Obscene

Rating: 1/10 (25 August 2013)

Thank God Mel Brooks never tried to play the Holocaust for laughs - unfortunately the producers of 1941 didn't know any better, mocking the initial and short-lived fear of a Japanese invasion following Pearl Harbor.
This movie was obviously made for the Animal House generation and their strange, slightly warped, sensibility; something like a child's fascination with gross body functions and preference for using feces over oil or watercolor as media.
For that generation, the aftermath of Pearl Harbor may well have seemed fair game for their version of what they considered irrelevant humor; after all it'd been 35 years since the real thing and who really remembered the shock and horror of the real 1941? That may have changed in 2001 with the shock and horror of 9-11 and I doubt that those same producers would dare do 9-11 The Movie; hopefully, no set of producers in 2036 will try either.
Just as such a movie would be obscene in 2036, 1941 was obscene in 1979 and still is.
Apart from the poor choice of subject matter and on its merits as a comedy, there aren't any. By most generations definition of schtick, 1941 was a bomb - as many reviewers pointed out, Three Stooges, not the Marx Brothers and, apart from the Animal House generation, The Stooges get really old around age 6.
Bottom line - it just ain't funny.
Humor is a very individual characteristic so, if you're an adult and you do still find the Stooges funny, that's your right and I'll defer to your sensibility on the point.
But I will not defer to the obscenity of trying to exploit one of the most traumatic events in the history of America for laughs.
The wars that followed are fair game - from Catch-22 to Kelly's Heroes or Mr Roberts to the Caine Mutiny but 12-7-1941 and its immediate aftermath isn't, any more than 9-11.
Update 9-11-13.
"The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" is a movie I kept trying to remember while writing this review. You may or may not have heard of it but it deals with War Hysteria with intelligence and wit, unlike 1941. Haven't seen it since it's first run but remember it as being gentle and humane, making the point, "Hey, we're all just people".