Tribeca doc 'The Last Laugh' surveys humor and the Holocaust

"The Last Laugh," which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, pokes and prods at the question of "Where's the line?" in comedy, teasing out comedy's cathartic, healing role in even the worst tragedies.

Pearlstein's film doesn't only examine the issue from those with a microphone, but through Holocaust survivors who add a deeper dimension to the film: humor as a necessary survival tool.

Some, like 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone, frankly confess that among themselves, survivors, too, tell jokes about life in the camps.

By seeking humor in the darkest dark, "The Last Laugh" gets at the intrinsic nature of comedy.

When he reflects on Silverman's introduction of him for a 2014 AFI lifetime award, he cringes at her joke: What do the Jews hate most about the Holocaust?

Famously never released was Jerry Lewis' "The Day the Clown Cried," made in 1972, in which Lewis plays a German clown forced to entertain children before they were sent to the gas chambers.

For Pearlstein, a veteran filmmaker whose previous films include the 2003 Japanese wrestling documentary "Sumo East and West," it's a complex chemistry that goes into determining whether a joke is offensive or not: