Humour in Schindler's List

Perhaps it is of little surprise that this film comes from Spielberg, the director of magical stories. It is without a doubt Spielberg is known for his films of balanced plots filled with colourful, humorous characters. Take Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, the sleazy mathematician acted by Jeff Goldblum, or the humorous attitude of Indiana Jones, such as when he unceremoniously shoots the scimitar-flourishing mini boss in Raiders of the Lost Ark (though this wasn't the original intention). In these films, the humour can add depth to fictional characters and build contrast, so the serious parts feel more earnest. The use of humour in films isn’t just restricted to such happy movies either. Humour is more complicated than that. Tarantino is a prime example of a director who employs a heavy use of dark humour, where the audience will laugh at ostensibly horrible things. It can also serve a purpose within the plot, such as building cohesion between characters as is typically seen in war movies, such as the banter between Schofield and Blake in 1917.

Yet, some things cannot mix with humour to such an extent that it could be considered taboo. The Holocaust is one of those things. Thus, I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised by the reactions of disbelief I received from the few people I mentioned the idea of this article to. So before I delve into this any further, I’d like to make a point very clear — I’m not suggesting for a moment that Schindler's List is a funny movie, in the same way that we would agree that Jurassic Park is not a comedy. While there certainly are instances of humour in it that may evoke a chuckle within the audience, I’m more interested in how Schindler's List employs humour, both against us as the audience and by the characters themselves.

So… what is humour? Well, any attempt at defining anything needs a bit of history. In older English, it would not have been uncommon to say one was “in good humour” to express a generally good mood. If we go back to the Elizabethan Era, humour refers to the dominating trait of a character in a story, almost like the driving force of an archetype. This idea originated from humorism, the theory that a few fundamental fluids (humor being Latin for fluid) within our bodies were responsible for one’s behaviour and emotions. While our minds may turn towards ideas of being funny, perhaps the etymology of the word humour lends more to ideas of being happy, being human, or even being alive. There is perhaps nothing as evocative as someone laughing when we think of life.

Yet, some may argue humour is not a product of our unique human experience as some animals, arguably, might experience humour as well. This is perhaps true at a basic level. Apes can be observed poking each other for seemingly no reason other than to have fun, and dogs can of course be playful. If we must classify this as humour, it would match closest with slapstick humour which relies on physical behaviour. It is a very reactionary sense of humour requiring no verbal communication but a degree of empathy to recognise something happening to a subject that isn't oneself.

As we add in self-awareness and speech, humour can quickly manifest itself very complexly. Wordplay is one example of humour that limits its understanding to those who speak the language being used. A good example of this I like is from Rammstein’s most famous song Du Hast. Due to the fact that German verbs tend to appear at the end of sentences, the lyrics deliberately leave off the final word in the initial verses, with only the first three words du hast/hasst mich being sung, which could be interpreted as either “you have me”, “you hate me” or as a sentence yet to be completed in the German perfect past tense. Thus, it’s fitting when the sentence completes to “you asked me” (du hast mich gefragt) followed by an aggressive Nein! to wedding vows being sung.

Perhaps one of the most complex forms of humour is irony, depending heavily on language, culture and nuance, and ironically itself eludes a strict definition. Irony captivates me; it’s a household term I have a good feeling for, yet before writing this article, I didn't know what it actually is. Apparently the strict definition is contended, but in general, it is always anything or any situation that involves juxtaposing or contradicting ideas. As we delve further into irony, we run into a myriad of sub-definitions. Verbal irony is one of the simpler forms, when one says something without meaning its semantic definition. My favourite example of this is the rhetorical question “does the Pope shit in his hat?”, most known to me from Hank in Breaking Bad (S1E4), who uses the phrase to indicate the obvious answer of “yes” when asked if he wants another beer. I love this use of irony (and have had a great deal of fun explaining it to non-English speakers) because it’s a combination of two obvious “yes” questions to create a contradictorily obvious “no” question that yet still means “yes”. At some point of time, someone decided to take the already ironic rhetorical questions to make it even more ironic. That fascinates me.

More complex forms of irony, such as dramatic irony* or cosmic irony^†, branch away from mere statements, instead involving greater situations within storytelling. The beauty of storytelling is the creation of a universe that is self-contained and unaware of our own, and the characters within are at the whim of the writers. Irony can quickly arise from the contradiction between the characters’ own subjective experiences and what we know about what's going on in their universe. I can’t resist but cite Breaking Bad here again. There is a great use of irony in the infamous episode Fly (S3E8), when Walt deeply contemplates the cosmic impossibility of randomly meeting Jane’s dad the night she died before his eyes. The irony almost seems to be that Walt, whose scientific brain cannot comprehend ideas of fate, really is experiencing fate, for he is part of the fabricated story the writers of Breaking Bad created. Walt is indeed a character within a fiction and his ruminations hint at some sort of recognition of a grand design as though he’s on the cusp of breaking through the fourth wall… and he is right.

Granted, this sort of irony is less humorous though it’s worth acknowledging the close relationship between irony and humour which exists because both hinge on that moment when you realise what it means, like “getting” a joke. Whether it’s simply funny or actually intriguing, it engages and entertains the viewer, which is arguably the fundamental purpose of film.

