Sometimes, the best way to highlight the sheer absurdity of something abhorrent is to make fun of it. With laughter, the most evil and unspeakable acts in the world can be confronted without going insane, and comedy - satire in particular - is often used to hold a mirror up to humanity and reveal all the warts and blemishes. Charlie Chaplin was no stranger to using comedy as a form of social and political commentary, with his tramp character in Modern Times and City Lights standing in for the common man in the face of poverty and oppression. His politics are most evident in his first talking feature The Great Dictator, a wonderfully subversive comedy featuring Chaplin as both a Jewish barber and a dictator called Adenoid Hynkel. When the barber finds himself in the dictator's place, the future of humanity takes an entirely different shape. The closing speech sums up Chaplin's hopes for a future free of war: "We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us."
