Fascism on Film takes a sharp, funny, and surprisingly emotional look at Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime satire To Be or Not to Be—a screwball comedy about a Polish theater troupe who find themselves impersonating Nazis, outwitting Gestapo agents, and flying to safety in Hitler’s own airplane.

What starts as a lighthearted romp through mistaken identities and love triangles quickly becomes something deeper. It’s a movie that plays with the idea of performance, whether it is on stage, in politics, or under fascist rule. As we discuss in the episode, Lubitsch isn’t just making fun of the Nazis (though he does that with glee) he’s asking what it means to perform resistance, to impersonate power, and to make audiences complicit in laughter that walks right up to the edge of good taste.

We talk about Jack Benny’s rare turn as a film lead, Carole Lombard’s sharp comic timing in her final role, and the film’s outrageous double entendres—like the infamous line, “He did to Shakespeare what we’re doing to Poland.” We also dig into the controversy surrounding the film’s release, the resistance it faced from censors and critics, and its enduring power as a film that dares to ask: what if comedy could be a weapon?

From bumbling Nazis and closet Hamlets to high-contrast lighting and low-key sedition, this film blends slapstick with subversion, farce with fatalism, and lands a few punches along the way. We also explore how Lubitsch’s genius lies not just in his jokes, but in how he uses structure, tone, and ellipses to make the audience fill in the most uncomfortable blanks themselves.

Is fascism just a performance of power? And can satire, disguise, and theater actually subvert that performance?