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Comedy Declares War on Fascism

A run of satires and cabaret turns that meet tyranny with ridicule — watch these together to see performers puncture dictators and expose the void behind the uniform.

Broadly beloved canon that's easy to walk into: Duck Soup and The Producers are pure crowd delight, The Great Dictator and To Be or Not to Be reward a little film literacy, and Cabaret turns the mood darker and more devastating as Weimar Berlin curdles into the Reich.

• The Great Dictator (1940)
• Duck Soup (1933)
• To Be or Not to Be (1942)
• The Producers (1968)
• Cabaret (1972)
• The Death of Stalin (2017) — If Chaplin and the Marx Brothers landed, this is the under-seen one to finally pull down — Iannucci runs the same ridicule-the-tyrant charge as The Great Dictator, only now the void behind the uniform is Stalin's Kremlin, where the farce keeps colliding with real terror.
• Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! (1966) — The overlooked wartime farce that rhymes with To Be or Not to Be — bumbling French civilians outfoxing the Nazi occupation, ridicule aimed squarely at the men in the uniforms.