The Rise of Hitler Humor
The first time I talked with Serdar Somuncu he adamantly insisted that he was not a one-trick artist. He then noted that he had spent nearly three years playing Josef Goebbels and that his current show, though titled “Hitler Kebab,” includes material that has absolutely nothing to do with Adolf Hitler or Mein Kampf.
The next time I talked with the Somuncu he turned ferociously evangelical. “Hitler!” he said, as I talked softly, “Say Hitler. Say it.” Somuncu was egging me on, trying to get me to cross the line, to shout Hitler in a room full of Germans. I held the phone away from my ear, peering around Cologne’s train station. At least twelve people were within earshot. A small group of teenagers stood just a few feet away from me, talking loudly. I didn’t really care what they would think. But to my right, there was a frail elderly woman, making a call from a pay phone. “Say it!” he said, as I shifted anxiously. “Just watch them,” he said, in German-accented, but flawless, English.
Being a bit on the shy side, I didn’t muster up the courage to shout Hitler. But a few days later, I had a chance to see the man, who is undeniably the world expert in the Hitler performance art genre, do his thing; not just in front of a handful of people, but on live television, with millions of viewers.
What a sight it was. Somuncu, a bulky, bald, dark-eyed Turk with a big, toothy smile, plops down on a couch next to Stefan Raab, the blonde, goateed German late night star. After making the absurdist claim that the first word he said in German was, as an infant, not “water” or “mama” but “Hitler,” Somuncu proceeds to unleash an intensely repetitive blitz of Hitler and Nazi references. In under four minutes, amid a dizzying flurry of German, I count nearly 10 mentions of the H-word.
But what was most extraordinary about all of this was not Somuncu’s ability to seemingly weave Hitler into every other sentence. It was the audience. This was not the United States, Poland, South Africa. This was Germany. The twenty and thirty-somethings in the studio audience, the children and grandchildren of Nazi lieutenants and SS troops, were not just laughing at Hitler, they were roaring, “When I go to a bar, I don’t order a beer, I order a Hitler. When I go to a restaurant, and they ask my name, I say, Hitler…” Each and every utterance of the dirty word caused an increasingly spastic reaction. It was as if Somuncu had found the Pavlovian secret; he had seemingly unspooled their anxieties with this simple trick—the simple repetition of Germany’s very own N-word.
The history of Hitler humor in Germany is brief. In the late 1920s and 30s, the artist Helmut Herzfeld created several pieces that poked fun at the Nazi leader; one showed Hitler hungrily surveying a live hen with a caption reading: “Have no fear—he's a vegetarian.” In 1933, on the day the Nazis took the Reichstag, the party dispatched troops to arrest him; Herzfeld jumped off a roof, and fled to England. Karl Valentin, the famous German beer-hall comedian, was somehow permitted to get away with a playful stunt in which he raised an arm in a Nazi salute, said “Heil,” and then added, “I forgot his name.” But the overwhelming majority of people who could have made jokes about Hitler (Germany’s comedians were largely Jewish) either emigrated or were killed. After the war, as Germany rebuilt itself, in a period some now call “The Comedy Gap,” there was little comedy in Germany, and what humor did exist didn’t touch controversial issues, let alone Hitler or the Third Reich. Even in the 60s, and 70s, when Americans were laughing at goose-stepping dancers singing “springtime for Hitler,” the Führer was clearly off-limits to comedians, and even citizens, in Germany. In the 90s, for instance, a cheeky member of the Berlin Philharmonic signed his name “Adolf Hitler” on a hotel receipt in Israel; he was promptly fired and excoriated in the German press. In sum, if you asked an ordinary German, in the spring of 1996, if they could envision a Turkish immigrant, standing on stage in German theatres, reading excerpts from Mein Kampf, they would likely tell you “Nein.” And then they would also likely add. “That would be illegal.”
