The Day the Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis’s unfinished, unseen, and presumably ghastly movie from 1972—it’s about a clown who entertains doomed children at a Nazi death camp—has been making headlines of late. Not only is it the subject of a well-reviewed documentary that debuted at the Venice Film Festival, but just last week the Library of Congress announced it would finally allow the public to view raw footage and related material that Lewis donated before his death, in 2014. How nice for Jerry completists and ghouls!
But there’s another Holocaust-adjacent entertainment that was arguably even more ill-considered, and actually shown to unwitting audiences. It looked and felt like an SCTV parody: a riff on a 1950s domestic sitcom, but the central couple aren’t Lucy and Ricky. Nor are they Ralph and Alice. Rather, this show focuses on squabbles, schemes, and misunderstandings between Adolf and Eva. The Hitlers.
The main set is a small Berlin apartment overlooking the Reichstag. And the buttinsky next-door neighbors always dropping by for coffee or schnapps? Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. As Adolf groans at one point, “When I finally get to invade Poland, who will be the first to know? The Poles? No! Rosa Goldenstein!”
Yes, Arny and Rosa are Jewish.
Heil Honey I’m Home! was a fully realized Hitler comedy series that premiered in Great Britain in 1990 on British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), a pioneering satellite-TV network. The pilot episode, which can be seen on YouTube, toys with a classic sitcom trope: an important guest is coming to dinner, only the guest in this case is pretentious British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, bringing with him a peace treaty he’s hoping wily Adolf will sign. The B plot: Rosa wants to set up Chamberlain with her homely, date-less niece.
The series—framed as being a genuine, re-discovered 1950s artifact—was canceled after one episode, though the production left as many as seven more completed half-hours in the can. Those “lost” episodes, never seen by the public, include special guest-star roles such as Benito Mussolini, the Hermann Görings, and Adolf’s ne’er-do-well brother.
The logline for the episode “Ziggy Hitler Comes to Stay”: “Adolf’s secret store of stolen masterpieces comes under threat when his shady brother Ziggy pays a call on the apartment. The Goldensteins find themselves unwittingly involved in Ziggy’s elaborate scheme to swindle Adolf out of his private art collection.”
Today the series is remembered mainly on pop-culture Web sites under headings like “13 Shows with Laughably Bad Premises” and “100 Greatest TV Moments from Hell.” On Quora, it is the most popular answer to the question “What was the most offensive sitcom of all time?”
As with the Lewis movie, however, the story behind Heil Honey I’m Home! is more complicated than such easy (though not unprovoked) mockery would imply. Its creative team, Americans as well as Brits, had impressive comedy pedigrees. Their intent was not merely to be outrageous but to satirize a problem that still plagues us: authoritarianism and its enablers. Was the show ahead of its time? Not really. But grant it an unexpected sincerity.
The business side of the production also contains an element of foreshadowing: the series was green-lighted in a season of technological change not unlike the recent gold rush enabled by streaming—and it was canceled amid a retrenchment that would strike a chord in today’s Hollywood.
Heil Honey I’m Home! might sound like one of the most inexplicable series in TV history, until you talk to the people who made it. Like many spectacular misfires, the project had its own internal logic and momentum; a lot of smart and talented people worked very hard on it, intending to make something good. No one’s career was ruined—but there were some bruises …
The Origin Story
The program was the brainchild of Geoff Atkinson, a British comedy writer known for the political tenor of his work. Among his credits: the satirical puppet show Spitting Image and a long collaboration with the Scottish comedian Rory Bremner, who cuts a figure in the U.K. similar to Jon Stewart’s in the U.S.
As Atkinson told The Guardian in 1990, he’d initially been inspired by the 1972 film Young Winston to attempt a “Young Adolf.” That didn’t pan out, but the idea of a Hitler comedy stayed with him.
Geoff Atkinson (writer): I suppose I was trying to find a form to deal with something like this: how to deal with bullies, how to deal with dictators. And how could you deal with that through comedy? And often the answer is using the form that on the face of it isn’t appropriate. And of course, all the Lucy shows were just fantastic, so in a way you could say we were borrowing from the best.
