What, That’s Not Funny?

A costume-provocateur at a Brooklyn high school was removed from class yesterday for dressing as Hitler:

A student at a Brooklyn high school named for a prominent Jewish educator faced a blitzkrieg of trouble yesterday when he arrived dressed as Adolf Hitler for Halloween.

Walter Petryk, 16, insisted his masquerade was a lampoon of the Nazi dictator — but administrators at Leon M. Goldstein HS declared autumn for Hitler and detained Petryk as their “prisoner of war.”

The junior honors student, who grew a moustache for the occasion, was pulled out of his second-period English class and told to remove his beige coat bearing a red swastika armband or risk spending the day in the office.

You would think that people who had family who perished in the Holocaust would refrain from facile Hitler comparisons, but then there they are:

His mother and stepfather, who is Jewish and lost ancestors in the Nazi genocide, defended Petryk’s stance. They rebuffed pleas by the dean to advise their son to remove the costume so he could return to class.

“This is a matter of artistic free expression and a school not being stupid,” said his mother, Diane Petryk-Bloom, who picked her son up at school. “[The dean is] offended by a parody of Hitler — and he’s acting like Hitler.”

Then there’s the issue of “talk the talk/walk the walk”:

Petryk said he didn’t set out to push the envelope as Hitler. But he acknowledged that he made a decision to disguise himself as Charlie Chaplin with a bowler hat and cane on his way to school to avoid ruffling feathers on the street.

“I wasn’t going to get on the subway in a Hitler costume,” Petryk said.

Pussy!