Serdar Somuncu is rarely known by his name. Ask most Germans about him, using his name, and they’ll stare blankly, and say, “A Turk?” But ask them about “the guy who plays Hitler, the guy who read Mein Kampf” and there is near universal awareness. No response to Somuncu is mild. A bright smile. A crinkled face. A scoff. A scowl. Some Germans—mostly young, urban Germans—simply love him. To them, he is a German Lenny Bruce, the daring hero, the taboo-breaker, who allowed them to laugh at their shameful past. Other, often older Germans who lived during the war, think that what Somuncu does—getting laughs about a man that led Germany to a devastating war—is wrong, even immoral. (“It’s not something to laugh about,” an elderly Berliner told me, soberly.) And there are also those folks, say, neo-Nazis, who want to see this son of a Turkish immigrant dead. In economically depressed pockets of East Germany, Somuncu’s performances ridiculing Der Führer often provoke neo-Nazis, prompting cryptic death threats and “Heil Hitler” chanting youths, sometimes forcing the actor to wear a bullet proof vest. He has a strategy for coping with the “enraged.” Challenge them. “What’s wrong with you,” he’ll ask. “Why do you have a problem with me?” Once, an enraged skinhead screamed “Heil Hitler” in the middle of his reading, and revealed his animus. “You are ridiculing the greatest man alive.” Somuncu stopped the reading, and talked with him. That became the show. “He’s a maniac,” said Heinz Gunter-Clobes, an expert on German comedy at the German media think tank, the Adolph Grimme Institut. “No one does what he does.”
The life-changing moment in the life of the man who allowed the Germans to laugh publicly about the Nazi-era occurred roughly ten years ago, in a library. A high school drop-out, and the son of a Turkish immigrant garbage man, Somuncu had by his late-20s managed to patch together an actor’s life by working a series of jobs—as a manager of a small theatre in his hometown, and as a bit player in German television shows (“The only thing a Turkish-German actor can do in Germany is be a Turkish-German”), and doing what he loved most, the one-man show. As a young soloist reading Kafka, or as a storyteller reading from a collection he called “Stories from the Life of a Nudist,” Somuncu was increasingly challenging rules in German theatre. Somuncu would spend part of his show reading, and then a half-hour talking with them. One night, after an intense three-hour long performance of “Nudist” at a cramped theatre in Nuremberg, a man approached Somuncu and made a suggestion, “You should read Mein Kampf.” Somuncu laughed, thinking it was a joke and little more. A few weeks later, a package arrived at Somuncu’s apartment. It was a videocassette of the only known dramatic reading of Mein Kampf in German. Even holding the tape, Somuncu said, felt vaguely “pornographic.” This was taboo. The evil text. But watching the 1974 reading by the Austrian actor Helmut Qualtinger, Somuncu wasn’t stricken by its evil. “It was so weird. It was so different than I expected.”
It’s no surprise that the text surprised Somuncu. For young Germans, Mein Kampf was a forbidden text. Authored by Hitler from a jail cell in 1923, the book, which means “My Struggle” in German, though widely available in the United States and throughout the world, has been banned in Germany and Austria for more than fifty years. You can’t buy Mein Kampf in Germany, you can’t even, to this day, get Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble to mail a copy to Germany. That would be illegal. The only exception to the ban, enacted by the German government, is if the reader has a “scholarly or educational” purpose. His curiosity piqued by Qualtinger’s reading, Somuncu, on an “educational mission,” obtained a copy of Mein Kampf in a Düsseldorf library. When Somuncu finally had a chance to pore over the 800-page text, which outlines Hitler’s political and racial philosophy, Somuncu had a surprising reaction. “I was laughing,” he said. “It was hilarious.” Hitler’s writing style, the absurdity of his philosophy, the banality of it all. “Here was this book that was supposed to be so evil, so seductive, yet it was so ridiculous.”
Fascinated to discover this lost text, Somuncu started heading to the library, virtually every day, digging through biographical information about Hitler and his life. “People in Germany need to hear this,” Somuncu thought. “People have all of these ideas about Hitler because of the taboo. That he’s a god-like genius. They need to hear this Hitler.” The complicating matter was, of course, German law. To get a chance to publicly read Mein Kampf, Somuncu had to do something that no artist had attempted in years—he had to petition the government for a waiver to the ban, on the basis that his performance was “educational in nature.” Friends and supporters thought his idea was not only outrageous, but impossible. Even if the government allowed this, a friend told him, politically correct Germans would be outraged.