[The premise of] our show is that Hitler has moved into an apartment in Berlin because of Eva Braun. She wants to set up a home. So they buy this place, and there is a Jewish couple, the Goldensteins, next door. Eva strikes up a friendship with them, which gives them some degree of protection. We don’t shy away from what life in Berlin was like at the time, but Hitler can’t attack the Goldensteins in the way he obviously would like to, which gives them the ability to at least say what they think—and to win, as it were, or take on the bully. So that’s sort of the dynamic that was the reason for doing it.
It’s really about appeasement. “Peace in our time”—what did that really mean? There’s always been a dilemma as to how much must people suffer for the greater good—if there is a greater good. And that kind of question is very hard to answer. I think that’s what the Goldensteins sort of address in the show. But all the while you want the comedy. You don’t want to preach.
From the Pilot Episode’s Opening Scene …
Living room. Adolf enters. Cue applause.
Adolf: Heil, honey, I’m home!
Eva enters from kitchen. Cue more applause. She’s carrying a frying pan, and she’s angry.
Eva: Don’t you “Heil honey” me!
Adolf: What did I do now?
Eva lifts lid of pan to show him its contents.
Adolf: Oh, tonight you were making schnitzel! (Slaps forehead.) What a jerk! You must be real mad at me, honey. (Childish voice.) I’ve been a very, very bad Hitler. (Slaps his own wrist.)
Fortuitous Timing
Atkinson had a long-standing relationship with Paul Jackson, an independent producer with a Lorne Michaels–like reputation for cutting-edge TV comedy in Britain. (He has also served as the head programmer at both the BBC and ITV.) In 1990, Jackson was the managing director of Noel Gay Television, which had a contract to provide original programming for the fledgling British Satellite Broadcasting, which was competing with Rupert Murdoch’s slightly more established Sky satellite system.
Paul Jackson (producer): BSB had five channels, one of which was an entertainment channel called Galaxy. And they did a deal with us to provide all their original entertainment. Galaxy was mainly reruns, but they wanted a little bit of original. We produced about seven or eight hours of entertainment material—music, comedy, stand-up, and so on. We’d started producing this material, and it was going reasonably well.
At the time, Atkinson was working on another show for Jackson, part of a group of creators who had a relatively free hand to “try and fill screen time” for Galaxy and BSB. Other series in production included Jupiter Moon, a soap opera set in outer space, and Up Yer News, a live topical sketch show.
Atkinson: They were hungry because it was a new channel and they hadn’t got anything on the shelf, so they needed stuff quickly. It was, of course, the only time anything like that happened.
Jackson: Just before the service launched [in April 1990], John Gau [head of programming at Galaxy] said to me, “Murdoch’s got such an advantage.” Sky was already on-air. John said, “He’s got the newspapers under his control, and so they constantly get written about. I need to get in the papers, quite frankly. Have you got anything a bit controversial, a bit mischief-making, that might get some stories going?” And I said, “Well, I have.”
Geoff had always had this bee in his bonnet about this show that he’d written called Heil Honey I’m Home! And we’d all said to him, “Geoff, nobody’s going to produce that.” He said, “No, you should read it.” Anyway, when John said to me, “Have you got anything controversial?,” I said, “Well, what do you think of this?” I told him the pitch, and he said, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” John was a very experienced current-affairs producer, very respected. It interested me that his immediate reaction wasn’t, “That’s crazy.”
Atkinson: Everyone seemed to get quite keen on Heil Honey, and a pilot got commissioned really quickly. The good thing in those days was there wasn’t much input from BSB. It was sort of, you go off and you make it and you were left alone.
“Have you got anything a bit controversial, a bit mischief-making, that might get some stories going?”
Atkinson polished the pilot script with the help of an American sitcom writer named Rob Dames, who had worked on Benson and Full House, the thought being that American input would aid in parodying an American sitcom.
