Laughter at Hitler's funeral: Hundreds see Adolf off.

THE BUNKER, Berlin, Tuesday (UNN) — Mourners laughed at the funeral of Adolf Hitler yesterday, as fellow comics cracked jokes in honour of the controversial stand-up.

Hitler had shot to fame on the hit 1930s show The National Socialists. He told friends before he died that he hoped the service would not be a "miserable occasion" and they did not let him down. Fellow comedians fired off one-liners at his funeral as a portrait of the tubby funnyman, shunned by the showbiz establishment for his gags about race, sat on the altar.

"So this Jew, this Gypsy and this queer walk into the pub ..."

Josef Goebbels gave the eulogy and told the congregation: "How could Adolf be a racist when he had four black horses pulling his coffin? Adolf used to say the problem with the Mary Celeste was Churchill and Roosevelt had just done cabaret there." Goebbels said he had visited Hitler in the bunker before he passed away and that he was, characteristically, "still sparing no one. He was complaining that they changed his cyanide for iron tablets and he woke up facing north."

Around 400 mourners attended Berlin Crematorium, including fellow acts Churchill and Roosevelt, Joe Stalin, Karl Donitz, Klaus Barbie and Rudolf "Wrong Way" Hess as well as former München United ace Neville Chamberlain and ex-Alexanderplatz Street star Heinrich Himmler, who had played a Butlins activities director.

Tributes were also read from many who could not be there, including Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer. The service ended with Richard Wagner's "My Way." Earlier, more than 500 mourners had lined the streets of Berlin to pay tributes as Hitler's cortege drove by.

Austrian-born Hitler denied being racist, once remarking: "I tell jokes. You never take a joke seriously." However, in 1939, he was barred from performing in the Baltic seaside country of Poland, where councillors were worried that his act would breach laws on race. His biographer Bernard Staempfle said, "He was a man of his age — and as people of his age went, he was relatively un-racist. Until his dying day, he didn't understand what all the fuss was about."

The comic died from sense of humour failure last Monday at the age of 56.

• William L. Shirer "We Just Like Their Really Cool Boots". Institute for Hysterical Review, June 26, 2007

Said you were smart, said it would just take a day of your time.

No-one will ever start a serious general encyclopedia again on the "one smart person writes the whole thing" (Aristotle, Pliny the Elder) or "a bunch of smart people write the whole thing" (Britannia, Brockhaus) models — they’ll use wikis and massive collaboration.

In fact, no-one will ever start a serious specialist encyclopedia on the one-smart-person or bunch-of-smart-people models again, because wikis already do the job much better, much faster.

For general encyclopedias the earlier models are already economically unviable; for specialist encyclopedias they’re not only unviable but just can’t produce as useful results nearly as quickly.