After fifteen years of planning to rent it, I finally sat down and watched Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, 1940’s funniest Holocaust comedy as well as the best movie to ever be inspired by someone saying, “You know…? You two sort of have the same moustache.” Though it ended up being nominated for five Oscars, people criticized Chaplin when it was made because they thought his criticisms of Hitler’s policies were too outlandish; seeing it now and realizing just how right he ended up being– and, in some cases, how much worse things turned out in real life– makes the whole thing a bit more of a gut-punch than it was probably intended to be. You look through the prism of history at scenes like the one where Chaplin’s Little Tramp is in a concentration camp writing a letter to his sweetheart about his impending release, and suddenly you notice that you’ve been moaning through your open mouth for the last ten minutes without realizing it. Even Chaplin said that if he’d known what was really going on in Germany, he’d never have made the movie.

All of this reminded me of another comic auteur who decided to make a Holocaust comedy, only this time with the benefit of historical hindsight. That man was, of course, poet/genius/friend to children Jerry Lewis, and that movie was The Day the Clown Cried. I could write ten pages on the amazing hubris, boneheadedness, and insensitivity that went into making this movie. Unfortunately, I have not seen it. No one has. It has never been shown to anyone, because it is (according to rare eyewitness accounts) one of the worst movies ever made. It is, after all, a 2 1/2 hour movie starring Jerry Lewis as a clown who leads children to the gas chambers at Auschwitz like some kind of rapist Pied Piper. Are you laughing yet?

Take a minute with the mental image. Now that you know about it, you’d kill to see the last ten minutes of it, wouldn’t you? Well, I can’t help you. Lewis has it locked in his office, and I doubt even his death will bring it into the light of day. Have a look at that article linked above, though; you’ll doubt your senses.