When the dust finally lay down again about the alleged Hitler salute/awkward movement of Elon Musk during the inauguration of Donald Trump, a friend asked what you should do if you are a Nazi with a ‘Frozen shoulder’ and you want to make a Hitler salute . I laughed.
Because I know my friend, he hates Nazis – I just say it to be sure – and he made a ridiculously big thing very small in an absurd way, the general laws of humor, say. Yet I didn’t know if I would dare to write about it. Would readers understand the humor? Can you still make jokes about the Hitler salute in these polarized times? I doubted.
I think more and more often lately: do people still understand irony? The emails I sometimes get. So recently from the elderly who were furious about my column about ‘rules of conduct’ for seniors. But also furious women when I jokes about part -time works, furious men when I joked about men’s day, angry readers when I joked that colleagues who go on vacation in September are asos. Or the reader who recently delivered me to e -mail or really handsome young men are hired since NRC has a female editor -in -chief. I refuse to believe that irony is dead, but in my cubs it sometimes looks suspiciously like that.
Because I didn’t like it anymore, I decided to call two experts: Comedians Peter Pannekoek and Raoul Heertje – for some encouragement, wisdom and interpretation. They wanted to reassure me.
Because of course you can still make jokes about everything, come on. Certainly, “irony is a bit ready, as a style figure,” says Raoul Heertje. “Because everything you can imagine ironically, nowadays in talk shows and in the House of Representatives, people are very seriously said by people.” But nowadays there are really no subjects taboo. “That you are not allowed to say anything anymore because of Woke is primarily a fabrication of the media,” says Heertje. “If a joke is good, he can always.”
It is true that nowadays the audience can say: “This is not okay,” says Heertje. And nowadays there are also many more ways to express your dissatisfaction, via the mail and the soosjals, while in the past it was only possible via a lawsuit, or a letter submitted, says Peter Pannekoek. But sounds like “you can’t say anything anymore nowadays,” they both think nonsense. “The problem seems more to me that the ‘all -sayers’ cannot stand it if people react just as hard to their texts,” says Heertje.
What is really a difference with the past, says Peter Pannekoek, is that people started to take jokes more personal. He calls that the ‘freedom to be hurt’. “If I make a joke about my father who died of cancer, I sometimes get angry reactions from people who have lost an uncle or know someone with cancer.” He sometimes tries to take that into account. “Not that I censor myself, but by adding one or two sentences, you can put it a little more in context.”
People are also furious faster, Heertje stands out. “Being furious has become a bit of a way of life.” But you have to try to keep your deaf for that, also because it is often not representative at all, he says. “It’s a bit like the asylum crisis: if you hear so many people screaming on TV about it, you think it is there. So you now think that there is a humor crisis. Well, it is not there. “
And yet, a joke in NRC About the Hitler salute? In a theater that is always possible, both find. There people know the comedian, can you take them into a joke, but in a newspaper? Then you are reading a heavy geopolitical analysis about Trump and Greenland and then BAM, suddenly a joke about the Hitler salute of a columnist you don’t know! More difficult!
Heertje would not make a joke at all about the Hitler salute of Musk. “That is only part and illustration of much more important topics, and no real surprise.” Pannekoek recently made a joke about it, but he really will not repeat it here “because he was written for the stage, and needs to be told there – that’s the right context. Not for an interview, in which intonation, facial expression and the intention are missing. “
And so I still don’t know. Whether I can make a joke about the Hitler salute in NRC. Or well, the requirements for a Hitler salute are fortunately clear: the right arm stretched, between 105 and 165 degrees and with the left is only permitted if the right arm is missing, so I fear that it is difficult with a ‘Frozen right-shoulder’ is becoming.
There seems to be a half -hearted Hitler salute about which Jerry Seinfeld once made a joke. A kind of waving from the elbow, for Nazis who don’t feel like stretching their arm all day: “Pfff, yes dude, Heil Hitler, whatever, are there any donuts, does the printer do it again?” But if you do that too often, I don’t think you’ll be taken seriously. You can also have a Frozen shoulder to get From the Hitler salute. Even if you make one by accident or not, I now look at you, Elon Musk.
Fortunately, what is always possible, Frozen shoulder or not, is the middle finger. Although it would not surprise me if that soon turns out to have been a Roman greeting, or a peace symbol in ancient times, or just an awkward movement. These are strange times. Everything lazes from his pedestal, including the irony. Can you make a joke about the Hitler salute?
I still doubt.