His Girl Friday

Someone who was old enough to know better told me that he would never watch a black & white movie. Here's one of the funniest, His Girl Friday, a movie remade by Hollywood about 4 times.

This version by Howard Hawks may be the best, with very snappy dialogue delivered by Carey Grant and Rosalind Russell. It's no longer in copyright, so you can grab a DVD version from the Internet Archive. The best copy is on YouTube with embedding disabled, but you can sample this:

There there. I hear he only shoots JPEG.

"There, there. I hear he only shoots JPEG" says a minion in response to Hitler's rant about the Nikon D3x in a new parody (below). Hitler Downfall parodies, based on 2004's Oscar-nominated movie Downfall, started in Spanish in 2005 and went meta-viral. A limited search on YouTube shows 314.

This meme has found interest in the mainstream media like the Sydney Herald (YouTube Hitler parodies go viral) and later, and introspectively, in The New York Times (The Hitler Meme). Immoral war and torture are not themselves funny, as we know after recent US adventures overseas. Despite the cruelties and not just because many are "American" or younger -- people use Hitler to represent the petty tyrant inside each of us.

He's still "our Hitler" but not the one pushed by Goebbels in his "Our Hitler" speech or in the Nazi youth song "Our Hitler is our Lord" that proclaims a "brave new world"! Our Hitler is more like the one in the movie Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland (pictured), where Hitler rises out of Richard Wagner's grave.

New Hitler Downfall parodies keep popping up in e-mails; here's a few interesting ones that show the breadth of the phenomena, which includes meta-parody:

Hitler rants about the Nikon D3x (hat tip to John Nack).

Hitler plans Burning Man from Boing-Boing last Spring


Hitler wants a united Eid (on Muslim religious differences)


Hitler Is A Meme Downfall parody

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