Late last month, it very nearly ended: a meme that had, weirdly, endured for years. When the copyright notices finally came to YouTube, and some of the videos were removed–well, they came far too late, and too few. Many of the videos survived, further extending the life of a joke that was never that funny to begin with.
If, as Mark Twain contended, nothing can stand against the assault of laughter, then the "Hitler Reacts" meme was tantamount to poking a dead horse. And yet, for years, everyone felt compelled to pick up their poking sticks and get to work on it. The conceit is one of shallow dissonance: scenes from 2004's Downfall, a carefully researched German-Austrian film depicting Adolf Hitler's final days/meltdowns, are re-"translated" such that a rant about, say, the ineptitude of academy-taught generals can be recalibrated as a fiery condemnation of Kanye West. The onslaught of bad news in Berlin in the spring of 1945 became a recognizable torrent of web-based gossip, in-jokes, opinion and backlash. Adolf, in a groaningly meta moment, has even railed against the popularity of his own meme. That iteration lands with a thud, as do the rest, no more than spasms of neuroticism and insecurity among online subcultures. Of course our digital ephemera matter-even Hitler is aware of this stuff.
This analysis assumes that we're not simply seeing a shadow of ourselves in Hitler's juvenile apoplexy over being banned from Xbox Live, or the animating of an argument that is better crystallized in Louis C.K.'s formulation that "everything's amazing and nobody's happy." Our angst concerning an item as objectively miraculous as an iPad is a mystery worth plumbing, sure, but the modified Downfall clips can only regurgitate the phenomenon itself, their satiric mojo wholly contingent on a perverse fascination with the 20th century's most reviled mutant. Moreover, it would take an uncommon finesse to turn a sincere and nuanced portrayal of the man into a worthy one-sided joke.
To date, no YouTube artist has proved equal to the task.
Not that it needed doing in the first place. We've been laughing at Hitler since we realized there was a Hitler to laugh at. Around the time Fritz Lang was forced to encrypt and allegorize the contagion of Nazism in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), a spazzed-out, homicidal and consistently foiled Führer was popping up in Warner Brothers cartoons. But with Chaplin's infamous first talkie, The Great Dictator (1940), Adolf Hitler (or "Adenoid Hynkel," in a cuttingly Hebraic approximation) became more than a joke for stateside audiences, worse than just some fussy, furious buffoon: he was now a racist, megalomaniacal, influential buffoon who danced sincerely with an inflatable globe to Wagner.
Its controversy-sense atingle, United Artists panicked halfway through production; Chaplin held fast to his aims, adamant that Hitler be lampooned without mercy. Harry Hopkins, a top FDR adviser, showed up to encourage him. The U.K. first moved to ban the film in keeping with an appeasement policy, then welcomed it as propaganda. It became Chaplin's highest-grossing picture and an enduring demolition of anti-Semitism-though he would later insist that had he known of the genocide then unfolding, he could not have made it.
Ernst Lubitsch had no such qualms in filming the all-time greatest send-up of Nazism, To Be Or Not To Be (1942), at a time when people were far less willing to accept fascists as clowns. The film's suspenseful/farcical plot, which hinges on a Polish actor's ability to imitate Hitler, drew the same charges of trivialization that Spielberg would levy against Roberto Benigni's bittersweet Life Is Beautiful (1997) in arguing that no good Holocaust movie should come across as funny, or indeed entertain at all. Need I bother throwing this hypocrisy back in his face? To lose sight of Hitler and his minions as amusing grotesques is to miss the verifiable truths upon which Mel Brooks' The Producers (1968) turns: laughter is a subversion of the otherwise impenetrably serious-watch a couple minutes of Valkyrie (1998) to see what I mean-and comedy grows through the cracks of tragedy like a weed.
