Charlie Chaplin was not messing around.
A full year before the United States entered World War II—and about a year after Germany invaded Poland—the world-famous comedian wrote, directed, and starred in The Great Dictator, a spoof of Hitler and Nazism that was his first sound feature and, in some ways, a folly. Yet despite the awkward seesawing between comedy and earnest speechmaking—to say nothing of the questionable taste in staging comic, concentration-camp set pieces—there is a conviction here that ultimately registers as artistic nobility. We live in a time when reputable news organizations have been bending over backwards for a decade now trying not to describe a wannabe American dictator as such, so there is something invigorating about seeing a spade called a spade.
And calling him an idiot. As a comedian, Chaplin is at his strongest in The Great Dictator when lampooning the inherent silliness that—alongside the horrific violence, of course—is part of any fascist movement: the puffery, the pageantry, the self-important buffoonery attempting to mask the lack of moral authority. And so I couldn’t help but giggle at Chaplin’s Germanic gibberish while giving enraged speeches as Tomainian dictator Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler stand-in. From his limp salute to his tiny temper tantrums, Hynkel is clearly a fraud. My favorite bit along these lines is his balletic routine with an inflated globe, in which warmongering is deflated as a childish whim.
There are also plenty of amusing gags that could appear in any Chaplin picture, many of which involve Chaplin’s second role as a Jewish barber bewildered by the increasingly anti-Semitic policies overtaking Tomainia (his shaving of a client to the rhythms of a Brahms piece is harrowingly hilarious). These gags, as well as the more politically barbed ones, sit strangely next to the moments when The Great Dictator shifts into serious speeches, a few of which are handed to Paulette Goddard as the barber’s neighbor. The Great Dictator drops all comic pretense for its final scene, in which the barber—who has been mistaken for Hynkel and propped up before a microphone at a Triumph of the Will-style rally—launches into a long, stirring, humanist address denouncing fascism. It doesn’t make all that much sense within the context of The Great Dictator, but I imagine it resonated powerfully in 1940.
(4/28/2026)