Rob Dames (co-writer): The idea sounded interesting, so I said yes. It was pretty much Geoff’s script. A lot of what I added was along the lines of, what are the typical tropes of what we’re parodying? There’s a moment [in the pilot] with Rosa and Eva where Eva has been sworn by Adolf not to talk about the fact that Neville Chamberlain is coming over. Eva doesn’t want to break that trust, so she and Rosa play a guessing game. That was straight out of an I Love Lucy episode.
From the Pilot Episode, “Peace in Our Time” …
The Hitler living room, Eva and Rosa on the couch. They’re playing charades, Rosa responding to Eva’s clues.
Rosa: Two words … first word … sounds like …
Eva stands and puts her hands to the side of her head, using her index fingers to suggest horns.
Rosa: Uh, bison? No. Water buffalo? Bull?
Eva plops back down on the couch, frustrated.
Rosa: Sitting Bull? The Indians are coming?!
Eva waves her off and tries again, using two bananas to make even bigger horns.
Rosa: Devil? Sounds like devil?
Eva encourages her to keep going.
Rosa: O.K. Uh, uh, uh … Bevel? Chevel? Revel? Neville?
Eva touches her nose: yes!
Rosa: Neville! Oh wait! I know who this is! Oh, oh … Neville! (Grimaces.) It’s right on the tip of my tongue!
The Casting
Casting was less of a challenge than one might think.
Atkinson: It was a bit like “Springtime for Hitler.” It got put out that you’d be casting Hitler, and you’d have certain Hitlers coming in, and the actors sometimes dressed for the part. Well, I don’t think any of the Hitlers did, but the actresses came dressed as Eva Braun. It was a strange process. And you know the bit in The Producers where they say, “That’s our Hitler!” We kind of had that moment. Neil came in, and afterwards we said, “That’s our Hitler!”
“Neil” was Neil McCaul, a British character and voice actor. He would play Adolf Hitler with a New York accent reminiscent of Jackie Gleason’s in The Honeymooners. (Through a representative he declined to be interviewed for this story. “He’s probably the one who suffered the most,” said Atkinson.)
DeNica Fairman (now Denica), a Canadian-born actress with few credits at that point, was cast as Eva Braun. Countering McCaul’s blustery Adolf, she affected an Audrey Meadows–like tartness.
Neighbor Arny Goldenstein was played by Gareth Marks, the son of Alfred Marks, a well-known British actor and the star of an eponymous ITV sketch show.
“You know the bit in The Producers where they say, ‘That’s our Hitler!’ We kind of had that moment.”
Gareth Marks (actor): When I heard about the show, I thought, Ooh, I don’t know. Is this a good idea? They wanted to meet me because they didn’t know if they wanted me to play Hitler or the Jewish neighbor. They opted for the Jewish neighbor. First thing, I had a word with my father. Being that we’re Jewish I said, “What do you think about this?” And he said [imitating father’s deep voice], “Well, as long as you come to bury Hitler, not praise him, I don’t see any problem with it.”
Rosa Goldenstein was played by Caroline Gruber, whose credits included the fellow BSB show Up Yer News. (Her representatives did not respond to several interview requests; this story uses quotes from an interview she gave to the BBC in 2020 to mark the 30th anniversary of Heil Honey I’m Home!)
Caroline Gruber (actor): Initially they wanted me to play Eva Braun, but I said, “I don’t want to play her, because I’m Jewish. I want to play Rosa.” They said, “But you don’t look Jewish.” I replied, “Well, I may not look it, but I have 2,000 years of persecution running through my veins.” I really liked the premise, but it was important to me that they got Jewish actors to play the Jewish couple.
“When I heard about the show, I thought, Ooh, I don’t know. Is this a good idea?”
According to Atkinson, the fact that the two actors playing the Goldensteins were Jewish was merely “how it worked out.” Cast and crew apparently had no qualms about the material. By all accounts, there was never a moment at a table read, say, where someone flagged a joke or plotline as being in bad taste.
Dames: You couldn’t dial anything back. I mean, the premise was the premise. Certainly from the beginning you said, “This is pushing the limits, so … we’ll see.” There was no blindness going into it, thinking like, “Oh, yeah, everybody’s going to love it!”