So how does this come into Schindler’s List? The answer to this isn’t straightforward, as it has a very layered use of humour. To try simplify this, I’ve broken the humour down into two layers. The first is diegetic versus non-diegetic, the former being humour used and recognised by the characters within the story and the latter being humour only recognisable by us. Then, a second layer breaks up each of these into ironic versus non-ironic. The non-ironic humour tends to be more easily identifiable and less dividing, while a lot of the ironic humour isn’t really humorous at all and more likely to cause contention. I caveat this by saying that humour is very subjective, so I’ve taken a loose definition of humour to include anything that could be interpreted as humorous if the subject matter or settings were changed. The fact that this movie is about the Holocaust means people won't feel the motivation at all to even consider anything humorous within it, and some have argued to me that there is no use of humour in Schindler’s List at all. I beg to differ. If you are in this camp, I’d urge you to watch the movie again and observe the uses of humour throughout it. Perhaps you’ll change your mind.

Below, I’ve roughly plotted the use of humour along the movie’s timeline based on these four categories. A lot of the less controversial, non-diegetic and non-ironic humour is used in the first third of the movie before our primary villain Amon Göth is introduced. Up until this point, there is very little killing (the one-armed worker, the first victim, is killed just before Göth is introduced) as the plot centres on the introduction of Oskar Schindler. Just like Schindler who is sanguine about his profiteering prospects in defeated Poland, the movie maintains a positive tone. No time is wasted on Schindler’s motivations. In the first act, we’re pushed along scene after scene by John Williams’ marching harp and woodwinds to learn that Schindler is a man of money, nothing else, only regarding the terrible political and social situation as a means to profit. In reciprocation, the Jews play the game with him, and are also ebullient in doing so. They take their predicament on the chin, willing to work with Schindler to make money where they can, such as when the black market group is congregating in the church, or when the Jewish investors decide to finance Schindler’s operation. Both scenes contain their little, humorous quips. Itzhak Stern, the stoic accountant, is the only one who seems to not be swayed by prospects of money, always serious and unsmiling with Schindler, never accepting a drink from him, as he is the only one focused from the very beginning on saving lives.

Schindler also plays the game with the SS. From our very first scene with him in the restaurant, we’re introduced to his immense charisma as he literally steals the room, having everyone laughing around him by the end of the night. He understands the core thing to eliciting cooperation: lifting the spirits. Whomever he’s dealing with, he maintains a jovial attitude and is full of good humour. Yet, it’s all a façade; his wife is the only person that knows what he’s really like. When she joins him briefly, we gain insight into his many previously failed business ventures as well as his crumbling marriage. Schindler’s obsession with the game is personally ruining him; his profiteering mindset comes with an emphatic indifference which is exactly what Stern sees. Schindler and even the other Jews do not or refuse to see what is really happening; an illusion is maintained through humour and it convinces us as the audience too. This creates the emotional high in the movie before things change for the worse when Göth enters the story.

Before I get into Göth though, there is an interesting miniature foil to Schindler within this earlier act, especially in relation to humour. While Schindler uses humour to please people and curry favour with the SS, Nussbaum, a Jew who’s forced out of his upmarket apartment to be occupied by Schindler, uses humour in an alternate way, almost being portrayed as some sort of comic relief, possessing an almost slapstick attitude toward his predicament. When they arrive in their empty, derelict room in the ghetto, his wife tells him that “it could be worse”, to which he overwroughtly responds “what could possibly be worse?” At that moment, five other Jews walk into the room, all repeating dzien dobry (“good morning”) one after the other, almost like a skit. This use of humour, highlighting a relatively trivial event in relation to the rest of the movie, works to build up the gradually worsening situation of the Holocaust. Nussbaum, who is already distressed over being evicted from his home, has no idea what’s to follow in the next few years. Nor would we, had we not had the hindsight of history.

The foil exposes itself further when Nussbaum makes the following joke in the ghetto:

Nussbaum: I had a dream I was broke and lived with 12 people I didn’t know. Then I woke and was broke and lived with 12 people I didn’t know!
Mrs. Nussbaum: Do you have to laugh?
Nussbaum: I have to!

Like Schindler, Nussbaum uses humour within the story to the amusement of others, only in his case, it’s used more as a coping mechanism. This particular joke is a good example of the diegetic uses of humour. While the dzien dobry joke before was non-diegetic and potentially funny to us, this diegetic joke is potentially funny to the characters instead. To us though, it’s less funny as the darker notes of the story begin to settle in.

