1940s: "The Dictator Has No Clothes" - Charlie Chaplin
Released in 1940 as Charlie Chaplin's first feature length talkie, The Great Dictator satirizes Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Third Reich with blistering precision before America's official entry into World War II. Charlie Chaplin plays a Jewish barber who is mistaken for a dictator, and plays the role of the actual dictator, who is identical to Adolf Hitler. Chaplin would later on say he would have never produced The Great Dictator if knowledge of the Nazis’ crimes against humanity had been publicly known. The Great Dictator went on to become Chaplin’s most financially successful film.
Two of the film’s most famous scenes include the dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, dancing and playing with a ballooned globe while Richard Wagner music plays in the soundtrack, with the second scene being a final speech in which the Jewish barber, acting as Hynkel, calls for world peace, compassion, and for an end to anti-sementism.
The Great Dictator is an early example of political satire that archives pre-American involvement during World War II in cinema. Throughout this film, Chaplin uses slapstick and political satire as storytelling devices in an attempt to expose and humiliate the Third Reich. Comedy is often used as a tool for audiences to easily digest the absurdity of real world situations. In essence, if you ridicule the boogeyman, it takes the power away from the monsters.