Atkinson: I think everyone knew there would be questions, but there was never a fundamental sense of, we shouldn’t be doing this. Around the same time, bizarrely, Shirley MacLaine came over here. She was doing her act [a musical revue], which I wrote for her, and we spent a long time talking about Heil Honey. She’d say, “No, no, you should do it. It’s quite right.”
Gruber: I was sensitive about doing anything that was offensive or upsetting. I didn’t think Heil Honey was either—I thought it was so funny. When I was reading through the scripts for the other episodes that Geoff had written, I couldn’t get through them—I had tears pouring down my cheeks.
Marks: No one objected because it was done very much as pantomime. It was over the top. It was Lucy. Geoff Atkinson got it completely right.
The pilot was shot in front of a live audience at Pinewood Studios in the spring of 1990.
From the Pilot …
Adolf, Eva, and the Goldensteins are in the Hitlers’ living room, drinking schnapps. The phone rings.
Adolf (answering): Hi. Hitler here … No, Bob Hitler. Who do you think? … Oh, it’s you, Joe. (Covering phone, to Eva and the Goldensteins) Joe Goebbels.
Rosa (drunk): Hi, Joe!
Adolf: Listen, could you speak up there, Joe? It’s hard to hear you with the “über Alles” playing in the background.
A Series Is Born
Atkinson: It played well in front of a live audience. They really took to it. I mean, it seemed no one walked out and people got it.
Dames: I remember there was laughter. There weren’t any boos or screams or anything like that.
BSB quickly ordered a full season of 12 or 13 episodes. (No one can precisely remember.) There would be two significant changes going forward. The first was that DaNica Fairman was replaced by Maria Friedman as Eva.
Atkinson: Partly it was a stature thing. DaNica was really tall where Eva Braun wasn’t, so it was physically slightly awkward. [True: on camera, Fairman’s Eva looks at least as tall as Neil McCaul’s Hitler.] DaNica was also quite aggressive. She stood up to Hitler whereas Maria was slightly more wide-eyed, sort of gullible. I suppose the question is, who on earth would actually live with Hitler? We just needed a different personality.
Marks: We only found out Eva was recast when we started filming the first episode after the pilot and DaNica wasn’t there. “Oh, everybody, I’d like you to meet Maria Friedman. She’s now playing Eva.” Which eventually kind of grated on everybody because she did it very cartoon. Everybody else was doing it for real, but in a Neil Simon kind of way. She was doing it like Pee-wee Herman or a poor man’s Jerry Lewis.
Friedman (now the third Jewish cast member) would go on to star on the popular British soap opera EastEnders and win three Olivier Awards for her stage work; as a director, she was recently represented on Broadway with Merrily We Roll Along. (The show’s press agent said she was unavailable for an interview due to other demands on her time.)
“It played well in front of a live audience. They really took to it. I mean, it seemed no one walked out.”
The other change as the show prepared to shoot a full season was conceptual.
Jackson: We wanted it even more Americanized.
Marks: You know what they say over there: “Oh, I’ve got a stopwatch, and there hasn’t been a gag for 10 seconds.” So they deployed a gag writer from Hollywood.
This was Paul Wayne, an Emmy winner with a résumé that included Bewitched, The Andy Griffith Show, and All in the Family. He was hired as showrunner, an instant source of tension with Atkinson. (Wayne did not respond to several interview requests.)
Jackson: Geoff had a different view of the show than Paul, so that was difficult in itself. I think Geoff felt to a certain extent it was his baby. He’d already written six or seven episodes. I don’t think he totally bought into the need to bring another writer on board. But we wanted the American one-liner writing-room influence, and that’s what Paul brought. So there became a little bit of conflict between them.
Atkinson: Paul hated the premise, hated the casting, hated the name, hated everything, really. So he wasn’t, perhaps, the best person to have on set. But it was a fait accompli.
Paul Wayne (writer; from a 1991 essay, quoting an older writer-producer he had consulted before taking the job): “Kid, we’re writers, this is our business, we all have to work. Take the money and run like a thief!”