Of course, the primary foil of Schindler is Göth, the infamous camp commandant, whose introduction signifies a massive tonal change within the film when the use of non-diegetic and non-ironic humour mostly vanishes. Yet, the use of ironic humour still remains because a lot of it is carried through Göth himself. Take his first scene when he is choosing a housemaid for himself. He tells them not to get too close to him as he doesn’t want to give them his cold. Only moments later, he has an engineer shot for contesting the quality of the camp accommodation being built; however, he still adopts her advice after she is killed. What are we to make of Göth from this? He is civil, cold-hearted and dutiful in the same moment. It is the sort of bureaucratic barbarism that uniquely defines the Nazi regime (as we touched on in our podcast), which itself possesses some sort of irony. The whole nature of the Holocaust was ludicrous; the annihilation of certain groups of people has an unparalleled pointlessness to it, an idea explored in works such as The Man in the High Castle. Yet, Göth is still a human. The addition of his love interest in Helen Hirsch, his Jewish housemaid, creates that bizarre inner conflict any good character needs as his emotions battle his dogma. Perhaps this is indicative of the ultimate fate of social systems based on extremist ideologies — they always fall apart.

The dynamic between Schindler and Göth is compelling and humour plays a massive role in it; they seem to spend more time laughing with each other than anything else. They both follow similar journeys, beginning with a lack of empathy toward the Jews but with very different motivations. While Schindler plays the charismatic businessman to make his money, Göth plays the brutal camp commandant to ensure the Holocaust is carried out. It is no coincidence that Schindler begins to develop empathy toward his Jewish workers after the two meet. He saves the first Jews, Jakob and Chana Perlman, after Stern points out that Göth had recently killed 25 people after a prisoner tried to escape. Stern plays a shrewd game, trying over the course of the movie to stoke the embers of Schindler’s empathy. In this scene, he gets through to him largely because Göth behaves as a counterweight. Once this activism within Schindler is born, he continues using his joviality but now to save rather than to profit.

The notorious train dousing scene highlights this well. In the middle of a sweltering day, the SS officers await the dispatchment of hundreds of Jews suffering in the train carts in front of them, not acknowledging their screams for water but instead grumbling about how hot and boring it is. In comes Schindler: “what do you say we get your fire hoses out here and hose down the cars?” he says. What ensues is an immense use of ironic humour: Göth complies and to him and the SS, it seems to be a form of entertainment to see the cars being hosed down by Schindler. Why? “This is really cruel, Oskar, you’re giving them hope” is what Göth says. Can he not comprehend that maybe Schindler is doing this to help the Jews? Does he really think Schindler is doing this to be more cruel? Or does he know what Schindler is really trying to do, knowing full well that these Jews will die anyway and laughing at Schindler who thinks he can save them? This diegetic use of humour is sick but also engaging because it’s hard to tell what’s exactly going on. It’s scenes like these which make Schindler’s List a timeless movie.

This brings me onto one of the most well-known scenes of Schindler’s List — the pistol scene. I have always been intrigued by it ever since I watched this film many years ago. It’s when Menasha Lewartov, one of the Schindler Jews, is taken by Göth to be executed for not building door hinges fast enough. By this point in the movie, our natural expectation is that Lewartov will be killed by Göth but it doesn’t happen because the pistol jams, not just failing to fire on the first attempt, but every attempt after that. Even the second pistol Göth uses fails to fire, who grows frustrated, clobbering Lewartov but leaving him nonetheless alive.

This is a use of non-diegetic, ironic humour that could potentially be viewed as a comedy if the subject matter were different. The silly attitude of the SS, the ridiculousness of the jamming pistols and Göth’s tantrum almost reminds me of Wile E. Coyote’s plans to kill Road Runner being thwarted by nothing more than bad luck. The terrifying aspect of this scene in Schindler’s List though is that Göth could have easily finished the job if he wanted to. It was only his mood that led to Lewartov surviving. This arbitrariness of Göth’s decisions to kill or not to kill is truly terrifying and represents the nature of the Holocaust, and generally genocide, well. It was luck for those that were saved by Schindler.

The film often focuses on this idea. The pistol scene is thematically reused much more menacingly later in the film when the women are accidentally sent to Auschwitz. This time, the tone is dire. We are introduced to the final killing mechanism of the Holocaust. It is immense and more terrifying than Göth with a gun because it is soulless, with no barrier of humanity to sway any decision. And yet, they survive because of luck. As they walk out of the chambers though, the women see a line of victims over the fence, being herded into the basement of a small brick building adorned with a chimney billowing black smoke. The guards around them are almost smiling, beckoning them to go in. These are not the lucky few.

At the end of the movie, you learn that the number of Schindler Jews and their descendants is greater at the movie’s release than the number of Jews that were left alive in the entirety of Poland. Schindler tangibly feels this at the end of the film during his poignant I could have saved more speech. The number killed in the Holocaust is incomprehensible and perhaps there is some irony within the fact that Schindler had saved only a drop in an ocean of blood. Yet, the movie emphasises the immense importance of Schindler’s act because of what it represents. He who saves one life saves the world entire.

Schindler’s List will always be a fascinating movie to me and a lot of this sentiment is carried by its intricate uses of humour. Even though Spielberg is walking on a tightrope by employing humour in the context of the Holocaust, he walks straight across without a single stumble. It amazes me how balanced this movie is, yet intriguing in its unusual ways of exploring tales of tragedy; however, we must not forget that Schindler’s List is not just a tale of tragedy. It is also a beautiful tale of hope and redemption, telling us that even in the darkest of times, kindness will triumph and with it, our inextricable senses of humour. ※