PERHAPS IN RESPONSE to the events of September 11, and the subsequent decade of terror attacks and the media spectacles made out of them, we seem desperate now to laugh. Mainstream comedy films often demolish box office records while movies that delve into the more tenebrous realities of existence disappear quickly. Laughter is the more lucrative business. The so-called real world offers more than an abundance of opportunities for darker cosmological and philosophical musings, but we would prefer to laugh, to experience the transition from anxious restraint to giddy release. Strangely, however, our laughter is often provoked by humor that chafes against the darkness from which we are inclined to retreat.

Rudolph Herzog’s book explores this proclivity in an altogether different context: Germany at the time of the Third Reich. Jokes about Hitler, Nazis, and concentration camps were pervasive before and during World War II: the least amusing era in history produced its own quantities of humor. Its jokes were told and heard by German citizens of all walks of life, which reveals an even more distressing piece of knowledge: Germans may not have been aware of every aspect of Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews and eliminate political dissenters, but they had an acute understanding of the diabolical nature of his vision, and instead of acting against it they sometimes laughed about it. Herzog’s new book uses Nazi-era German humor as a basis for exposing the ethical shortcomings not only of those directly involved in crimes against humanity, but also of those who remained silent or claimed ignorance. In many instances, Herzog suggests, even the most critical jokes told by average Germans “ultimately served to stabilize the system.”

Herzog’s book, though its primary focus is on the use of humor in Nazi Germany, remains a timely inquiry into the nature of comedy itself, particularly in the face of catastrophe. His exploration of Hitler-era humor is certainly one of the first in-depth studies of humor under the Third Reich, but the discussion of humor in relation to the events of the Holocaust is not a new one. Scholars such as Terrence Des Pres, Sander Gilman, and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi have broached the question of the appropriateness of laughing in the shadow of six million. Des Pres in particular, in 1988, suggested the existence of a kind of “Holocaust etiquette” when it comes to speaking about the allegedly unspeakable—ultimately arguing that laughter is not an appropriate response because it is “hostile to the world it depicts,” a world where suffering should be treated delicately and soberly. Yet Des Pres simultaneously conceded that the “high seriousness” with which writers have treated Holocaust material was slowly becoming exhausted, and that a serious consideration of laughter as an alternative resource of the spirit should be undertaken.

Even a cursory examination of contemporary American comedy suggests that this consideration has been undertaken, though the degree to which it is serious is debatable. Jokes about the Holocaust have become customary for nearly every stand-up comedian. Comedians have always drawn from stock comedic material—jokes about spouses and mothers-in-law, or the difference between men and women—and now the Holocaust has become similarly easy fodder for comedic impulses. I became aware of this phenomenon when (I confess!) I watched The Roast on Comedy Central in 2010. The Roast has become one of the most watched programs in the channel’s history. Between 1998 and 2002, Comedy Central produced and televised the annual roasts of the New York Friars’ Club, a private club in NYC known for its risqué celebrity roasts. After 2002, the network began to produce their own roasts, and last year the celebrity to be roasted was David Hasselhoff, who certainly seems roast-worthy.

Every roast contains many of the same elements—jokes that go for the jugular, inappropriate, and offensive references, and all manner of indecencies—but there was a new and dominant element that was part of the Hasselhoff event. Of German descent, Hasselhoff provided the well-known comedians on stage with the opportunity to declare open season on all things connected to Germany and its recent dark history. What happened was this: nearly every comedian who stood up to roast Hasselhoff referred to the Holocaust, directly or indirectly. The popular Jewish comedian Jeffrey Ross—the “roastmaster”—began his roast with the following proclamation: “Finally a Jew gets to roast a German [motions Hitler salute]. Heil Hasselhoff! The only difference between Hasselhoff and Hitler . . . at least Hitler knew when his career was over. You dumkopf! Oh . . . Why do the Germans love you so much, huh? Maybe it’s because you fill the entertainment void left by Anne Frank. [groans] Aw, too soon?”