Filmmakers in Hollywood were not making many jokes about Nazis in the 1940's, and To Be Or Not To Be didn't exactly start a trend. Setting aside Charles Chaplin's unique skewering of Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator, released in 1940, comedies focused on the Third Reich remain rare even today.

One exception was the hit TV show Hogan's Heores, which ran for six years on CBS from 1965-1971. The producers of that show narrowly won a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the original authors of the 1953 Billy Wilder prison camp drama Stalag 17, but with the exception of one character, the Wilder film treated the Nazis as murderous villains. All the Nazis in Hogan's Heroes, however, were incompetent, egotistical, bumbling, sometimes benevolent, and almost never deadly.

The Mel Brooks movie The Producers (1967), with its subsequent re-makes, was based on the premise that any comedy, musical or light entertainment about Nazis was intrinsically in bad taste. The target of Brooks' fictional musical Springtime For Hitler was never the Nazis themselves, but rather, the crackpots who thought a musical celebrating Hitler would be a good idea.

Quentin Tarantino's edgy WWII film Inglorious Basterds, (2009) might not be generally seen as a comedy, but it has distinct comic elements. The original Italian movie The Inglorious Bastards (1978), which shared little more than its title with the Tarantino film, was a straight, if implausible, "Macaroni" war film. The 2012 German-Finnish-Australian comedy Iron Sky, about Nazis who fled into space and return in 2018 to conquer Earth, has met with limited success, released only on DVD in the U.S.