Comedy Is a Great Antidote to Racism. So Let’s Stop Censoring It in the Name of Anti-Racism.

Differences around race and religion are real. Joking about them can help us get along.

The Comedy Central series Nathan for You — starring Nathan Fielder as a consultant who goes around and helps real-life people cultivate their businesses in the most comedic ways — is one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen.

Where else can you watch people hike a mountain and solve a riddle in order to get a special rebate at a gas station, marvel at a maid service that deploys 40 maids at once to a location, or wonder if a realtor promising ghost-free property will really help her business take off.

Although the series ended back in 2017 (with Fielder helping a Bill Gates impersonator find love), its comedy is eternal. I think people will be watching this send up of get-rich-quick business consulting decades from now.

But there’s at least one episode they won’t be watching unless they happened to nab it on physical media or are willing to resort to Internet piracy. That’s because Paramount+, which streams the series, decided to remove it from its service.

The episode in question — the second one of the third season — featured Fielder deciding to start a clothing brand to promote Holocaust awareness.

Paramount+ Germany decided to remove the episode after the onset of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023. This set off a chain reaction of Paramount+ following suit worldwide. Although they did not publicly explain the decision, Fielder later learned that it was because they wanted to distance themselves from “anything that touches on antisemitism in the aftermath of the Israel-Hamas attacks.”

He struck back at the entertainment giant over the weekend by releasing an episode of his latest series, The Rehearsal, that analogized Paramount+ to the Nazis themselves. In the show, he talks to an actor playing a Paramount+ executive from Germany and dresses them down:

Look, I know you guys probably feel a lot of shame about what you did in the past, and now you're trying to overcompensate by being the world leaders in fighting antisemitism, but when it comes to art, I think you have to know your place, and you have to let us Jews express ourselves, because honestly, the way you're approaching this whole thing, people might get the wrong idea about what you actually stand for.

The irony is that Fielder was inspired to originally make the episode because he learned that one of his favorite Canadian clothing brands had published a tribute to a Holocaust denier in their winter catalog. Fielder, who is Jewish himself, decided to do the gag about a jacket company that promotes Holocaust awareness as a way to process the absurdity that there are still prominent people in the world who refuse to acknowledge what happened to his ancestors.

(You can watch the relevant portion of the episode here on YouTube).

But should humor that relates to the Holocaust — even if Holocaust deniers themselves are the brunt of the joke — be off limits? What about humor relating to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler? Isn’t that just downright offensive?

That was HBO host Bill Maher’s retort after being taken to a literary woodshed by comedic writer Larry David recently.

After Maher decided to have dinner with President Donald Trump and gush about how charming and different he is in private, David took to the New York Times and wrote a satirical op-ed about having dinner with Hitler:

But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.

It’s not every day you’re skewered by one of the funniest men alive, so Maher of course had to respond. A no comment is not going to suffice.

“To use the Hitler thing — first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews,” he told host Piers Morgan. “That should kind of be in its own place.”

This must’ve been a real change of heart for Maher, who has a long history of telling Hitler jokes and invoking the Fourth Reich. That ranges from comparing grocery store managers to Hitler to himself once saying that Trump was “a little Hitler-adjacent.”

But David’s joke seemed to go over Maher’s head. Because David was not comparing Trump to Hitler. In fact, Trump was not the target of the essay at all.

David’s argument was basically that Maher is a dilletante, someone who is so superficial that of course he will be won over by someone’s charm of humor even if that person is also a powerful government official who he should be holding accountable, not dining with in relative comfort.

Cranking the knob up to the absurd and saying that Maher would do this sitting next to literal Hitler is just how you make the satire funny — it’s not like Jonathan Swift was literally proposing that the Irish poor sell their babies as food. That’s the whole point of satirical exaggeration.

In both these cases, the offending comedian is themselves of Jewish descent. It’s not like either Fielder or David have any love for Hitler or any lack of sympathy for the millions of Jews and others who perished at Nazi Germany’s hands.

But they can see that humor is often a healthy way to deal with discomfort.