Marks: The guy [Paul Wayne] sat down with the entire cast saying, “Now, before we go any further, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had death threats because I’m associated with this show.” And then he proceeded to tell me in front of everybody else, berated me, “I don’t understand why a Jew would be living next door to Hitler.” And I said to him, “Listen, I’m not being paid to convince you why I’m being paid to be in this. If you can’t cut it, then I’m with you. I’ll wash my hands of it.” He brought the real downer on it. He changed the flavor of it all, tried to make it more message-y.
“You know what they say [in America]: ‘Oh, I’ve got a stopwatch, and there hasn’t been a gag for 10 seconds.’ So they deployed a gag writer from Hollywood.”
Gruber: The pilot and the series were two different things. By the time it came to do the series they were very nervous about it. We had an episode of Hitler building shelves, for instance. Their series was much safer, and they played down the Jewish couple—I think the new showrunner would have been happy if they weren’t in it at all.
Logline for the episode “Eva’s New Shelves”: When Adolf arrives home late all he wants to do is work on the speech he must give at Nuremberg next day. But Eva reminds him that he promised to put up her new bathroom shelves and she isn’t going to let him off.
Wayne (from a 1990 interview): There have been a lot of problems doing this, but I really think we found a way to make it work, being outrageous without being offensive.
Atkinson: There was a sort of misguided sense of safety, a notion that if you took out all the stuff that could be controversial, you would make it better. But in fact you were making it worse. You were taking away the reason for doing it—the justification. Looking at it with hindsight, that’s the lesson: if you back away from the original idea and start to pull teeth.... [Pause] Be bold and be brave would be the note.
The new episodes began shooting in early fall outside London at Bray studios—famous as the one-time home of the Hammer horror films.
From the Episode “A Close Shave for Adolf” …
Hitler living room. Adolf is pacing anxiously, worried about an assassination plot.
Eva (on couch): Adolf, you gotta calm down.
He grabs a bottle of pills from the coffee table and downs a handful.
Eva: Oh, relax. (Shouts in his ear) YOU’RE OVERREACTING!
Startled, Adolf spits out the pills, gives her a look.
Adolf: Somebody is out to get me. Me! A man who wouldn’t even hurt a fly. Oh, I’m so distracted … (Gobbles another handful of pills.) What’s the matter with these vitamin pills? Why aren’t they working? They’re not having an effect.
Eva (reading label): They’re laxatives.
Adolf (“uh-oh” look): In that case they are having an effect. In a very few minutes you’ll come to see how I invented the goosestep.
On the Air
It was around this time—at 9:30 P.M. on September 29, 1990, to be precise (just a few hours after the end of Yom Kippur, ironically or not)—that Galaxy chose to air the Heil Honey I’m Home! pilot, slipping it into an evening of sitcom reruns. A BSB spokesperson claimed the service received only four angry phone calls that night, perhaps in part because BSB reached a relatively small number of households.
The show’s profile changed a few weeks later when BSB announced that a full season would debut in early 1991.
Jackson: There was an immediate outcry, particularly from Jewish spokespeople.
Hayim Pinner (then secretary general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, from a 1990 interview): It is very distasteful and even offensive.... I imagine very few intelligent people will watch it once they see a few seconds of it.
Michael Goldfarb (TV critic for The Guardian, from a 1990 review): Hitler and Eva live next door to the nosy Goldensteins.... The way my finger is hovering over the word nosy and the erase button shows the eggshells this show is crunching over.
Reactions in America—where no one had seen the show—were even more outraged.
Rick Du Brow (TV columnist, Los Angeles Times): It’s the most repulsive show business notion in memory.
Susan Trausch (columnist, Boston Globe): To laugh off Hitler is to diminish his crimes. Such an attempt at comedy should make us cry.
Liz Smith (columnist, New York Daily News): Why, I ask you, do so many Americans still have a cultural inferiority complex about the British?
“To laugh off Hitler is to diminish his crimes. Such an attempt at comedy should make us cry.”
For cast and crew, the controversy provoked something of a siege mentality.
