August 15, 2004

• Does "The LiveJournal of Anne Frank" count? Here are first days' entries. Some of the comments are not so appreciative. I couldn't get page 2 of your link to load, but I seriously doubt it is listed there. They say that the recipe for humor is "tragedy + time", but that doesn't mean that everyone will find it humorous. Of course "The Producers" is considered "a comic masterpiece of uproarious bad taste", but Mel Brooks lineage makes him unimpeachable.
• Don't forget the David Sedaris story in "Dress Your Family..."
• Am I the only one who had reservations about following the link just based on the phrase "fanfic"? First thing I thought was Anne Franke and furries, or perhaps tentacles... OT: It's a commentable Sedaris Weekend at Mofi!
• bad thought get out of my head no no no what is that thought doing in there oh no the horror of my previously unexplored subconscious bad no no bad no pivo, not just you, my immediate interpretation of this was anne frank slash fanfic such bad thoughts wrong wrong wrongfulness no no stop my head now please bad.
• tragedy + time = comedy The question is, of course, how much time? My worry is that my personal required elapsed time before involuntarily thinking of jokes about tragedies is considerably shorter than many other people's. Hence the punching. For example, Dunblane - about a day and a half. Columbine - half a day. 9/11 - two, maybe three days. Princess Diana - 0.0013 seconds. Based on various cultural markers I can recall seeing over the past few years, I believe we are living in that liminal, boundary-crossing time when the Holocaust is now becoming legitimately funny. That we are in a time of transition (with some finding it funny and others not) only serves to heighten the comically transgressive nature of such 'caustic wit, thus pushing it further towards the mainstream. As evidence, I offer the observation that the reviews for Kill Hitler: Volume One on that site are hilarious, and probably much funnier than the piece itself. I remain undecided about whether or not this is a good thing.
• Well shucks, flashboy. If we can't laugh about the brutal and methodical execution of 6 million innocent souls, then I guess this ol' world's just made for frownin'.
• lol jews
• Not to mention a crossover [mixture] of The Diary of Anne Frank and Touched by an Angel, which I think may have been deleted. (The link I had previously is here, and it seems defunct.) There's also the one where a fictional woman redeems Josef Mengele with her Pure True Love, but I can't find a link at the moment and really don't want to dig up that particular mental torture. (My angle is from a masochistic net-hobby of especially, uniquely terrible fanfiction, not Holocaust history, so don't think I'm an expert.) My guess at how this... material... comes to exist is the age of the... writers... involved, who are probably studying The Diary of Anne Frank in school, and their youthful misunderstanding of the real historical impact. To them it is probably just a dramatic story. Given that people their age probably don't even have grandparents who served in WWII (my generation does, and I'm twice as old as they are), this probably seems as remote as Ancient Greece to them. It probably doesn't seem like something that really happened to real people. I have hope that some of them will finish sixth grade, grow up and understand that real things happened to real people, that this isn't just a story to play around with.