Holocaust humor

[4] She wrote that until recently the question of humor in concentration camps was little known to the general public and had little attention in scientific community.

Another reason is the reluctance of the survivors to recall harsh memories associated with the unnatural circumstances that evoked humor.

[6] Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning wrote: "To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes.

"Those who have never seen anything similar cannot possibly imagine the dance of joy performed in the carriage by the prisoners when they saw that our transport was not crossing the bridge and was instead heading only for Dachau."

[5] The Holocaust-era archive clandestinely collected by a team led by Holocaust victim Emmanuel Ringelblum ("Ringelblum Archive") documented the everyday life in Nazi-organized Jewish ghettos, in particular, the Warsaw Ghetto.

Kampf und Tod im Ghetto Warsau" cites a number of black jokes from diaries of Warsaw ghetto residents, such as: Horowitz passed to the other world and sees Christ in the paradise.

[13] Demonstrating that Holocaust humor is international, Dundes and Hauschild cite two versions of a joke recorded in Germany and the United States in the early 1980s: "How many Jews will fit a Volkswagen" – "506: six in the seats and 500 in the ashtrays".

[14] Adam Muller and Amy Freier note that in modern times increasingly many people are becoming comfortable joking about the Holocaust.

They attribute this, among other reasons, to the fact that since the generation of Holocaust survivors had passed, and there is no more witnesses of the atrocities, who could provide emotional firsthand testimonies.

Nevertheless the "Holocaust etiquette" prescribes to consider it as a unique, solemn and, to a degree, sacred event, and laughter related to the matter disrupts this convention and is viewed as bad taste.

Some other people see modern Holocaust "comedy as a vehicle for coming to terms with the memory of Nazis' horrors".