Somuncu is large, bald, 37-year-old, with dark eyes, an over-sized-face, and a perpetually toothy smile. When I first him, he was wearing khakis, a baseball cap, and was driving an SUV. He looked like he could easily be an accountant or a Web programmer in an American suburb. (He lives in a suburb of Düsseldorf.) At times, when talking about German politics and culture, or American theatre, or Korean food, he talks with a precision and intelligence and awareness that raises questions about his humble educational resume. (He dropped out of school, as a teen, to become an actor.) The most striking thing about Somuncu is that he seems to have two modalities. For the most part, he is boyish, and ironic, and just a fun bear of a guy who drinks and eats and bullshits about anything and becomes fast friends with anyone within range. (Within two hours of our meeting, he was calling me, affectionately, “My Jewish friend Josh Goebbels.”) But, he also has an intense, dark look, and can turn. Once, when I asked him a simple question about performing in Austria, his eyes narrowed, and his toothy grin disappeared. “Austria,” he groaned, solemnly. “Austria is sooooo cold, so empty, sooo lazy.”
When I first met Somuncu in the flesh at his favorite restaurant—a Japanese barbecue in Düsseldorf that he eats at several times a month—and asked him about his interest in Hitler and why he’s spent much of the past decade as a Nazi specialist, he shrugged, dismissively. “Hitler is not important to me. Hitler is a vehicle,” he said, in the stentorian, almost Gielgudesque voice, that he often uses. “Hitler is just a way of reaching the audience. I am an actor,” he says, sipping sake.
Though Somuncu insists that Hitler is just another character for him, and that he is a serious actor, a director and writer with broad interests, Hitler keeps on slipping, unsolicited, into our conversation. When I tell him that I’m from Chicago, and that Chicago has a large German immigrant population, he instinctively improvises in Hitler’s voice and cadence. “Chicago has and always will be, German, and it should be German again.” At another moment, after a few more sakes, and a few words about the post-September 11th world, he says, “Civilization must rise up and fight terrorism. You know who said that?” he asks. “George Bush,” I say, confidently. “Hitler,” he says, smiling devilishly.
Some passages of Mein Kampf—such as the first chapter on Hitler’s background, and the chapter on his theory of Aryan supremacy—are, he says, so weird, so stupid, that simply reading them straight will burst most audiences into prolonged laughter. “You could do this,” he says to me. In other instances in his show, Somuncu focused, on simply fact-checking Hitler. In the first biographical chapter of Mein Kampf Hitler claims he was an excellent student. “That’s not true. It’s a lie. He was actually a very ordinary student.” Germans are surprised to hear this. “They know very little about the most important person in German history. They expect him to be completely brilliant.” “He’s not, ” Somuncu says, raising his voice, widening his eyes. “Hitler was very ordinary.” In other instances, he simply points out hypocrisies. “The book is banned in Germany, but you know who owns the rights to the book, and can decide who can publish the book, and profits from the book?” “Bertlesmann?” I ask, taking a stab, naming the German publishing giant. “Noooo. It’s the state of Bavaria. The state of Bavaria holds the rights to Mein Kampf and sells it throughout the world.”
Somuncu’s reading of Mein Kampf, the banned text, predictably sparked soul-searching in Germany in 1996. Many liberal, mostly younger Germans celebrated the occasion as an achievement, a sign that the post-war healing had begun. But for others, what Somuncu was doing was inconceivably offensive, and immoral.
How did this happen? Why wasn’t this censored? How could Germans laugh at a book whose ideas led to the darkest moment in human history, the murder of six million Jews?
In the land of Howard Stern, Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Chris Rock, George Carlin, Sandra Bernhard and literally thousands of angry young comics longing for the next shocking thing, the unmasking of taboo is common, if not hackneyed. One need only recall four years ago to see the speed with which a national tragedy is metabolized into comic fodder. As smoke still billowed from the ashes of Ground Zero, the satiric newspaper The Onion unleashed a full-on spoof of the wall-to-wall 9/11 coverage. Days later, David Letterman jumped into the fray, with a like-minded remark in his monologue, and Second City, the Chicago sketch comedy group, always seeking topicality, named it’s post-9/11 show, “Thank heaven, it’s not 7/11.”
