Tony Earnshaw: Why even top film directors should never joke about the Nazis

Answer: when he’s Lars von Trier.

Call it Danish humour – and we all know that German humour is an oxymoron; the Danes may be related – but it was the worst of bad jokes when von Trier joked: “I understand Hitler. I sympathise with him a little bit. Okay – I’m a Nazi!” at the Cannes Film Festival back in May.

This was a provocative and controversial filmmaker frenziedly digging a very deep hole and pulling in the earth over his head. But, as we all know, he kept on digging. And digging. And digging.

For the watching Press it was a movie car crash writ real on a global platform. For Kirsten Dunst, star of Melancholia and sitting aghast to von Trier’s left, it was the end of any hoped-for Oscar dreams for a performance that is, frankly, the best, most courageous and most unusual thing she has ever done.

It’s now four months on and, guess what, von Trier has authored the sequel to the disastrous verbal apocalypse that led to the 55-year-old being ejected from Cannes and its Croisette as persona non grata.

Not only has he talked about his moment of madness, he’s retracted his apology.

Interviewed by GQ magazine, von Trier has talked of his moral compass and has re-opened the wounds of France. He is quoted as saying he is “sick in my mind” and that saying sorry for his remarks would be the equivalent of saying sorry “for what kind of a person I am ... that would destroy me as a person”. Eh?

Everyone has a right to make a faux pas. Hugh Grant did it when he picked up a hooker in Los Angeles in 1995. His mea culpa on the Jay Leno Show (“I did a bad thing”) made him the darling of housewives all across America.

George Michael, arrested for “engaging in a lewd act” with an undercover policeman in the US in 1998, made a similar confession to Michael Parkinson, adding: “He was gorgeous!” So maybe that wasn’t much of an apology after all.

And even raging anti-Semite Mel Gibson made an attempt at cultural and religious reparation when he offered to meet Jewish leaders after his roadside tirade in 2006.

Anyone can see that von Trier’s gaffe is bigger, deeper and longer-lasting than all of them. Well, maybe not Gibson, who is in a class of his own. But von Trier needs to stop stoking the fire, step back, put his hand on his heart and, for once, accept that being outrageous isn’t always an auteur’s right.

Because the Holocaust is no joke. Hitler wasn’t a joke. The Nazis weren’t a joke. Tell it to the millions who died in the Second World War, in Belsen and Dachau, in towns like Oradour-sur-Glane, or in the Ardeatine caves.