Charlie Chaplin as The Great Dictator (1940)
In 1940, at the height of the Second World War, comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator satirised the likes of Hitler and Mussolini and other ‘machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts’.
As Hitler and the Nazis exterminated six million Jews and another five million Romani, homosexuals, disabled or otherwise ‘undesirables’, Chaplin strutted across screens making fun of them. Ever since, in productions such as Cabaret and Mel Brooks’ The Producers, the Nazi Party have been satirised and laughed at – but always such performances risk offending survivors of the Holocaust and trivialising, rather than lampooning, the horrors of World War II.
