as a student. Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain and the Cold War was in its final intense phase. Walking along the streets of the city, I passed the North Korean Embassy, which featured an enormous billboard praising construction of a new hydroelectric dam. Nobody passing by was interested.

Down the street, the U.S. Embassy had a slightly smaller billboard which displayed satirical illustrations by the American cartoonist Herb Block poking fun at President Ronald Reagan. A large crowd was gathered in front of that sign marvelling that in democracies you can make fun of your leaders without repercussions. Reagan never resented being mocked and often used humor as a weapon to disarm his political counterparts or to point out the moral failings of communism.

But while humor has always been an important weapon for democracies to counter dictators, it has its limits like all weapons. And its risks.

Charlie Chaplin later acknowledged in 1964 that he would not have made The Great Dictator had he known at the time about the true extent of the holocaust and the murder of millions in Hitler’s concentration camps.

Similar considerations might temper the deployment of humor towards the North Korean regime. The Yodok camps in the North are a massive affront to humanity and should perhaps temper our use of humor in dealing with the regime in Pyongyang … but concerns that we might hurt the feelings of the Friendly Leader should not.