Source: The London Prat | Region: Federal Republic of Germany | Period: c.1200 to present
German humour is one of the most persistently and unjustly maligned comedy traditions in the world. The international reputation — distilled into the aphorism, variously attributed but most often to Mark Twain, that "a German joke is no laughing matter" — is a piece of cultural shorthand that has survived approximately 150 years of evidence to the contrary, sustained by a combination of linguistic inaccessibility (German comedy in translation loses not merely nuance but frequently the entire joke), the structural habits of a language that places the verb at the end of the sentence and thereby holds the punchline until the last possible moment in ways that do not survive word-for-word rendering, and the particular reluctance of British and American cultures to revise a comfortable prejudice once it has been established.
German humour is, in reality, a rich, diverse, and formally sophisticated tradition built on Wortspiel (wordplay), Situationskomik (situational comedy), a dark philosophical strain rooted in Romantic irony and its successors, a cabaret tradition of extraordinary political courage, and — in its regional expressions, particularly Bavaria and the Rhineland — a warmth and exuberance that would surprise anyone whose understanding of German comedy begins and ends with the stereotype. The Germans have a word for the particular pleasure of making other people laugh: Schadenfreude has entered every European language, but the Germans also have Gemütlichkeit — the cosy, warm conviviality of people who are comfortable enough with each other to be funny — which tends to be overlooked in international accounts of German national character.
The foundational figure of German comic literature is Till Eulenspiegel — the roguish folk trickster whose pranks, collected in a chapbook first published around 1510 and reprinted hundreds of times across Europe over the following centuries, established the template for a specifically German comic archetype: the literal-minded fool who exposes the absurdity of social conventions by following them with perfect exactitude. Eulenspiegel's jokes typically operate by taking a figurative instruction literally — told to "get out," he removes the windows; told to paint the walls "as he sees fit," he paints them with life-sized portraits of the people who live there — and the comedy lies in the gap between what was meant and what was done, a gap that reveals, with each prank, how much of social life depends on unstated assumptions and implied understandings that the rules themselves never specify.
The Eulenspiegel tradition is a specifically German contribution to European comic literature: the comedy of pedantic literalism as social critique, the joke that exposes the arbitrariness of convention by complying with it too precisely. It runs from the 1510 chapbook through Richard Strauss's 1895 tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche to the contemporary German tendency — sometimes maddening, often comic — to apply rules with a thoroughness that reveals the rules' own internal contradictions. The European Union's legendary bureaucratic precision, which has generated considerable comedy both inside and outside Germany, is the Eulenspiegel tradition operating at continental scale.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's comic writing — particularly the satire of Faust's Mephistopheles, a devil whose relationship with human ambition is one of the most sustained comic-philosophical partnerships in world literature — and Heinrich Heine's political poetry and prose (whose wit was so sharp that his works were among the first to be burned by the Nazis, which Heine had effectively predicted in 1820 with the observation that "where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also") represent the German literary comic tradition at its most intellectually ambitious.
The most significant and the most specifically German contribution to the history of political comedy is the Kabarett — the political cabaret tradition that developed in Munich and Berlin in the final years of the 19th century and became, in the Weimar Republic (1919-33), the most vital and the most dangerous comedy in the world. German Kabarett was not the relatively benign entertainment that "cabaret" suggests to British and American ears: it was sharp, politically explicit, formally experimental, and operating in a context in which the comedy's targets were actively seeking to suppress it, which concentrated both the wit and the courage required to practise it.
The Weimar Kabarett — centred on venues including the Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke) in Berlin, the Elf Scharfrichter (Eleven Executioners) in Munich, and dozens of smaller venues across Germany and Austria — produced performers including Karl Valentin (Munich, 1882-1948), the comedian whose absurdist sketches — deadpan, linguistically precise, and structurally disorienting in ways that anticipate Beckett — made him the most beloved comic figure in Bavarian cultural history; Erich Kästner (Dresden, 1899-1974), whose satirical poetry was burned by the Nazis in 1933 and who was one of the very few authors to witness his own book-burning in person, an experience he later described as "very strange"; and the political satirists of the Berlin scene whose material named names, attacked policies, and called the emerging Nazi movement by its correct name at a time when much of the mainstream press was still hoping the situation might resolve itself.
