80 years before Taika Waititi decided to turn Adolf Hitler—the embodiment of evil—into a punchline, Charlie Chaplin directed his own satirical film about the horrifying dictator, called The Great Dictator. While Chaplin's film is quite different than Waititi's, it takes a similar political tactic, attacking the evil of fascism by making fun of it and turning it into something more worthy of derision than fear. At the time of its release, Chaplin's film proved quite politically impactful, educating Americans about Hitler, Mussolini, the anti-Semitism of Nazism—all did so just as World War II was breaking out, but before the United States declared war on Germany.
At the time that Chaplin decided to make The Great Dictator, he was one of, if not the most, popular American entertainers, but he was more known for playing unassuming and bumbling low-status characters like his famous "Little Tramp." While many made comparisons between Chaplin and Hitler's physical attributes, including their signature mustaches, he was not exactly a natural choice to play such a seriously evil man. The Great Dictator also marked Chaplin's introduction to sound films. In the film, Chaplin plays both a fictional Hitler-like dictator and a Jewish barber, and the film follows the Hitler figure's single-minded thirst for power, while also portraying his bigoted views.
At the time of its release, the film was well-received in America and Britain, but banned in several countries where Nazi sympathy was more prevalent. With time, it has gone down in history as both a historically and artistically important film, distinguished in large part by its comedic and satirical treatment of serious subject matter. In an article about the film's merits for Vanity Fair in October 2019, K. Austin Collins wrote, "The Great Dictator understands Hitler as a performer, as an orator wielding language like the unifying, galvanizing power that it is. But it also understands him as a psyche. This of course means it’s full of what feel like sophomoric jokes, gags in which Hitler’s insecurities, his thirst for influence, his ideological inconsistencies (an Aryan revolution led by a brunette?) and zealous dependency on loyalty come under fire. It isn’t a psychological portrait, but nor is it so simple as a funhouse treatment of the coming war, all punchline and distortion."
