Demon's Humorless Antics

Like thousands of other Harvard students, I was eager to read the winter issue of Demon magazine. In the past I've had a laugh or two out of Demon's jabs at political figures, the Harvard College administration and the Harvard University Police Department. In the latest issue, however, one writer overstepped the line distinguishing light-hearted levity from the malicious and hurtful.

In the tradition of Demon, the most recent issue attributed a number of novel pseudonyms to its staff. In this issue, one "Glazed Pork Loin" descended to a new low in humor writing. In his own attempt at "humor," Glazed Pork Loin satirized one of the Crimson Key Society's traditional welcome week activities, the showing of and commentary on the old Harvard favorite, "Love Story." This is his introduction:

As everyone knows, there are few things more hip for an incoming freshman than to see a movie which features the topical and knee-slapping narration provided by the Crimson Key Society....Here are some of the other typically uplifting movies CKS [The Crimson Key Society] will be showing in the future, and transcripts of more of the same kind of rip-roaring comments you have come to expect.

Following is his rendition of the Crimson Key Society's commentary upon one "typically uplifting movie," "Schindler's List," in which Oskar Schindler attempts to save German Jews from the gas chambers and crematoriums that awaited them in concentration camps during the Second World War.

Little Boy: (sobbing hysterically) Mama! Oh God, why did that guard here in Auschwitz shoot my Mama?

CKS: SHE WAS UGLY!

Father: There, there son. She may be dead, but shell always be with us in spirit. And remember her last words--

CKS: WOOF, WOOF!

(On screen, we see a young girl slap an SS guardsman when he touches her.)

CKS: TYPICAL HARVARD FIRST DATE!

That the solemnity of the Holocaust and the painful connotations that it still has for so many could be trivialized and disparaged in such a callous manner is almost too much to bear. Worse was my own realization, and no doubt that of many Jews who watched "Schindler's List," that the characters represented in the consoling father, the hysterical little boy, the murdered mother and the harassed young girl very likely met the same fate as did members of my own European family.

Rest assured that I did not take this dialogue at face value. Glazed Pork Loin's intent was clearly to criticize the Crimson Key Society's own unusual brand of humor, but surely there were other ways to make the point more effectively. Yet he chose to disregard the sensitivities of Demon's readers for the sake of making a trivial point. There is a real danger that readers flipping through the latest issue of Demon who do not have the time to ponder the subtleties of the authors' convoluted sarcasm would have taken away little more than the new and dangerous attitude that the Holocaust is fair game for knee-slapping satirization. According to Jewish sages, one who makes a mockery of something, whether intending to or not, diminishes its importance.

In an era of Holocaust denial and historical "reinterpretation" and "reconstruction," Glazed Pork Loin's flippant attitude cannot be dismissed simply as being in poor taste or excused as "politically incorrect" or "culturally apathetic." He gives us a sobering reminder of the work that awaits all those who would seek to preserve and to (now) re-dignify the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the infamous and inhuman acts of the German people and their cohorts. His is an attack upon the hallowed memories of all Jewish martyrs who are not alive to reply to his so-called humor today. I shudder at the mockery of such unprecedented and historically unparalleled tragedy.

This incident affirms the fears of so many Holocaust survivors. If the tragedy of the Holocaust and its seriousness are being questioned so soon after the event, what lies in store for us when first-hand memories are gone? On the most basic level, the author of the "Schindler's List" piece offers a critique of the gravity and validity of the Holocaust, as do all who find amusement in "Holocaust humor." It is a sad testimonial to the legacy of our First Amendment that such material is considered to be imbued with enough expressive value to be published.

Demon is sadly one of few satirical journals on the Harvard campus, providing the most patent vindication of Adam Smith's thesis that the quality of goods diminishes proportionately with a decrease in competition. Such "humor" would cease to intrigue if higher quality goods were available in our humor market. A few more humor magazines and Demon would be compelled by the rationale of supply and demand to undertake a wholly new and revolutionary enterprise: to create humor that is at the same time clean, engaging, tasteful and intellectual, or, at the very least, inoffensive.