Jackson: The production was subject to a lot of trauma. There was a lot of nasty activity going on, denouncing it and so on. And for a short time the set became a little bit of a fortress, where there were journalists outside trying to find out what was going on. It was quite difficult for the performers. I felt very sorry for them. Whilst they were doing good work for which they were never going to be recognized, they had to suffer this surrounding pressure.
Gruber: I was of the opinion‚ and still am now—that within reason, people should take risks. If it’s funny, if it works, it’s O.K.... All the sensationalism about it at the time, I think it was misplaced—they were over-reactions. It was a conceit; it wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
Atkinson: If you had to do it again, you’d prepare yourself for [the reaction] and just think it through a bit more. I mean naïveté might’ve been a factor that we hadn’t anticipated what it was going to be like and the difficulties of it.
Jackson: The chairman of our [production] company was the very respected Sir William Cotton, who had been the managing director of the BBC. He was a public figure, and he was put under a lot of pressure. He would say to me, “Paul, why do we have to do this?” Of course, we had three Jewish actors, so they came under a lot of pressure from their communities. Paul Wayne came under pressure. He’d come over from Los Angeles, left his family back home. His wife was getting threats, stuff through her letterbox.
Atkinson: The tension on set toward the back end had gotten really unpleasant. There was just sort of a general anger, and I think Paul [Wayne] was partly the catalyst. We were shooting at the studios out of London and Paul had a place in central London. At one point the production team would talk about sabotaging his car. They were so upset and angry, and you thought, Well, we’ve almost become the Third Reich. We’ve almost become what we’re satirizing.
“It was done very much as pantomime. It was over the top. It was Lucy.”
Frustrated with Wayne and the show’s direction, Atkinson left the production. The rest carried on as best they could.
Jackson: There was one particular night that you could take as an omen, or not: the entire power feed of the studio got cut. It was just an outage—I don’t mean to imply anything more than that. But it did lead to people saying, “Maybe someone’s trying to tell us something.”
Marks: I just wanted to be rid of it. I hated it.
Jackson: I would constantly go down there and try to reassure people, because ultimately I was responsible. And I think we stuck together as a team. It was coming together really well. The scripts were working well, even if there was this slight tension between the two writers. And the performances were really very clever, very good television performances. It made me feel even more kind of like, “Just shut up outside there until you see it. Just let us finish the damn thing and have a look at it.” I’m sad that it didn’t ever go out.
From the Episode “Without Prejudice” …
Adolf and Eva in their living room. She is practicing her singing while he is feeling romantic.
Adolf (embracing her): Is it asking too much just for half an hour to express our love for each other?
Eva: No. But what you have in mind you usually manage to do in three and a half minutes.
He glowers.
Eva: When you invaded Russia, you managed it in three!
Adolf: It was a foolish move. That’s why I had to withdraw. (Beat) Don’t say anything.
The Not-So-Grand Finale
The endgame for Heil Honey I’m Home! began when BSB announced on November 2, 1990, that it was “merging” with its bigger rival, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky. (Both companies were losing money—together more than a billion pounds, according to a Times of London estimate.) But the deal proved to be more of a takeover.
Jackson: The day after the merger was announced I got a call from John [Gau, at BSB’s Galaxy channel] saying, “Look, Paul, you have to talk to the Sky people about most of the product you’re doing. But the one thing they’ve asked me to tell you straightaway is: Shut down Heil Honey. Today.” And I said, “But we’re kind of in the middle of a run here. If they’re going to take the assets, why don’t we finish it?” And he said, “It’s no good talking to me. I’ve been given very clear instructions by Sky: ‘Shut it down, sequester all the material, and bring it to us.’” They didn’t muck around.
So I had to go up to Bray [the studio] and tell them, “Sorry, guys, we’re done. We’re closing down.” It was just a dog’s-ass chore that I had to drive up there and do it.
Marks: This all happened in the middle of filming. We went in one day, and the producers said, “Kids, I’m sorry, we’ve got some news here.” It was a shame, because I’d written an episode that was going to be filmed.
