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August 12, 2022

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known to most as AOC, is personally responsible for a cottage industry of funny memes, video parodies, and ROFL (i.e., rolling on the floor laughing) jokes, all at her expense. Would you expect anything different from a beautiful woman who, with a sense of authority, speaks gibberish about serious issues facing the United States? When laughing at the memes, though, remember that in the last century two others were initially mocked when they first came onto the political scene.

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In their rise to power, both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini seemed more like comic-strip villains than diabolical dictators. From Hitler’s wacky mustache to Mussolini’s smirk and from Hitler’s effeminate speaking mannerisms to Mussolini’s standing with outstretched arms on his large hips, imagine all the funny memes and ROFL emojis had the internet been around in the 1930s.

Reviewing R. J. B. Bosworth’s “Mussolini,” which calls for revisiting how history views the Fascist leader, Alexander Stille, writing for the New York Times, opens with:

Americans have tended to think of Benito Mussolini as a cross between a gangster and a buffoon, a ‘‘Sawdust Caesar’’ who hijacked Italian democracy and led his country to disaster as Hitler’s junior partner. But in recent decades a number of Italian historians have disputed this view.

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Likewise, writing about Hitler’s accession, Tom Phillips shares:

In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became Chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.

In Hitlerland, Andrew Nagorski discusses the media’s early impressions of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Yet you had Americans meeting Hitler and saying, “This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.” And a lot of them went through this whole litany about how even if Hitler got into a position of power, other German politicians would somehow be able to control him. A lot of German politicians believed this themselves.

In January 1940, the Three Stooges released You Nazty Spy! Moe was the first screen actor to mock Adolph Hitler. Later that year in October, Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Great Dictator was released to great acclaim. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, the Three Stooges did a sequel called I’ll Never Heil Again.

All this was a 1930s version of ROFL. In “How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler,” Dr. John Broich, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, explained,