Family Guy

A couple of weeks ago, the incredibly popular show Family Guy opened with a hilarious bit. Much of Family Guy is made up of social satire and cut-aways so this bit was perfectly typical of the show.

The scene starts with an animated Osama bin Laden speaking into a camera. I'm paraphrasing but Osama is saying something along the lines of "All the Americans infidels must be killed. We will bring down America. In this holy month of Radaman." Of course, it's the holy month of "Ramadan," not "Radaman." Osama cracks up over this mispronounciation and tries to re-shoot the take, but he just can't do it without breaking into laughs. "Radaman, what am I gonna do, kill them with my crazy hair?" he asks, in a reference to Dennis Rodman's hair preference, the former Chicago Bulls basketball star. Osama then riffs on what would happen if he did the whole scene with a rubber chicken in hand..."What, it wasn't me? It's the chicken!" Or with goofy, over-sized sunglasses.

I'm not doing it justice, but the scene was truly hysterical. I laughed all the way through. It's easily one of the best bits ever on Family Guy and I'm a big fan. But why is this funny? Is it really comical to poke fun at somebody who was essentially the direct cause of the biggest terrorist attack on American soil ever? 9/11 is so fresh in all our minds...was this really appropriate? On some level, the scene is sympathetic to bin Laden merely in its depiction of him as having a great sense of humor? Can we really hate this guy...I'd rather have a beer with him. I was reminded of the award-winning play The Producers. I'm sure many of you have seen it, but for those who haven't or aren't familiar, The Producers is about a man who decides to make the worst flop of a movie he possibly can in an order to run away with the investors' money. The movie ends up being called Springtime for Hitler, and it basically portrays the Nazi party, WW2, Hitler, and the Holocaust in a very comical light. At the play, I laughed along with everyone else, but in the back of my mind I couldn't help but feel a tinge of guilt. The Nazis incinerated a third of my people as well a hundreds of thousands of other minorities (gays, gypsies). I'm almost conditioned to get angry and enraged when I talk about Hitler or the Nazis. I was brought up with such a hatred for Hitler and all that he stood for that it just seemed fundamentally "weird" to be laughing at him.

Mel Brooks, who wrote The Producers, is of course Jewish himself. I doubt a non-Jew would be able to get away with writing this play. Brooks has talked extensively about the power of laughter. He believes it's really the only way to confront the evil in this world and be able to go on with our lives. For Brooks, comedy is a coping mechanism. The writer/s of the bin Laden scene in Family Guy would no doubt prescribe to the same philosophy. Brooks makes a good point, but I for one, am still torn. Even though it may help us cope with tragedy, is it still right to make comedy out of the Holocaust or 9/11? I was arguing with someone the other day about the movie Life is Beautiful, which tells the story of how a man tried to shiel his son from the horrors of the Holocaust in the hell that were the concentration camps. This person felt it was simply wrong to show that any good came from the Holocaust at all or to imply that life could possibly be beautiful in the concentration camps. He thought it sent people the wrong message. I vehemently disagreed, but the notion was actually expressed by many highyl-regarded critics at the time of the movies' release as well. How do we reconcile art and comedy with human tragedies?