Pearl Harbor as a source of comedy?

I recently watched "Don Juan Quilligan," a modest comedy from FOX with William Bendix, Joan Blondell, and Phil Silvers. Bendix is a sailor who sort of inadvertently marries two women, then tries to get out of his predicament by faking his own death. It's a decent enough way to pass an hour and 20 minutes so, but never more than that, and Silvers is in his tame sidekick mode of the 1940s, not his "comic force of nature mode" he would get to unleash later.

Something that stands out to me is when Silvers and Bendix are trying to figure out how to get out of the revoltin' development (apologies to Chester A. Riley). They find out that Pearl Harbor has just been attacked by the Japanese, and Silvers basically says, "Great! Now you can enlist and not have to face any of this." It's kind of a throwaway line, except that the strategy sounds pretty good to them, and that's what they decide to do. So the disaster that led to so many deaths and threw the country in world war here is the catalyst for the next act in the movie.

Now, granted, this was released in 1945, a good 4 years or so after the actual event. I wasn't around back then, and maybe it's only with such ignorance I can say, with hindsight, that at the time this movie hit theaters, the end of the war was a foregone conclusion. But even if that were true, the war was still raging and U.S. troops were still dying.

Was 4 years "too soon" to use Pearl Harbor as an offhand reference in a comedy? Was 1945 too early for even a brief mention of the tragedy in the context of a scheme to get some idiot out of the consequences of self-inflicted bigamy? I guess not. Today people make frivolous references to the event all the time, but I don't know at what point that became "acceptable."

It's interesting to note that even today, let alone in 2005, people are a bit skittish about anything that approaches a joke about 9/11. Have times changed? Are the two situations at all comparable? Beats me. But I was surprised to hear even that little line in a 1945 movie.