Holocaust Humor Always Funniest When Used by Leaders of Former Axis Powers

Who doesn't enjoy a light-hearted, anti-Semetic Holocaust joke now and then? Humorless Vatican and Israeli newspapers, that's who.

[T]he Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, denounced Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy for telling a “deplorable” joke about Jews and the Holocaust.

The newspaper called Mr. Berlusconi’s anti-Semitic joke, which stereotypes Jews as obsessed with money, “an offense to the sacred memory of six million victims of the Holocaust,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

[...]

[T]he Italian leader can be heard telling a joke about a Jew who admits that “during the time of the death camps” he agreed to hide another Jew in his cellar but forced him to pay more than $4,000 a day because “we are Jews.” The joke’s punch line, such as it is, involves the man asking his family if he should finally admit to the man in his cellar that Hitler is dead and the war is over.

C'mon, people, lighten up! The day we can't laugh at 6 million dead is a sad day for us all.

[NYT] via [theAwl]