Political Spoofs Gallery

Commander Shutz: “How's the gas?”
Jewish barber: “Terrible, it kept me awake all night.”

At a time when America was fiercely maintaining its neutrality in the Second World War, it took The Little Tramp to bring home to US audiences the horrific scale of what was going on in Nazi Germany. His broad satire – his biggest box office success - followed the misfortunes of an amnesiac Great War soldier who returns to his Jewish ghetto in Tomerania. However, things have changed: Dictator Adenoid Hynkel, who accidentally looks very similar to the crimper, has laid his merciless grip on the country and is waging a merciless policy of repression against the Jews. Chaplin – who faced opposition from the Hollywood studios yet was encouraged to make it by President Franklin Roosevelt - would later say that had he known the true extent of Nazi atrocities, he "could not have made fun of their homicidal insanity".