Why This Writer Doesn’t Regret His Failed Hitler Sitcom
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By Thea Glassman April 24, 2017
What happens when you write a zany sitcom about Adolf Hitler, his wife and their Jewish next door neighbors? Well, not a whole lot.
“Heil Honey, I’m Home,” a British comedy show produced in 1990, only made it one episode in before it was promptly pulled off the air.
The show’s creator Geoff Atkinson spoke to Entertainment Weekly last week about his ill-fated sitcom, and explained that the aim was to “laugh at bullies.”
“It seems like the right thing to do; as we speak, somebody’s probably writing a Trump sitcom,” Atkinson said. “I would love to write a Trump sitcom.”
Atkinson went onto say that poking fun of Hitler was actually an important move.
“If you have a monster like that, and everyone says, ‘You can’t make fun of him,’ then we’ve made him even more a monster,” he said. “That’s what fascists want, to keep people in fear of them, when surely we should be debunking and destroying them.”
The writer does have his regrets though — like maybe he should have nixed the show’s drunken conga line.
“I think if we got it right, it would have been fantastic, and I’d rather that than yet another sitcom about a 30-something couple that hasn’t really got that much to say,” he said.
Thea Glassman is an Associate Editor at the Forward. Reach her at glassman@forward.com or on Twitter at @theakglassman.
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