Ernst Lubitsch's earliest films, sometimes called “milieu comedies” or “fashion farces,” reflect the influence of variety and Yiddish theater. Set in Berlin's garment district, a milieu that Lubitsch's contemporaries perceived as Jewish, these comedies star Lubitsch as a charming rascal whose shenanigans help him succeed in the fashion business and get the girl. The Lubitsch protagonists in the milieu films have stereotypical Jewish names, gestures, and appearance, and are widely taken to be Jewish. Consequently, scholarship on these films emphasizes German-Jewish assimilation and class mobility, and there is ongoing conversation about whether Lubitsch's treatment of Jewish difference is anti-Semitic or self-hating or whether it critiques anti-Semitic stereotypes. Because Lubitsch as actor draws all the attention, analyses of Jewishness in the milieu comedies say little about Jewish women, whom the films encourage viewers to overlook. In early twentieth-century Germany, visual coding of Jewish femininity was subtle and complex, and there were significant pressures on Jewish women to be only “subtly or barely visible.” The subtle coding of women characters in the milieu films is consistent with these pressures and makes them more readily identifiable by class and gender than by ethnicity. More attention to the representation of Jewish women will enrich our understanding of humor and Jewish difference in the milieu comedies.

have argued previously that Lubitsch's ironic and theatrical performance style resists anti-Semitic stereotypes by exaggerating and demonstrating resilience to them. In this essay, I complicate my own prior claims. Humor has both inclusionary and exclusionary functions.