Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn’t saluting.
“Why aren’t you saluting like the others?” Hitler barks.
“Mein Führer, I’m the nurse,” comes the answer. “I’m not crazy!”

That joke may not be a screamer, but it was told quite openly along with many others about Hitler and his henchmen in the early years of the Third Reich, according to a new book on humor under the Nazis.

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort “through spiteful remarks” and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin’s radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. “Why don’t you just jump?” suggests Göring.

From Der Spiegel.

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Mr. Sarkar told the new arrivals that, having spent a year in Raleigh, he was seriously considering staying on for a doctorate at N.C. State. The decision was momentous. “If you go for a Ph.D.,” a former boss in India had told him, “you won’t come back.” In the winter, Mr. Sarkar told the group, he planned to fly back to India to make the decision with his family. The juniors nodded, agreeing with this approach.

Then Mr. Sarkar described to the juniors something that had mystified him: While working an on-campus job, he said, he met an American student who had started out studying engineering in college. After a while, she had switched to chemistry, and then, finally, to English. He had been dumbfounded. But Mr. Sarkar said he had begun to have a kind of respect for this American propensity for drastic self-reinvention. “You’re required to take strong decisions,” he observed.

I liked reading this piece in the Chronicle about desis arriving in America because it stirred something close to nostalgia. (Via Arts and Letters Daily.)

(P.S. I took the above picture in Bombay some weeks ago. I think it was the gin that made the camera tilt so absurdly upwards.)

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