Popular Culture, Humor, and Trauma: Towards the Normalization of Holocaust Memory

This study integrates three research fields: television as popular culture, humoristic sketches, and the collective memory of the Holocaust. It does so by exploring skits that were aired on Israeli television and are related to Holocaust memory. At its core the study suggests a typology of these skits indicating several phases that were gradually developed, from using humor for criticizing Holocaust commemoration discourse to using Holocaust discourse as a means to create humor. In the last and current phase, humor and critique are directed not towards Holocaust memory but rather towards the myths arising from the events themselves. Contextualizing its analysis in the fields of trauma theory and media memory, the study argues that while commemorative discourse plays a distinctive role in performing cultural trauma, the media’s humorous discourse conveys a sacrilegious viewpoint and thus can play a vital role in recuperating from it.