Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit arrives with the full weight of its reputation — an Oscar-winning dark comedy about a ten-year-old boy in Nazi Germany whose imaginary friend is a buffoonish Hitler, and whose world is upended when he discovers a Jewish girl hidden in his mother’s attic. The film is vibrant, well-acted, and visually inventive. It is also, James and Teal find themselves concluding, a film that has surprisingly little to say about fascism. That is not a condemnation so much as a clarification — and it is precisely the kind of distinction the show exists to make.

The hosts’ central charge is analytical rather than aesthetic. Jojo Rabbit is not an anti-fascist film; it is an anti-hate film. Its argument runs: fascism is animated by hatred, hatred dissolves through contact and empathy, and the good-hearted individual is ultimately redeemable. This is what the show’s framework calls a personalist model — the problem is bad hearts, and the cure is meeting people unlike yourself. What the film never reckons with is the structural machinery that produces people like Jojo in the first place. The contrast with Christine Leunens’s source novel is instructive: in Caging Skies, Jojo never stops lying to Elsa, keeps her imprisoned into adulthood, and is permanently damaged by fascist formation. Waititi’s Hollywood ending — and his historically untethered Hitler, bumbling and cigarette-offering — tells us something about the film’s ambitions and their limits.

What the episode keeps returning to is the question haunting Season 3: what can comedy actually do with this material? A whimsical aesthetic is not merely a stylistic choice — it is an epistemological one, determining what the film can see and what it can’t. Jojo Rabbit uses fascism as an environment for a coming-of-age story rather than as its subject. That said, James and Teal note something its original audiences may have underestimated: rewatched in the political climate of 2025, it isn’t funny at all.