"Frisch’s former students describe him as eccentric, nerdy, prone to lengthy classroom digressions about his stamp collection, dinosaurs or childhood snow days spent sledding."

"Any teacher who spends three decades in the classroom, speaking extemporaneously for hours on end to a roomful of teenagers, is going to have awkward moments. [Ben] Frisch might have had more of them, and they may have been a bit more awkward. But that was how he connected, and it was perhaps a way of connecting that is no longer possible. 'Everybody knew this guy was off — weird behavior, quirky,' said one parent who, fearing retribution against her child, insisted on anonymity. 'Maybe in the ’70s that would have been O.K., but not when you’re paying $45,000 a year in tuition.'"

From "A Teacher Made a Hitler Joke in the Classroom/It Tore the School Apart" (NYT). The joke was saying "Heil Hitler" after he noticed that his arm — in teaching a pre-calculus lesson involving angles — was in the Hitler salute position. "Frisch is a practicing Quaker, but his father was Jewish, and two of his great-grandmothers were killed at Auschwitz."

[Bo] Lauder [the principal at Friends Seminary] did not consider the “Heil Hitler” episode a close call. “Personally, I was appalled,” he told me. “I couldn’t imagine, even as a joke — and I grew up watching ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ — that in a class that had nothing to do with history or World War II or Nazism or teaching German language that an incident like that could happen.” I asked Lauder why he felt he needed to go so far as to fire Frisch. “One of our pledges is to make all of our students feel safe,” he replied. “And that is something that I take very, very seriously.”

That no one has accused Frisch of being an anti-Semite was beside the point: His invocation of the Nazi salute in a classroom full of high school students, regardless of his intentions, was enough to end his career. On today’s campus, words and symbols can be seen as a form of violence; to many people, engaging in a public debate about the nuances of their power is to tolerate their use. “I asked one of our lawyers, ‘How can I do this in a more Quakerly way?’ ” Lauder told me. “And he just looked at me and stated the obvious: There is no way to make a firing a Quakerly event.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Isn't it making fun of the salute rather than promoting it?

Yes, but it's the Era of That's Not Funny, because how is a student ever able to be sure that the device of making a joke is not really a way to say the otherwise forbidden thing? I mean, what if a lot of students started greeting one another in the hallways of Friends Seminary with a big old Nazi salute and a hearty "Heil Hitler!" Would it be hilarious? Would it roundly make a mockery of Nazis?

You know what it would be?, I suddenly realize. It would be a real "I am Spartacus" moment! If all the students who think Mr. Frisch is getting an unfair punishment would greet each other henceforth with a Nazi salute and a hearty "Heil Hitler!" — what a protest that would be!

Here's the Wikipedia article on the Nazi salute, which I looked up because I wanted to see the extent of efforts to drain it of power by turning it into a big joke. I thought there'd be a substantial list under the "In popular culture" heading, but there are only 3 things, one of which is "Hogan's Heroes," the 1965-1971 TV show that the Friend's Seminary principal says he "grew up" watching:

• In a running gag in Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Klink often forgets to give the Hitler salute at the end of a phone call; instead, he usually asks, "What's that?" and then says, "Yes, of course, Heil Hitler." In the German language version of the show, called Ein Käfig Voller Helden (A Cage Full of Heroes), "Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz have rural Gomer Pyle-type accents," and "stiff-armed salutes are accompanied by such witticisms as "this is how high the cornflowers grow." The "Heil Hitler" greeting was the variant most often used and associated with the series; "Sieg Heil" was rarely heard.

• On August 11, 2017, Jeffrey Lord was fired by CNN for tweeting "Sieg Heil!" 

He was joking.

• A similar gesture was used by the fictional Nazi-affiliated organization Hydra, with both arms outstretched and the phrase "Hail Hydra" uttered by members of the organization.

There must be more pop culture examples. I can think of "Dr. Strangelove":



AND: Of course, there's "The Producers" ("Springtime for Hitler" is loaded with Nazi salutes):



ALSO: I know that's the more recent, more musical version of "The Producers." I thought the clip was excellent and used it, even though I'd gone searching for in the original 1967 movie, which you can see here. In that movie, Dick Shawn played the ridiculous Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.) who was intentionally miscast as Hitler in the so-bad-it's-good show "Springtime for Hitler." I love Dick Shawn in that movie, and went to read his IMDB page, and was fascinated by this:

Shawn won a huge fan base... touring in one-man stage shows which contained a weird mix of songs, sketches, satire, philosophy and even pantomime. A bright, innovative wit, one of his best touring shows was called "The Second Greatest Entertainer in the World." During the show's intermission, Shawn would lie visibly on the stage floor absolutely still during the entire time. By freakish coincidence, Shawn was performing at the University of California at San Diego in 1987 when he suddenly fell forward on the stage during one of his spiels about the Holocaust. The audience, of course, laughed, thinking it was just a part of his odd shtick. In actuality, the 63-year-old married actor with four children had suffered a fatal heart attack.

What an ending!

AND: Here's Dick Shawn on Johnny Carson in 1986, doing a comedy routine about how you can't do jokes anymore, because everything is dangerous:



It was already the Era of That's Not Funny as far as he was concerned.