It's no accident that these seminal films play with the idea of Hitler doppelgängers, Hitler as performance, Hitler being not so much a man as a body of symbols and gestures and twisted rhetoric that galvanized a humiliated nation. While weak Hitler comedy relies on shock, frivolity and invention, strong Hitler comedy acknowledges tension, takes real risks and pulls on a thread of extant silliness until the whole uniform unravels: The forelock of hair always loosened on cue by his vigorous nods. The overripe, overrehearsed rhythms of his speeches. Chaplin's dictator, to drive the point home, speaks a frothy Teutonic gibberish that is then ‘translated' into too few English words-the missing 90%, we can safely assume, is filler spectacle.
The "Hitler Reacts" meme essentially mangles that gag while never getting so much as a toehold on the trending topic du jour. It doesn't help matters that inane 21st-century setbacks find no harmony when layered onto the trauma of World War II. Even while those minding the copyright said otherwise, Downfall's director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, sanctioned these videos, in spite of their failure as pop-cultural commentary. "The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality," he said. "I think it's only fair if now it's taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like."
You can't blame him for being diplomatic; most artists welcome wider exposure. Still, I wonder if he actually believes that an effort to de-mythologize a mass murderer is in any way compatible with a movement to make him the official mascot of fanboy ire.
RATINGS 
(characteristics rated on a negative to positive scale of -10 to 10):

Flexibility: -4.8
Insight: -9.1
Aesthetic: 1.7
Redundancy Potential: -10.0
Confusing To Outsiders: -5.3
Final Meme Score: -27.5
Miles Klee is on your Internet.
The only Hitler videos I saw mocked the earnest humorlessness of fanboy rage rather than condoning it. Then again, I only saw two of the things, so it might not have been a representative sample.
I'm glad the meme is dying out, but on the bright side, it did get me interested to see Downfall. That's a good thing, right?
Also, "objectively miraculous"? Really?
Yes really. I am also continually amazed by airplanes.
As to the first point, Hitler seems to usually just paraphrase a consensus opinion rather than call attention to the opinion's absurdity, but there are enough half-assed versions out there that it's hard to generalize
Anything with Bruno Ganz is a good thing.
Hey sexy...
Also, I blame the move from existence as a wonder to function as a requirement. See the move in our educational system from traditional liberal arts to a more technocratic focus.
Everyone should read up on why Central Park's south half is manicured and functional while the north half is undeveloped and less functional.
Hint: It's not because rich white people hate the poor blacks in Harlem.
The same is true for memes. Memes, when viewed through the prism of functionality seem trivial. That's where everyone screws up. Memes become memes because of popularity. Usage. Not because they have some function (as in they have to be funny to be worthwhile).
In that way, trying to create a sociological study of them becomes a long winded lack of understanding of why a meme is popular.
It is because it is.
Not everything needs to be deconstructed and put in a mathematical formula or bottled to be exploited by viral propaganda theory bs.
Some put flowers in their garden in an orderly manner to complement colors or provide a smelly menage that is akin to a cologne for the soul.
Others just like the pretty things - wheeee.
I guess "objectively miraculous" does work in a "what times we live in" sense. We're so jaded that magic cordless light-up slates are a letdown because they don't do something really basic like multitask. Fair enough!
This seems to be a variant of the argument that repeated exposure to movie/tv violence desensitizes the population to real violence. I think the popularity of the meme stems largely from knowledge of Hitler and his actions and not from ignorance (frat boys and such excluded). Captioning Hitler reduces him to buffoon status, negating his Weltanschauung. I'm with Brooks and Hirschbiegel: no sacred monsters.
Completely agree. However, and this is somewhat emberassing (and may get some ire directed at me), I tried using this argument once in relation to a variant of the word Negro. I was in college and used that word (and many other racist/sexist/prejudiced words and phrases freely) precisely for this reason (or at least that's what I claimed, I also just liked the shock value of it). So I said something about a bed frame being "rigged" in a certain way, using the N word. Little did I know, in the room with me was a light-skinned African-American. He did not take kindly to my casual usage of this word. I stood my ground and made my argument, that using it was a form of disempowering the word and stripping it of its meaning, etc, etc. Needless to say, after a reaming in front of a group of people, I don't use shocking words anymore (at least not so carelessly). It has made me somewhat ambivelant about this argument, though, upon reflection just now, it still resonates with me.
