“The problem with *Heil Honey* is you knew what was going to happen down the road.”

Furor over the Führer

Jerry Lewis’s unfinished film, The Day the Clown Cried, was long considered the last word in Holocaust-related bad taste. And then along came Heil Honey I’m Home!, an I Love Lucy–like sitcom about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun

By Bruce Handy

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.