why? RE: Taylor and the Holocaust: summing up

[Doug Millison]

De Bris ends up playing Hitler after Franz Liebkind, the Nazi who wrote
Springtime for Hitler, literally breaks a leg on opening night. (The musical
wisely drops the outdated hippie character played in the movie by Dick
Shawn.) Leibkind's assistant tells de Bris, "You're going out there a silly,
hysterical screaming queen, and you're coming back a passing-for-straight
great big Broadway star!" As camped by the incomparable Gary Beach, de
Bris's first entrance as "Adolf Elizabeth Hitler" ("descended from a long
line of English Queens") is enough to guarantee him his Tony. Glowering at
the audience with his hands guarding his crotch, he suddenly crumples his
body and lifts his arm above his head like a demented teacup, displaying a
gleaming set of teeth below his Hitler moustache. [...]The Jew who finally
buried Hitler, Mel Brooks demonstrates that comedy is not only capable of
exposing stupidity and pretension. At times, it can also exorcise and
nullify evil--not as powerfully, but sometimes more lastingly than a hundred
Sherman tanks, a thousand B-42s, or a million GIs. 
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/052801/3brustein052801.html



Swing:
"Why does Pynchon have the Captain wear a false cunt crafted by the
notorious 
Mme. Ophir in Berlin? Why is it that he wears false labia and bright purple 
clitoris molded of synthetic rubber (see Sasuly) and Mipolam, the new 
polyvinyl chloride? Why the nihilistic pleasure? Why is the target also the 
launch site?
Why are they all condemned? Why the Oven? Why the Fairy Tale Hansel and 
Gretel? Why the Kingdom of Death, the Moon? What does Blicero mean by 
Destiny?"