While it takes courage to laugh in the face of evil, most Hitler parodies leave the audience laughing instead of facing evil. Comedies that borrow from history—whether from dictators (The Interview), entire cultures (The Ridiculous Six), or religious figures (South Park, Black Jesus)—have to reckon with historical baggage, too. These works could make audiences feel more connected to the past, more aware of injustice. But to do that, they need to aim for more than just laughter.

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When Charlie Chaplin released The Great Dictator in 1940, he declared grandly that his parody had a purpose. “Pessimists say I may fail—that dictators aren’t funny anymore, that the evil is too serious,” he told The New York Times. “That is wrong. If there is one thing I know it is that power can always be made ridiculous.” The Great Dictator wasn’t pandering to an audience of Hitler-haters, however. At the time, despite German aggression in Europe, American politicians wanted to stay out of the war. Chaplin’s studio warned him that the government might censor the film; he received letters from people who threatened to cause riots or attack screenings with stink bombs. He later recalled that at the film’s opening “the laughter was there, but divided. It was challenging laughter against the hissing faction in the theater.”

Yet the resistance to The Great Dictator was exactly what made the film necessary. In one scene, Chaplin’s stand-in for Hitler dances like a greasy-haired ballerina. He accidentally pops a balloon globe, which makes him cry. “He is one little man with the whole wide, vast unconquerable world, and he thinks the world is his,” Chaplin told The Times.

Chaplin’s defense of The Great Dictator amounts to a simple theory of political satire. When his version of Hitler cries, viewers laugh, because there’s such an absurd dissonance between the historical and the hysterical Hitler. And by making viewers laugh, the film invites them to question the status quo, turning reverence for a powerful man into irreverence. With each laugh, the audience can perhaps become more resilient.

Chaplin came to believe that satire has boundaries, however. Some reviewers argued that it was irresponsible to make light of dictatorship—and he eventually agreed with that critique. “The laughter chokes suddenly and is reluctant to start again,” wrote Otis Ferguson in The New Republic. More than 20 years later, in 1964, Chaplin wrote in his autobiography: “Had I known of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” In his view, certain topics are simply too horrifying to ridicule.

The arguments for and against The Great Dictator can serve as a yardstick for the uses and abuses of satire. Chaplin articulated a good reason why filmmakers shouldn’t make fun of mass murderers—but he also found a relatively elegant way to do just that. The question is whether Nazi parodies in peacetime, particularly those made in Germany, succeed at the same challenge.