But Germany has taken a wildly different approach to its national tragedy. Traditionally, tragedy and pain is not source material for comedy in Germany. One theory is that Germany’s humorless response to its past is in large part a function of a national character forged generations before the World Wars. Hans-Dieter Gelfert, a professor of English at the Freie Universitat of Berlin, traced German and English comic texts back to the medieval period. Gelfert argues that the Germans and the English took an entirely different approach to the genre, beginning in the 18th century. In the Anglo tradition, later embraced by the Americans, comedy, even in the 1700s, was irreverent, zany, a source of anxiety relief, and pure entertainment. But as the Anglos were laying the groundwork for “taking the mickey out” and Fawlty Towers, on the other side of the English Channel, Germanic-speaking peoples were developing another theatre—an effort that, Gelfert argues, was aimed at social cohesion and national stability. Even comedy had a purpose, a pedagogical role in 19th century Germany. “German humor has tended to ridicule the disturber of social order and to create an atmosphere of a tension-free zone. Thus, it is either moralizing or gemütlich,” Gelfert writes. “In either case, it corroborates the authority of society as a whole.” Comedy in Germany developed rules. The best-known form of live German comedy, the kabarett, not to be confused with the cabaret, had very clear parameters: performers commented on politicians—only politicians—and performers must have a point, a political perspective on the left or the right. The audience understands these rules. Sonja Kling, a Munich kabarettist, attempted to play with the rules last year—instead of politics, her troupe talked about social events. Once this experiment became apparent, half the audience walked up and left. Such restraints are stifling for German comedians—exposed to the liberties of their American and British counterparts. “They say that you’re not supposed to hit below the belt,” said Harald Schmidt, a late-night talk show host, who is perhaps Germany’s best-known comedian. “That’s fine. But in Germany,” he said, pointing to his neck, “the belt is up here. ”
The explanation for Somuncu’s success in “getting away” with exposing Germany’s most taboo moment almost invariably focuses on one thing: his identity. Comic performers groused that Somuncu, as a Turk, was the beneficiary of an “exception” to “Germany’s stifling political correctness.” Moritz Netenjakob, a German comedian who himself had been thwarted in his own efforts to ridicule Hitler, lusted after the freedom that Somuncu, as a Turkish-German, has. “He can say and do whatever he wants,” he said. “No one will touch him.”
Somuncu accepts this basic thesis of his own phenom—that as a Turk, as an alien, he holds this unique status that gives people of the diaspora a perspective, and an ability to resist the German “Leitkultur.” “I am not a Turk, I am not a German,” he says. “I am a human being.” His own explanation of how he “got away with it” is, though, more mundane. “Look at me,” he says, throwing up his hands. “Would you be scared? Threatened?” Later that night, I looked at a photo of Somuncu, on the compact disk of his Mein Kampf readings. The disk has a funny picture of a Somuncu in a plaid oxford; he is brushing his teeth, and flashing the “Heil Hitler” sign at the same time. On the inside of the disk, Somuncu sits in a barren apartment, looking out a window into the night, holding a beer in one hand. Imagining this goofy, bald, middle-aged Turk, in the voice of Hitler, was, in fact, absurd.
Somuncu’s discovery of Mein Kampf in 1996 was like Chaplin’s discovery of the bowler hat or Woody Allen’s discover of his neurosis—it changed his life. The appearance of the show, prompting German soul-searching, resulted in press coverage that subsequently caused his box-office appeal to rise. The small cabaret theatres where he once played to tiny crowds were now packed. The Hitler-ified Somuncu recalls returning triumphantly to a small theatre in Aachen where earlier in his career he performed Kafka before a grand total of three people. Returning with the magic text, the venue was packed. And they were listening, he said, glowering, “to every word.”
But as Somuncu’s career soared, his readings increasingly attracted an audience, rarely interested in theatre. His Mein Kampf readings became “events” for neo-Nazis; audiences often comprised a strange mix of ordinary theatre-goers, curious to see the performance, and packs of snarling skinheads, representing the Führer, and fuming at the sight of a Turk “disrespecting” their leader. Readings were often interrupted by chants of “Heil Hitler.” Somuncu increasingly became the recipient of cryptic phone messages and threatening letters. Venues received bomb threats. Police protection was often necessary.
The death threats and the neo-Nazis didn’t scare Somuncu; it energized him. “I understood the importance of these readings. How relevant it was.” Emboldened, Somuncu would play anywhere for anyone. “Stupid people, smart people, foreigners,” he says, and he would read anytime. He performed, always wearing a bullet-proof vest, on the sacred Nazi days—the High Holy Days of Aryan Supremacy—Hitler's birthday, April 20, November 9, and June 30. He encountered hostility, especially in economically depressed pockets of East Germany, where Nazi ideas had grown in popularity in the late 90s. Perhaps the most frightening place for Somuncu to perform was the East German port town of Rostock, the site of the ugliest incident in German post-war history.
