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Thou Shalt Not Laugh (at Schindler’s List)

By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 1, 1995

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The Joe Bob Report (PO Box 2002, Dallas TX 75221, $3 for a sample copy), a newsletter dedicated to the conservation of a threatened American cultural institution, the drive-in movie theater, ran an interesting article about the high school kids in Oakland who were taken to see Schindler's List and laughed at all the wrong places.

The adults “kicked out the whole crowd of sixty students from Castlemont High School, who were there on a field trip to learn about… well… about acceptance.

“… I'd like to say there is no such thing as an inappropriate response… to a movie. In other words, the audience can't be wrong. If the audience laughs, it's funny, by definition. If the audience cries, it's sad. You can't go around yanking people out of their chairs and saying, 'You can't stay at this movie, because you don't get it!'”

“These students were watching in a group. Groups are different. Groups have an energy based on what the various members of the group are doing — not what's on the screen. All the adults that got so upset were watching the movie in isolation. The high school students were watching it together. They knew who was laughing and who wasn't. After a while, it's contagious because of things that have nothing to do with the movie.”

And he adds: “I'm surprised I have to explain these things.”

  • Bradley R. Smith

    Bradley R. Smith was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1930. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served with the infantry in Korea where he was twice wounded. After three decades of a variety of professional activities, it suddenly hit him: In 1979 he read a leaflet by Professor Robert Faurisson, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers." Then, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century did it for him. He understood from the beginning that he would address the censorship, the suppression of independent thought, the taboo against publishing and debating revisionist arguments—not the arguments themselves. That has remained his position. In 1989, Smith founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry into the Holocaust question. He handed over CODOH's helm in late 2014. He passed away on his 86th birthday, February 18, 2016. Read a series of obituaries here.

Bibliographic information about this document: Smith's Report, no. 20, February 1995, pp. 3f.taboo
Other contributors to this document: n/a
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