A documentary on Holocaust jokes took 23 years to make

The Last Laugh was made by director Ferne Pearlstein, and it is a documentary that took 23 years to get from idea to premiere. In 1993 a friend, Kent Kirshenbaum, gave her a paper he had written on humor and the Holocaust and urged her to turn it into a movie. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.

It asks a question most comedy avoids: can the Holocaust be a subject for jokes? Pearlstein put it to comedians, writers and concentration camp survivors, and the film runs 88 minutes.

Why did it take so long?

Pearlstein has said that what made her want to make the film was finding out that there was some humor in the camps. The Jewish Journal reported that raising the money took nearly two decades, with almost all of it coming from one anonymous donor.

The turning point came when she watched Gilbert Gottfried get laughs with 9/11 jokes in The Aristocrats. She took it as a sign audiences were ready: "people are ready for my film," she said.

It opened in New York at Lincoln Plaza Cinema on March 3, 2017, and aired on PBS Independent Lens on April 24.

Who is at the center of it?

The film is built around Renee Firestone, an Auschwitz survivor and retired fashion designer who lost the rest of her family. She watches comedians' Holocaust jokes on YouTube while the camera follows, and Pearlstein joins her for lunch in an old Nazi bunker with her daughter Klara. Klara says in the film: "The survivors actually have some of the worst gallows humor ever."

The film opens at a Holocaust survivors' convention in Las Vegas. An elderly man says, "Without humor I don't think we would have survived." A neighbor disagrees.

Where do the comedians draw the line?

Gottfried says in the film: "if you say 'Holocaust,' then it becomes bad taste." Pearlstein says many of her interviewees told her they had no Holocaust joke, but did have a Nazi joke.

Mel Brooks says of his Hitler comedy, "Anything I could do to deflate Germans, I did." Pearlstein says Brooks draws a line: you can joke about the perpetrators but not the victims.

The film also includes newly discovered footage of Jerry Lewis's never-released Holocaust film, The Day the Clown Cried.

It is for anyone who follows stand-up and wants to hear comedians, a survivor and a director argue about where its limits are.

Documentary