Politics of humour in extremis: Cabaret and propaganda in the Netherlands during the Second World War

Abstract

This article examines politicized humour in totalitarian regimes by conducting an analysis of the radio programme ‘Zondagmiddagcabaret van Paulus de Ruiter’ (‘Sunday Afternoon Cabaret by Paulus de Ruiter’), which was aired between 1941 and 1943 in the Netherlands under German occupation. The radio programme in the occupied Netherlands is exceptional in that it was explicitly designed as a ‘political cabaret’, whereas propaganda in Nazi Germany generally aimed to indirectly influence the audience through so-called light entertainment. The focus on dramaturgies of humorous strategies and on Althusser’s concept of interpellation allows for a distinction of different scenes of interpellation as staged by the ‘Sunday Afternoon Cabaret’. Even though the study of National Socialist programmes can be distressing for both the researcher and the reader, the aim is to analyse the workings of humour without necessarily characterizing humorous strategies in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but instead paying attention to the way humour works on socio-political imaginaries. During the first period of the broadcast, the ambivalent character of humour aimed at shifting ideological frames, to redefine socio-political imaginaries. Later on, the performed dramaturgy of humour redefined the scene of interpellation as a scene of exclusive racial national identity, even before the German National Socialist authorities started to implement measures for the persecution and annihilation of Jewish citizens in the Netherlands at the beginning of 1942.