Yeah it's not a problem of ignorance; it's a problem of not bothering to make your comedy smart because you can just ride a dead formula instead. And unfortunately putting your opinions in Hitler's mouth doesn't make him a buffoon, rather, we identify too closely with his rage. I don't want a sacred monster either, but this meme went a long way toward building him an online shrine, however "self-aware" it was
You must have never seen the Oasis one.
I think the online shrine is to the meme, not the man. As for identifying too closely with his rage--I just don't get that, nor the "putting your opinions in Hitler's mouth" bit. I probably haven't seen as many of the videos as you, but the ones I have seen were trying for comic effect rather than attempting to impose viewpoints.
Well said, irishbreakfast. I am a huge fan of MK (the quality of whose prose stylings, btw, I must take a moment to say YAY! about) but I do think he has missed an essential point, here. This meme, taken as a whole, is like a shaggy dog story; its very tediousness is itself the point. The Hitler in question, by this time, doesn't even vaguely resemble anything like a "real" representation of Hitler; he is just a generic foam-spitting maniac, now, all his Hitlerness worn off because this one is so very mad about so many silly things. Which is another joke, given that the original film is famous for the care with which it was made, so to reduce the carefully-made thing to a sort of Banksy-like squib is funny in itself, and it's tediously funny, kind of like when Harpo keeps making people hold his leg all the way through the movie.
And as irishbreakfast points out, there's never a "real" viewpoint espoused--it's always a spoof one. It's pretty much invariably been used to poke fun at excess itself, right?
Anyways I never tire of Downfall parodies. Or of this column. More please.
If only we had newspapers to tell people what they should be interested in or think.
Aw.
Ultimate extreme rejection. "I have 20 friends who are the smartest most popular, but I hate those millions of uneducated basement dwellers who keep making things I think are crass - but strangely more popular than what I do."
End quote.
"Worst part is they don't tell us special people what is a meme until long after it's popular and then run away from it the minute we want to join the fun."
Begin quote.
Classic.
Pssst, though, do you think you can hook me up with a date with Doctor Disaster? Unless he's like a cousin or nephew cuz that would be ewwww.
@barnhouse point taken about the tedium of the puppetry! There WAS something funny about the dogged way people kept churning out videos for every blip in the news cycle -- and the ever-expanding scope of Hitlers interests.
@jeff you wily weirdo, I never accused anyone of crassness, only laziness. I like "offensive" comedy but I want it done right. Also I try to wait till a meme runs its course before picking it apart. Also I have far, far fewer than 20 friends.
Frat boys excluded? I know we're used to those "startling surveys that Americans remarkably don't even know the most obvious shit, but c'mon. People know who Hitler was, and what he did on a basic level.
Agree with irishbreakfast & barnhouse on this one. The meme is built upon and plays with a fictional and a fixed representation of Hitler; it is not directly engaging with Hitler the man, not trying to make any meaning of him, as even an original parody would.
Let's also not give too much credit to Downfall, the movie, either. It is good, in terms of a well-made film, and also a much-welcomed and new representation of the character of Hitler (as man -- sorta) in the grand Hitler genre but it is just a good movie (in a very, very standard sense), not some great service to mankind or tool against fascism. Love Bruno Ganz but it always struck me that having this beautiful, doe-eyed, & politically-uninterested little secretary as the very sympathetic protagonist and at least, in my opinion, representation of a normal-not-insanelikecrazyeyesGoebbels-- was a pretty easy way out for Germany-at-large. Not that I'm of the school that believes the whole population should be deeply and totally accountable but her face was just a little TOO innocently adorable, right? Anyway.
There was a very weak version that popped up last year in the Florida senate race that showed Hitler angry that Marco Rubio beating Charlie Crist in the polls.
Watching the mainstream press and a bunch of old Florida republicans trying to make sense of it, and then try to blame it on the opposing side was of course much more funny than any of these videos.
From what I could tell in the endless email forwards and blog posts/comments over the years, most people that made and/or watched these parodies had never even heard of Downfall, which somehow makes the parodies even worse.
