It’s difficult to tell whether the North Korean regime has anything to with the hack attack on Sony Pictures, or the subsequent terrorist threats against movie theaters planning to screen The Interview. The forthcoming Sony film centers around an assassination plot against North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. (Those terrorist threats have worked, by the way: Five major movie chains have just cancelled plans to screen the James Franco and Seth Rogen comedy.)

But I’m not so sure that Kim should be so quick to condemn the movie–even if it does include a scene in which his head blows up. I’m reminded of an astute argument that Ron Rosenbaum made in the New York Observer some years ago, in which he argued that in Charlie Chaplin’s classic comedy The Great Dictator, “Hitler became merely Chaplinesque: a figure to be mocked more than feared, a comic villain whose pretensions would collapse of his own disproportionate weight like the Little Tramp collapsing on his cane. Someone to be ridiculed rather than resisted.”