When Somuncu arrived in Rostock in the winter of 2000, he anticipated trouble. Just a year earlier, a rooming house filled with immigrant workers, largely from Turkey and Eastern Europe, caught fire. As the house blazed, as dozens of residents perished, hundreds of people gathered, cheered, and chanted “Heil Hitler.” He knew the city had a growing number of neo-Nazis. And standing in front of his small hotel, as if they expected him, were two bulky skinheads, with a pit bull. “I shouldn’t have traveled alone,” Somuncu recalls, thinking, as he passed into the hotel. But when he entered the hotel, and called repeatedly for the clerk, no one responded. No one was there. He found an envelope, on the reception desk addressed to him, with a key, and a note. “We will be watching you.” Somuncu, though, was undeterred. He vowed he would never, under any circumstances, cancel a performance.
Somuncu became famous, won a prestigious German theatre prize, toured Italy, France, and Spain, all thanks, in large part, to Adolf Hitler. But one day, after four years and more than 1400 shows, he woke up in his apartment, shaking, the voice of Mein Kampf echoing in his head. “I was Hitler,” he said. “I had to stop.” On April 20, 2000, Hitler's birthday, he gave a final public reading of Mein Kampf.
Somuncu stopped performing, worked as director of the Chamber Theatre in Neuss, directed classic plays, and vigilantly resisted thoughts of Hitler for close to a year. But in late 2001, he found his thoughts wandering to the Nazi era. Another member of the Third Reich intrigued him.
On an April day, two years after going cold turkey on Hitler, Somuncu returned to the library. This time, he was in pursuit of Dr. Josef Goebbels. If anyone rivaled Hitler in haunting the German psyche, it was Goebbels, Hitler’s club-footed, sex-mad, repulsively ugly Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels, who had complete control over radio, press, cinema, and theater during the 12-year Nazi reign, had an almost deity-like reputation in the minds of Germans. It was Goebbels who masterminded the pseudo-religious symbols of the Nazi-era, created “Der Führer,” staged the massive displays of Nazi greatness. It was Goebbels, with his brilliant insight into psychology, and his ability to exploit the grandest aspirations of the German people, who was regarded as the “evil genius” of the Nazi-era. Of all his dark arts, though, Goebbels was most feared for his rhetorical brilliance. And the apogee of his speech-making skill is believed to be the Berlin Sports Palace Speech of February 18th, 1943. In the aftermath of a devastating loss in the Battle of Stalingrad, the speech rallied a worried German people to believe they were marching towards victory. The speech’s most famous line, “Total war, only war,” implored Germans to endure even more sacrifice, even more death for Der Führer. “It’s thought to be spellbinding. One of the most brilliant speeches of all time,” said Somuncu, likening it to an evil Gettysburg Address. It is not banned, but like Hitler’s treatise, Somuncu says, “Goebbels's speech is believed to be dangerous. No one reads it.”
After spending six hours poring over the forbidden text, Somuncu emerged. Again, a revelation. Just as with the supposedly hypnotic text of Mein Kampf, Somuncu was underwhelmed. “It was so boring,” he says, “Just two and half hours of boring. There was nothing brilliant about it.” And hence, within months, another Nazi show was born. “People had to hear this,” he said, raising his voice excitedly. “Goebbels needed to be unmasked, he needed to lose his power.”
Somuncu began touring Germany with the Sports Palace speech in 2002. “Goebbels was the host, I was guest.” The show had the same structure. Somuncu read passages of the Palace Speech in character, in the voice of Goebbels, then reverting to his own voice, and commenting. Instead of highlighting blatantly weird passages, as he did with Mein Kampf, he focused on the speech’s painful boredom, it’s excruciating length, and he exposed the massive lie at the heart of the legendary speech. “Germany lost 60,000 troops at the battle of Stalingrad,” he said, his eyes flaring, and voice rising. “They lost the city. That was a victory. It's not possible.” And during the tour, which lasted two years and 500 shows, Somuncu had defined his purpose. “I read forbidden texts in a funny way,” he said. “The Nazis told lies. I told the facts.” But, during the course of the tour, a change happened in Germany; Somuncu was no longer alone.