The Kabarett tradition's relationship with the Nazi period is a defining fact about German comedy: the best German political comedians were, from 1933 onwards, either silenced, imprisoned, murdered, or forced into exile. Kurt Tucholsky, the most brilliant political satirist of the Weimar period, died in Swedish exile in 1935. Walter Mehring fled to France, then to America. The Kabarett venues closed or were taken over. What survived, in those years, was the underground joke — the Flüsterwitz (whispered joke), the anti-regime humour circulated privately among people who trusted each other, whose comedy was the comedy of people who laughed because the alternative was worse.
The post-war revival of Kabarett — in figures including Wolfgang Neuss, Dieter Hildebrandt (whose Scheibenwischer programme on ARD ran from 1980 to 2005 and represents the longest-running political satire programme in German television history), and the contemporary generation of political comedians including Jan Böhmermann (whose 2016 satirical poem about Turkish President Erdogan provoked a diplomatic incident, a criminal prosecution under a Wilhelmine-era law prohibiting the insult of foreign heads of state, and a national debate about free speech that the poem's author had clearly anticipated and possibly intended) — demonstrates that the Kabarett tradition, once established, is not easily extinguished.
Bavaria (Bayern) has the most distinctive regional comedy tradition in Germany: a humour rooted in Gemütlichkeit, in the specific warmth of the beer garden and the alpine hut, and in the Bavarian character's cheerful refusal to be hurried. Karl Valentin's Munich absurdism is one expression of this; the Bavarian folk comedy tradition — the Volkstheater, the Bauerntheater, the comedies of rural life performed in dialect — is another. Bavaria's relationship with the rest of Germany is itself a source of considerable comedy: a region that regards itself as a civilisation in its own right, that maintains its own customs, its own food, its own beer regulations, and its own political party (the CSU, which has governed Bavaria continuously since 1957, a record of uninterrupted regional dominance that is either admirable or alarming depending on your perspective), and that tolerates the existence of non-Bavarian Germany with the good-natured condescension of a host country dealing with its less sophisticated neighbours.
The Rhineland — particularly Cologne (Köln) — contributes a different strain: warmer, more immediately accessible, rooted in the carnival traditions of the Rhinish cities and in the Kölsch-speaking culture of a city that regards its local beer as a philosophical position rather than a preference. The Kölner Karneval (Cologne Carnival), one of the largest carnival celebrations in Europe, is a three-day festival of political satire, comic performance, and general exuberance that produces, each year, satirical floats of considerable artistry and political sharpness.
Northern Germany — Hamburg, Bremen, the Protestant Hanseatic cities — has a drier, more restrained comedy that reflects the cultural influence of the North Sea and of a mercantile culture that values precision and understatement. Hamburg produced Otto Waalkes (Emden, 1948), the comedian who has been one of the most commercially successful in German history, and whose slapstick and absurdist comedy — less politically engaged than the Kabarett tradition but formally accomplished — demonstrates that German comedy is capable of producing a performer whose appeal crosses both regional and generational lines with ease.
Contemporary German comedy is navigating a cultural moment of considerable complexity: the question of what a democratic society's comedy is permitted to say about authoritarian states and their leaders, the question of how satire functions in an era of social media and instant international circulation, and the question — specific to Germany — of how a country with a direct historical experience of what happens when comedy is suppressed relates to the pressure to suppress comedy now.
Jan Böhmermann (Bremen, 1981), host of ZDF Magazin Royale, is the most significant German comedian of his generation: a performer of considerable formal intelligence whose work combines investigative journalism, political satire, absurdist comedy, and a deliberate provocation of the boundaries between what satire is legally permitted to say and what it chooses to say regardless. His 2016 "Schmähgedicht" (insult poem) about Erdogan — read on television with explicit framing that made clear it was intended as an example of what satire should not be, but which worked perfectly well as satire regardless — resulted in a criminal complaint by the Turkish government, a prosecution under a law that had not been used since 1964, and a debate that produced, eventually, the abolition of the law in question. Getting a 19th-century law repealed by breaking it is a specifically German kind of comedy achievement.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: France; United Kingdom; Austria; Switzerland.