X
Wartime comedy boosted morale in dark times. Some risked execution for cracking a joke; others raised millions for war bonds.
1. Bob Hope (United States).
Hugely popular on US radio before Pearl Harbor, British-born Hope became the face of the USO and the ultimate morale-booster, traveling the globe, cracking jokes on battleship decks and in godforsaken desert camps. I’m convinced his self-deprecating humor was English in origin, though as a limey I would say that. In North Africa, he quipped: “The minute the siren went off, three thousand soldiers and one comedian found the exact same ditch. I was at the bottom... because the local mosquitoes are so big here, they have to clear their flights with the control tower.” He completed 57 USO tours from 1941 to 1991 and died in 2003, aged 100, an absolute legend.
2. Lou Costello & Bud Abbott (United States).
These masters of quick-draw wordplay had servicemen and women in stitches. Their 1941 film, Buck Privates, hit theaters just before Pearl Harbor and became an accidental military recruiting tool. The duo funded a massive 35-day cross-country tour, generating $85 million in war bonds for the U.S. government. How many comedians are lauded by the U.S. Treasury Department? Well, these guys were. Costello died in 1959, aged 52, from a heart attack. Abbott died in 1974, aged 76, from prostate cancer.
3. George Formby (United Kingdom).
I vaguely remember my grandparents laughing at Formby when he appeared on television. This working-class northern lad had a huge grin and could play the banjo and ukulele like the devil. He packed music halls and had the war’s best double entendres. Like Bob Hope, he traveled to active combat zones. On one occasion, he was said to have crawled into a trench to strum his ukulele just yards from enemy positions. His wartime hit “Bless 'Em All” became an anthem for troops around the globe. “They say there's a troopship just leaving Bombay, bound for old Blighty’s shore,” he sang. “You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean, so cheer up, my lads, bless ‘em all!” He was awarded the OBE in 1946 for bravery under fire, but, sadly, died in 1961 of a heart attack, aged 56.
4. Tommy Trinder (United Kingdom).
Trinder was the quintessential Cockney comedian. He had an outsize ego and comedic talent, and was the West End’s star jokester during WWII. He also had guts. During the Blitz, Trinder kept performing to packed houses. He also served as an auxiliary fireman, dragging bodies from burning buildings by day and donning a tuxedo by night as he walked the boards, with the theater walls shaking from bombing. He was also a hit with the hordes of American troops who arrived in London before D-Day. “You’ve got to love our American cousins,” he quipped. “The only real trouble with the Americans is that they are overpaid, over-sexed, and over here. Meanwhile, we British are under-paid, under-fed, and under them!” He became a TV star and died in 1989, aged 80.
5. Arkadiy Raikin (Soviet Union).
Surprise, surprise – in Stalin’s Soviet Union, making people laugh was tightly controlled. Mockery enrages tin-pot dictators, wannabe strongmen, and genuine despots. Raikin evaded censorship and the Gulag through subtlety and character transformations, using masks and cloaks to satirize Soviet society. He took his theater troupe straight to the Eastern Front, performing on flatbed military trucks. He was beloved by the doomed millions of the Red Army. “The German high command drew up a mathematically perfect master plan to capture Moscow in three weeks,” he quipped. “But they made one fatal mistake. They forgot to file the paperwork with our local district transit office. If our own citizens can’t get a pass to cross the street without waiting six months, how did Hitler think he could manage it without a single rubber stamp?” Unlike some 25 million of his fellow citizens, he survived the war and died in 1987, aged 76, at the height of Glasnost.
6. Leonid Utyosov (Soviet Union)
A prodigiously talented Jewish showman from Odessa, Utyosov pioneered Soviet jazz despite the Soviet state’s deep suspicion of Western popular music. He had great comedic timing and a soulful voice. He survived the epic 872-day siege of Leningrad and boosted troops’ morale at the front with his own orchestra, raising enough funds to buy two fighter planes for the 5th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. He mocked German propaganda: “Attention, Berlin! Our glorious advance toward the East continues... We have successfully lured the Soviet army directly into our rear guard. In fact, we are advancing backward so quickly toward Berlin.” He survived ruthless post-war purges and died, a national treasure, in 1982, aged 86, from natural causes.
7. Ken'ichi Enomoto (Enoken) (Imperial Japan).
“Enoken” was the Japanese answer to Charlie Chaplin, superb at slapstick, a face-contorting dynamo adored by Tokyo audiences. His form of Western comedy was banned by Japan’s military government, so he pivoted to parodying samurai. He survived the Tokyo air raids and firebombing that killed more than a hundred thousand Japanese in a single night. Cleared of right-wing militarist ties by Allied occupation forces, he returned to the theater and died in 1970 of cirrhosis of the liver, aged 65.
8. Roppa Furukawa (Imperial Japan).
Roppa was Enoken’s opposite – heavy-set, highbrow, a kind of midcentury John Candy for Japan’s intelligentsia. As Japan faced severe shortages, he turned to the radio and made fun of the absurd lengths some people went to in substituting real food with roots and vines. “The government tells us that eating simple, unseasoned boiled sweet potatoes every single day builds a pure warrior spirit,” he opined. “My spirit is definitely changing—it is turning entirely into gas. If the military needs a new secret weapon, they just need to put me in an enclosed room with the enemy.” He died in 1961, aged 57.
9. Ludwig Schmitz & Joseph “Jupp” Hussels (“Tran and Helle”) (Nazi Germany).
Joseph Goebbels, propaganda supremo of the Third Reich, sure was inventive when not outright lying, creating this fictional comedy duo to manipulate the German people. Schmitz starred as “Tran,” a dumb Berliner who tried to hoard food or listen to foreign radio. Hussels played “Helle,” a correct Nazi who would catch Tran out and mock him into behaving as Hitler would surely want. They were surprisingly popular, which tells you all you need to know about German humor. They were classified as “followers” during de-Nazification tribunals after the war and banned from performing, but both found work as actors in the 1950s. Schmitz died in 1954, aged 70, from a heart attack; Hussels died in 1986, aged 85, from natural causes.
10. Werner Finck (Nazi Germany).
Finck was a giant of the Berlin cabaret scene. His cutting wit and agile mind made him a natural enemy of the Nazis, who were slow to grasp irony and utterly unable to laugh at themselves. Finck performed at the Katakombe cabaret while Nazi agents sat in the front rows, taking notes. He was duly arrested in 1935 and survived a concentration camp. He then joined the Wehrmacht as a radio operator. Before his arrest, he had pushed the envelope, raising his arm in the mandatory Nazi salute on stage while his audience stared in tense silence. Then he’d glance at his wrist. “Oh, look at that,” he’d exclaim. “It's exactly ten past eight. Or... is it later than we all think?" It was too late for tens of millions of Europeans, but Finck survived the war and was “exonerated” by the Allies. He went on to have a hugely successful cabaret career, dying in 1978 at age 76. There was precious little funny about Nazism, or for that matter WWII, but natural-born comedians like Finck, just as with his peers in other nations, at least gave people something to smile about.
