Silence the comedians: The first rule of fascism from Goebbels to Putin to Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump is following script of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who banned comedians in early 1939, Russian President Vladimir Putin who did it in 2000

German comedian Weiss Ferdl made a joke in late 1938 or possibly early 1939 that was unpopular with his nation’s government.

In the stage gag, Ferdl approached an empty table and began unloading jewelry from his pockets, turning to the cabaret audience and leering: “Ach, you were asleep that night.”

A reference to what was referred to at the time as the “anti-Jewish disorders,” increasingly brutal treatment starting with bullying and robbing. We know how that ended.

Another knee-slapper referenced the Munich Agreement reached between the leaders of Germany, Italy, France and the U.K., on Sept. 30, 1938. In the joke, a comedian representing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain looked longingly at another portraying Adolf Hitler and said: “Can’t I have something to take back with me to London?”

The Hitler character’s reply: “All right, I’ll give you your umbrella back.”

A clear reference to the legendary capitulation by Chamberlain, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, and other Allied leaders, in this case allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain and Daladier went to Munich only to return home with less than nothing, a policy of appeasement that ended badly.

These and other jokes were not popular with the Nazi regime, such that seven months before war was declared in Europe on Sept. 3, 1939, German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels blasted the “intellectual snobs” who were laughing at comedians who made Nazi leaders the butt of jokes. He announced that five German actors were banned from the stage for publicly ridiculing Nazi officials.

“There is plenty of humor in Germany, more than enough,” he said, in an editorial in the Nazi party's newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter. “But we do not permit ourselves to be ridiculed.”

This story is outlined in a Feb. 4, 1939, United Press article under the headline: “Herr Goebbels Angered By Anti-Nazi Wit.”

This was shared by several people last week on social media after pressure from the Trump administration led first to CBS cancelling Stephen Colbert’s show then ABC cancelling Jimmy Kimmel on Sept. 17.

People rightly questioned whether the news story was real or fake, but it is indeed a real United Press story printed by The Montreal Daily Star, and likely many other newspapers, on Feb. 4, 1939.

The Propaganda Minister said that actors such as the five suspended never were in the party and "now will nave no further opportunity to burden down the public with their rude remarks."

On July 18, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump said he “loved” that Colbert was fired and he threatened that Kimmel was next, also referencing Jimmy Fallon, host of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

Trump posted on his own Truth Social platform: "I absolutely love that Colbert' got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show."

From Goebbels to Putin to Trump

In a Sept. 19, 2025, op-ed in The Moscow Times, an Amsterdam-based independent online newspaper, investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov said the removal of Kimmel and Colbert “should send chills down the spine of every journalist who worked in Moscow in the early 2000s.”

The reference is to a TV show called simply “Puppets,” where Russian politicians were satirized in puppetry. 

Just as Goebbels despised how Nazi officials were portrayed in cafés by German commedians in the 1930s, and as Trump hates late-night talk-show hosts skewering him in 2025, Putin loathed Puppets in particular. 

When took power in 1999 into 2000, the Kremlin went after NTV, the channel that hosted Puppets, raided its parent media company and fired the core editorial team from NTV.

A public pissing match began between Russian arts critic Alexander Arkhangelsky and Puppets creator Viktor Shenderovich culminating in a conversation between the two being printed in the newspaper Izvesetia. What Soldatov wrote shocked him at the time, in 2000, something he referenced as giving him chills in 2025, is how Russian liberal journalists and public intellectuals were quick to rationalize Putin’s crackdown on satire and comedy.

Shenderovich warned at the start of the Putin regime that the year 2000 could be a second 1929, “the last year of relative freedom before Stalin’s terror.”

“Shenderovich’s prophecy was, indeed, fulfilled under Putin,” Soldatov wrote last week. “These days, Shenderovich lives in exile in Warsaw, branded a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian government. His critic, Arkhangelsky, ironically, also found himself on the list of foreign agents in November 2024.

“Dictators tend to be highly skilled at winning over the country’s intellectuals. When they succeed, the intellectuals are happy to stay silent or provide intellectual ammunition that would justify repression.”

In cheering for late-night talk-show hosts getting fired, Trump likes to point to supposed low ratings, declaring they aren’t funny. 

“We heard a lot of that during the attack on the NTV,” 25 years ago Soldatov wrote. 

Goebbels, similarly, was able to get public intellectuals in Germany in the late 1930s to line up in support of the Nazi regime, helping shut down criticism to help solidify the fascist government. 

When ending freedom of speech to silence critics, all the best dictators know you have to start with the the comedians.

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Paul J. Henderson
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