Bah! Funsucker. I could watch Hitler mashups all day. Some of them were just lovely.
You almost made me feel bad about my Hitler joke in yesterday's comments about the horny airport photog. Almost.
Sorry, I stopped reading at "a joke that was never that funny to begin with." The first Hitler video I saw was the Tony Romo/Cowboys one and I cried with laughter for 2 days. I won't be made to feel bad about that. Closes tab!
I respect this move
The Romo one was indeed a gas.
You what the Internet needs less of as well? Meme-experts.
God how you bore me
I assign this riposte an arbitrary negative number.
The Internet could maybe due with fewer meme experts. But it undoubtedly needs fewer pointlessly mean comments.
That's one explanation for why I've been seeing less of your around here.
I assign this riposte an arbitrary negative number.
@99: http://www.theawl.com/2009/09/thom-browne-is-a-god#comment-23022
Thank God you never pretended to be an expert.
@abe Now I will write a humorless essay about how that comment was not funny.
Really, the reason I'm being a dick is because of this line That iteration lands with a thud, as do the rest, no more than spasms of neuroticism and insecurity among online subcultures..
Sorry, that entire video (assuming it refers to the BWE version) makes pretty much every point Klee does, but with more subtley -- and humor. And it is delivered precisely to the audience that this essay ostensibly seeks to address.
I have issues with the thesis broadly as well, but that's ground is well trod, from Adorno to Arendt to many, many others.
Bullshit. Any downfall downfall is an attempt to vindicate the downfall format and is itself a pitiful attempt to suggest that such madlibs comedy can be valid if it winks enough. Meanwhile, I realize that the deadpan vigor with which I deconstruct that which is not meant for deconstruction may not ring hilariously to you, but at least I am trying to feel my way around a barrier between comedy and noncomedy that any Hitler jokes should aspire to. LAUGHING IS A VERY SERIOUS THING, and if memes want to occupy my brainspace they had fucking better well be ready to get their asses kicked
it's starting to feel like christmas at my house. now someone should throw an empty budweiser bottle through the television...the cops should be here already.
I think we can agree on this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/7746436/Pink-Hitler-posters-provoke-fury.html
(sourced from Gawker)
I wish that headline said "Pink Hitler Posters Provoke Furry."
@ Irishbreakfast: Part of the offensiveness of Hitler is just that we're aware of his legacy in the West. Mao is used all the time in fashion and art and it's extremely offensive to many. We just don't see it because people generally just don't know the background.
I had a devastatingly brilliant response to this and now it's in David Cho's refresh pocket. But I trust it was only worth about $0.0001 anyway. The upshot was "AND I TAKE CRITICISM VERY SERIOUSLY", or something. It was really funny (maybe?) and insightful. So I win! (Posted again below because I wasn't even watching).
Little known fact: after a few cocktails Hitler was a cut up at parties.
He also invented home videos. By taping his dogs!
Internet memes work best when you’re only exposed to one or two instances of the model. Kind of like the flavor-of-the-month pop sound. The more you’re exposed to, the less funny the model seems.
As someone that saw only one example of this meme (the iPad critique), I can tell you, I thought it was funny at the time. Now, having watched a few of them, I find the whole genre boring. (Next meme, please!)
I don't think it's fair to say that "The conceit is one of shallow dissonance" - the conceit is one of dissonance, sure, but the "depth" of the joke is dependent on how well it's executed in a particular video. I agree that most of these suck, but I think the way you're approaching them is too far removed from what actually makes things funny or not. For example, though I found the discussion of the history of Hitler parody really interesting, I don't think these videos share an approach with any of the works you mention - they're not "Hitler comedy" as such. To say that "their satiric mojo [is] wholly contingent on a perverse fascination with the 20th century's most reviled mutant" is just wrong. (side note: lay off the qualifiers and let those nouns breathe)
I appreciate the attempt to take Internet culture seriously (though "shallow dissonance" comes to mind regarding the tone/subject matter gap), but this analysis doesn't address the meme - what do people who do find it funny like about it? - so much as it does some tangentially related historical stuff.
