I had a good friend in High School who seemed to believe that the phrase:

"I hate Illinois Nazis"

was the height of comedy. He brought it up at every possible opportunity.
We spent much of our time playing various RPGs and he tended to prefer Top Secret and other games in contemporary settings, so he got the opportunity pretty frequently.

I didn't really get it. Partly, this was because I was till years away from seeing The Blues Brothers.
However, it was also because this particular bon mot isn't really all that funny.

Its not clever, there's no play on words. The constituent parts did't seemed neither related nor so unrelated as to create Pythonesque surrealism. If the line had been "I hate polyglot fish." or "I despise furious green ideas", I could have probably found either of those funny. (Of course, I had already started on the path that got me to where I am today, so the second example may have been less than random to me.)

Mel Brooks aside, Nazis aren't funny. Nor is hating Nazis very funny. If you're to hate someone, it might as well be the Nazis. "I hate Nazis" is about as funny as "I like ice cream."

Now "Illinois" in virtue of being so ordinary, so midwestern, so MidAmerican, such the typical state of affairs state, becomes funny in many contexts.

I suspect my friend found it funny as a combination of bizarre randomness and making fun of the weakness of others.

One could argue that there are Nazis in Illinois and the joke was probably at their expense. Mid-American Nazis are a variety of paranoid kook and, I have to admit that paranoids can be mighty funny.

Of course, this was before Tim McVeigh proved that being a midwestern fascist wasn't the same thing as being harmless.

So, why was it funny to hate Illinois Nazis? Consider this first, why wasn't the second Blues Brother Movies funny?

Comedy requires context and timing.

So, I get it a bit more now, but its still not high comedy.
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