Jackson: I’m pretty sure I was able to say right away, “You will be paid your contracts,” which is always a useful thing to say in that situation. In some ways, I think maybe they were relieved, because they had been under a lot of pressure. There was kind of a feeling of, “If we’re going to be paid, maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
Atkinson: It was a bittersweet feeling, I guess. I’d left by about Episode Five because it had just been really unpleasant, and it felt like it wasn’t my show. You’d brought it to life, and then suddenly it’s been killed off. But at the same time there was a sort of relief that the fairly difficult thing that you were doing was no more.
“The one thing they’ve asked me to tell you straightaway is: Shut down Heil Honey. Today.”
One irony: Sky didn’t cancel Heil Honey I’m Home! for the reason one might assume: taste.
Jackson: [The objection] was not “How dare you have ever even started this?” It was “There’s controversy bubbling around this—we don’t need it. There will already be a backlash reaction to Murdoch, who is not a very popular person in the British media, taking over this British institution. We don’t need to attach another controversy.”
Atkinson: The cancellation had nothing to do with artistic reasons. It was just that Sky didn’t want to have to defend a sitcom with Hitler in it when there were easier ways to sell subscription fees.
“I’m sad that it didn’t ever go out.”
Three and a half decades later, its creators look back on Heil Honey I’m Home! with conflicted emotions. In her 2020 BBC interview, Caroline Gruber defended the series but allowed that she had recently showed the pilot to her then 23-year-old son with muted results.
Gruber: He said, “Turn it off, mum, it’s really not funny.” I guess I saw it through his eyes, and it wasn’t that funny either.
Jackson: I think the essence of the show is saying two different things at the same time. I think it’s simultaneously saying, à la Chaplin [in his 1940 film, The Great Dictator], “Look, the best way to treat these kinds of people is to understand the innate stupidity of their position and to laugh at them, call him Shickelgruber, an interior decorator and an inept lover and those things, and make a mockery of him.” And yet, at the same time, it’s trying to say, “But we treated him like a joke and we shouldn’t have.” So I think there are two contradictory strands running there, and I don’t think they ever got resolved.
Atkinson: Things can go wrong almost without you really thinking, Why did that not work? I think there are probably subtle things that I’m to blame for as well, or more than anyone.
Marks: We’ve got the distinction of being called one of the worst-taste sitcoms ever made. We get on that list. Of course, people hadn’t seen it. They were going from the title and the premise. But that didn’t bother me. What I find offensive is that every other history channel over here is all Hitler. Hitler’s Favorite Holiday Retreats. Hitler’s Favorite Herb Garden. Hitler’s Illicit Affairs. Hitler’s Favorite Cars. I find that more offensive because it’s making him into, dare I say, an icon. Along with that, there’s always the standard footage of those dreadful pictures when they liberated the death camps, with the bodies. Now that’s stock footage. I find that offensive, not a send-up comedy.
Atkinson: People are entitled to opinions. I can’t complain. But I felt the show wasn’t really being judged on people seeing it. The idea that you can’t do a sitcom with Hitler and a Jewish couple next door? Challenging television, I’ve always thought, is the best television, so I kind of always defend that. But we set ourselves up, I guess you could say.
DAMES: To pull this kind of thing off, you need the genius of a Norman Lear or Ed Weinberger [The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi] or Susan Harris [Soap, The Golden Girls], and none of us were of that quality. People will say, “Gee, in movies like The Producers and Jojo Rabbit [spoofing Hitler] seemed to work.” Big difference. The movie ends.
The problem with series television is that your main job is to create a character the audience wants to tune in to and enjoy. Could he be mean and cruel and horrible? Sure. Archie Bunker was a horrible racist bigot, but you knew he was going to get his comeuppance. Also, he’s a fictional character. The problem with Heil Honey is you knew what was going to happen down the road. In another year there’s going to be six million dead. You can’t get that onus off of it.
Bruce Handy is a journalist, children’s-book writer, and the author of a forthcoming history of teen movies, Hollywood High. To read his definitive 1992 Spy story on Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, click here