Fair enough! Virginia Heffernan did a piece tor nyt a while back that delves into the "why" of people's laughter at this stuff, incidentally -- I suppose I was too focused on incineration to make room for the question. But I do wonder how much the meme's perceived popularity is due to the ease of making the videos rather than any long-lived comedic value. If auto-tune the news were an easy thing to do, would we not see a glut of imitators that diluted the quality of one or two inspired originals?
Oh man, Auto-Tune the News is one of the best things the internet has served up in AGES.
I thought the Jeffrey Dahmer Snausages commercial was kind of fun.
I applaud this effort but I don't buy it. For one I happen to have enjoyed the ones I've seen (I think iplaudius is right, limited doses are the most effective). But also when you reach for the crux of the thing, that is, why you think it is not funny, your terms seem to fail. You sound like AO Scott when you talk about what something funny should be like. This passage, which, as someone who likes to dissect jokes, is the most important to me seems not at all helpful: "While weak Hitler comedy relies on shock, frivolity and invention, strong Hitler comedy acknowledges tension, takes real risks and pulls on a thread of extant silliness until the whole uniform unravels." What is the border between "frivolity" and "extant silliness"? (and who polices it? and how?) Between "shock" and "tension?" And isn't "invention" kind of a good thing? Did Hitler really dance around with a globe or was that an invention? What's a "real risk" but a way of saying "they have not, to my satisfaction acknowledged tension?"
What I find most intriguing about this meme, though, is the way its demise is a sort of legally mandated issue. What if they outlawed image macros? (cue "first they came for the lolcats" joke here)
That is, is this a sort of banning rock 'n' roll moment? And have you just told the readers of the Saturday Evening Post why Elvis Presley isn't that great, musically speaking?
Ok maybe "invention" is too broad and maybe I hate the hitler meme less for its unfunniness and more for a fundamental cowardice. The inflatable globe dance is a beautiful visual metaphor for a key aspect of the real hitler's psyche; in that snse it is not invention but magnification. The downfall videos, by comparison, daren't engage their subject
There is definitely nothing brave about them, I'll grant you that. As players in the war against fascism they are kites on the battlefield picking at eyeballs at best. But then, it seems to me, you're back arguing that every Hitler joke must be part of that struggle and nothing else, sort of a liberalized Sacred Monster rule.
It's true the Hitler of these videos is more the Godwin's Law Hitler and not the Nuremberg or Treblinka Hitler, and that is not something that can be said to be entirely pleasant. But that is the Hitler they have set out to depict (although Ganz sure as hell didn't but that's parody for ya) and in that regard I think they have done a fine job. That's probably not a social good but...
I would argue that formulaity is the essence of the joke. After all, every new person has to find aspects of whatever they are writing about that work to the rhythms of the clip. That constraint and that rhythm-discovered-within-whatever are what make it work. The formulae of a kind of poetry.
I had a devastatingly insightful response to this, now it's in David Cho's refresh pocket. But I trust it was only worth about $0.0001 anyway. The upshot was "AND I TAKE CRITICISM VERY SERIOUSLY", or something. It was really funny (maybe?) and insightful. So I win!
This has been bugging me since yesterday. I've been trying to put my finger on the successful Hitler video, vs. the unfunny Hitler video. And for me, the good ones use Downfall as a blank canvas for great dialogue. Sure it's repetitive. It's a vehicle for satire about something else. If that satire fails, then all your left with is the repetitive form.
Take "Hitler Plans Burning Man," (a personal favorite). Non-Burners would probably find it tedious. But for those familiar with theme camp dynamics and Playa zealotry, the satire is spot on. It would be funny if laid down on The Hidden Fortress, or and an episode of Law and Order.
In the end, it's like the Aristocrats. It's all in the delivery.
I do not have an opinion about the Hitler meme, so I am mostly here to say this is some goddamn great writing, Miles. I don't know. I guess I like watching the nouns of the world choke.
A very transparent attempt to have a parody based on this post.
I am on to you, Klee.