Ridicule is a potent weapon in the fight for free speech

On Tuesday night this week, I went into central London to see Patrick Marber’s brilliant new production of the musical The Producers, complete with the most bad-taste song in musical theatre, “Springtime for Hitler”.

- JON SOPEL

In this joyous telling of the story, the Fuhrer is rotund and as camp as a row of tents. One can only imagine the shock of audiences when Mel Brooks's original film with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel opened just 20 years after the end of the Second World War. A comedy about Hitler? Swastikas everywhere? Farce and absurdity mixed with a dusting of satire? But an interview Brooks gave in 2001 explained the rationale:

"If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator, you never win... That's what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."

This quote from Brooks I found in the show's programme. Last Tuesday evening when I went to see the production was, coincidentally, the same night that Jimmy Kimmel was returning to America's TV screens after ABC and its parent company, Disney, had been bullied into removing Kimmel's late night comedy show from the air because of the ridicule that he had heaped upon Donald Trump in the wake of the dreadful murder of Charlie Kirk.

Now the president of the United States isn't a dictator, but – ummm - he has tendencies in that direction. And reading that 2001 quote from Mel Brooks had never seemed more apposite.