Photo by Michel Grolet on Unsplash

Think about Rush Hour, the classic buddy cop film starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as mutual fish out of water.

Chan, who plays a Chinese cop, arrives in the U.S. to help solve a kidnapping that has turned into a diplomatic incident. Tucker, an average LAPD officer, picks him up and immediately starts to groan about being assigned to a foreign colleague who he fears barely speaks English.

“I cannot believe this SHIT! First I get a bullshit assignment, now Mr. Rice-a-Roni don't even speak American. C'mon, man, my ride over here. Put your bag in the back,” Tucker yells within earshot of many onlookers.

Can you imagine if a guy greeted a minority colleague like that during the first day of their office job? It would be offensive, outrageous, and maybe even a firing offense.

But that’s exactly why you need comedians to do it. Over the course of the film, Tucker and Chan become best of friends to the point they’d gladly give their lives for each other. But they have to work through that discomfort of the cultural barrier first. And having someone just blurt out the most offensive anxieties they have, which is the role Tucker’s character plays, is an effective way to diffuse the tensions we all have somewhere inside of us about diversity.

That’s what I love about Norman Lear’s old shows from the 1970s. Programming like Good Times, The Jeffersons, and All in the Family gave Americans who had just lived through the Vietnam War and desegregation a way to laugh across political and social divides.

Take this scene from The Jeffersons that featured both Mr. Jefferson, a middle-class black man, and Archie Bunker, a white conservative with a tendency to offend. Instead of hewing to political correctness as some kind of guidebook for behavior to the audience, Jefferson and Bunker simply air their disagreements with eachother, using comedy to slowly break down their prejudices.

First, Bunker commits the faux pax of referring to Jefferson’s mother as a mammy, an historical stereotype based on black women engaging in domestic work, especially as a slave.

But then we see that Jefferson isn’t perfect, either. The two happen to be at a wedding and they meet a rare sight at that time: an interracial husband and wife.

“Hey Jefferson, you’re going to love this,” Bunker tells him.

Upon meeting the couple, Jefferson is blunt.

“You’re white,” he tells the white husband.

“And you’re black,” replies the husband replies, not missing a beat.

“It’s a kick in the head, ain’t it?” Bunker asks him.

It turns out that despite their differences the two can bond over one thing: their shared prejudices. And the audiences can laugh at them both — because prejudice about who marries who is actually pretty absurd, no matter who it comes from.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

Yet censors on right and left, from corporate America and the academy and the U.S. federal government, don’t appreciate the role of just letting people air their grievances and laugh about their differences. Paramount+ panicked after October 2023 and decided it needed to purge its network of anything that could potentially offend Jewish people. Maher, after years of making Hitler comparisons and jokes himself, has suddenly decided that the topic so solemn it can’t even be mentioned.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of watching improv comedy at a comedy club in Chicago, which is basically ground zero for the art (it’s where this form of comedy was first cultivated and popularized). At one point, the team I was watching started doing a scene where they tortured a Jewish person by sending him to a Jesus camp. It was a hilarious set, but at one point one of the comedians stepped forward and broke character and explained that he could tell those jokes because he was Jewish.

I understand why he chose to do that. He didn’t want the audience to think he was actually antisemitic. But it still felt a little unnecessary.

Years later, I watched another improv show in Chicago where the improvisers were given the task of being really racist (don’t ask me how they got there, improv takes you to weird places). They seemed afraid to do that and made a few misogynistic jokes instead. It wasn’t remotely funny.

Look, not every joke lands. And sometimes comedians just end up being bullies when they repeatedly pick on one ethic or religious group and clearly are trying to actually denigrate a group of people rather than make light of our differences. I won’t defend everything any comedian anywhere has done, and our tastes provide a natural limitation to what a comic should say or do.

But we’re not making the world any more tolerant trying to rid the world of jokes about race, ethnicity, culture, or controversial topics. Humor is often the way we get through the day without just going crazy about these things. Comedians are the pressure valve of our society, and we should be very wary about shutting it off.