One day in Cologne, I asked him about the recent appearance of a sketch, in which the late night host Harald Schmidt played Hitler, complete with his trademark mustache. During the past several years in Germany, others—ethnic Germans—had tapped the Hitler/Nazi vein. Schmidt dressed up as the Führer to instruct a hapless group of East German neo-Nazis. A sketch comedy troupe showed Hitler in a domestic squabble with Eva Braun over her lousy vegetarian cooking. Hitler comic books, such as “Adolph: I’m Back” appeared; there was even a short-lived German sitcom, which starred Goebbels. “No one was interested in Mein Kampf. No one thought it was funny,” he said, sighing. “And now Hitler was nominated for an Oscar.” He was referring to Bruno Ganz, the German actor, who portrayed Hitler in the German movie, Downfall. Of the recent proliferation of Hitler sightings in the German media, Somuncu was nonplussed. “Hitler is Germany,” he said. As we talked, as Somuncu waxed prophetically about Hitler, three teenagers started chattering in background, and I had trouble hearing Somuncu. When I mentioned this—revealing that I was calling from a public phone, in the Cologne train station, and was surrounded by a pack of noisy teenagers, Somuncu interrupted me.
“Say Hitler,” he said. I balked at this outrageous suggestion. I was not the artist. I squeaked out a little “Hitler” to appease him. “Louder,” he said, like a theatre coach, as I talked softly. “Say Hitler. Louder.” I showed little promise in the art of the Hitler shout—he laughed. After he failed to get me to shout Hitler, Somuncu, himself, didn’t want to talk about Hitler. He wanted to talk about “Hitler Kebab,” his new show. Though “Hitler Kebab” has nothing to do with Hitler, and pisses off a whole new group of people, the whole idea started from a Hitler show. Reading Mein Kampf in East Germany, Somuncu got into a feisty exchange with a skinhead in the audience. “You know what his name was?” Somuncu says. “David Richefsky. A skinhead has a Jewish first name and a Polish last name?” He laughs. “Can you believe that? He didn’t even know his name was Jewish.” He said, “My friends call me Dave.” He laughs again.
Somuncu, as he often does, pressed the skinhead about why he thought Hitler was such a great man. “So David Richefsky told me that I shouldn’t make fun of Hitler. That I should make fun of my own people. ” He said, slowly, “Like Atatürk.” “OK. Atatürk. And then, we talked for a while longer, and then I asked David Richefsky, what I should call my own show and what does David Richefsky say?” He pauses, pregnantly, for a moment. “You should call your show ‘Hitler Kebab.’” He laughs. “‘Hitler Kebab? ’ The audience loved it. I promised the audience I would call my next show ‘Hitler Kebab. ’”
The outgrowth of that incident is a collection of stories about Somuncu’s experiences growing up around Düsseldorf. He exposes a whole new realm of ironies and hypocrisies—the life of a secular Turk. For instance, the secular Turkish view of veiled Turkish women: “When they cover their face, we just look at their ass. What else is there to look at?” Such remarks have created a whole new group of Somuncu-haters, Islamists in Germany. “I really don’t care what the audience thinks,” he says. “I have received death threats from Turks, too.” But, he says, he’s not worried as much about the Turkish threats. “The difference between the Islamists and the Nazis is,” he says, “the quality of the threat.”
Somuncu doesn’t know what he’s going to do in the future. There is no ten-year plan. There is no plan to systematically unmask all the social taboos and hypocrisies in Germany. He doesn’t even, after exposing me to his irony, his jokes, his absurdism, accept the label “comic.” He doesn’t even know, days after performing his four-minute Hitler joke blitz, if he will strut on stage as Adolf Hitler again. He switches into his stentorian voice. “I am not interested in Hitler, or Goebbels anymore, but it’s not my interest,” he said. “As long as Mein Kampf is relevant, as long as there are neo-Nazis. I must do this. Can you say Nazis are not a problem now?” He pauses, notes the rise of the far right in the German parliament in recent years, and says, bleakly. “I could be doing this for many years.”
As I say goodbye to him, Somuncu tells me one other thing. He reminds me that when I’m on the airplane, going back to Chicago, I should push the call button. And when the flight attendant arrives, he says, “say Hitler.”
Otium
