BERLIN JOURNAL
Is
Jan Böhmermann funny?
In
a defamation case that’s garnered worldwide attention, the Germans
turn to debating the essence of comedy.
By KONSTANTIN
RICHTER 4/23/16, 3:18 PM CET Updated 4/23/16, 3:34 PM CET
Ever since the
comedian Jan Böhmermann read a poem called “Slanderous Criticism”
on public television, prompting Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan to take legal action, German analysts have looked at it from
every angle. First they discussed the judicial perspective. Then they
examined the political implications. And then, finally, they got to
the most complicated question: Is the poem funny? Is it perhaps even
a great work of art?
Humor,
traditionally, doesn’t have a high standing in German culture.
Goethe and Schiller weren’t particularly funny, and no one has ever
called Heidegger’s “Being and Time” a comical masterpiece. At
the University of Bremen, there’s a professor who’s done some
serious research on humor. Whenever the media need an authority on
laughing matters, they give him a call. But now that a bit of comedy
has turned into a matter of global importance, every German suddenly
claims to have an informed opinion as to its comedic value. And so I
thought I’d give it a go, too.
* * *
For anyone who
hasn’t been following the news: The whole thing started with
Erdoğan’s request for a ban on a satirical clip called “Erdowie
Erdowo Erdoğan” that ran on German television. In response,
Böhmermann, the 35-year-old host of another comedy show, set out to
illustrate the legal limits of satire — and presented something
that went far beyond. “This thing I’m doing now is not allowed,
right?” he said and then recited a few couplets about the Turkish
President’s small penis reeking of döner kebab and being sore from
gang-banging. He also rhymed “f—ing goats” with “suppressing
minorities.”
Böhmermann’s
crude little poem, in the end, is just a crude little poem and not a
comical masterpiece.
While defending
Böhmermann’s right to freedom of speech, the English-language
media overwhelmingly refrained from doing a line-by-line translation.
The New York Times, the well-bred old lady, only said the poem was
“laced with profanity.”
Most German opinion
leaders, on the other hand, didn’t think the poem was crude at all.
Discussing the affair in the nation’s Feuilletons, or arts pages,
they usually refer to something they call the “meta-level.” Taken
at face value, the poem isn’t funny, they argue, but what makes it
humorous is the fact that the comedian embedded it in an analysis of
German defamation laws.
Helge Malchow, a
well-known book publisher, likened Böhmermann’s poem about the
goat-f—ing Turk to “context communication,” which, he said, is
“the essence of modern art.” The problem, he added
condescendingly, is that saying one thing and meaning another is an
art form “atavistic societies” — i.e. the Turks — don’t
fully understand. Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer (a co-owner
of Politico Europe) said he laughed out loud when he read the poem
and called it a “masterpiece.”
But is it really? A
little history lesson may be in order here. The Germans, after all,
aren’t known for their sophisticated sense of humor. In the 1930s,
“the main protagonists of German humor were either killed or forced
to flee,” writers Jakob Hein and Jürgen Witte recount in their
book “Germans and Humor: A History of Antagonism.” This left only
Nazi-approved comedians. When the war was over, the Allies,
understandably suspicious of German humor, oversaw the founding of
the so-called political cabarets. These institutions had cute names
like Die Stachelschweine (“The Porcupines”) or Kommödchen
(“Little Comedies”) and mostly engaged in the type of politically
correct humor designed to re-educate and denazify the Germans. On
public television, the bureaucrats of ARD and ZDF made sure that
things didn’t get out of hand. And in East Germany, of course, the
state kept an even closer eye on anything bordering on humorous.
* * *
Some of the stuff
that was passed off as German humor during these years was
intelligent and subtle. But it sure wasn’t unruly. That all changed
with the deregulation of the television industry in the 1980s and
1990s. Privately-owned channels such as RTL and Sat1 had lots of air
space to fill, and they borrowed heavily from U.S. pop culture. In
1995, comedian Harald Schmidt launched his late night show, a
Letterman rip-off that soon developed a life of its own. Schmidt, an
intellectual type with a background in high-brow theater, liked to
reenact Samuel Beckett plays on air. He also told jokes about the
Poles. Schmidt wasn’t a racist. When he told a racist joke, the
fact that he was telling a racist joke was meant to be a joke, too —
a distinction that may indeed have been lost on those viewers who
just enjoyed laughing about Poles.
Schmidt, the
comedian who never really meant what he said, shaped Germany’s
sense of humor. The Germans discovered the many uses of irony in
daily life, and lots of taboos were lifted. These days, when you see
someone raising their right hand in public that someone is usually a
stand-up comedian, and the Hitler salute is meant to be ironic.
(Unless, of course, he’s a Neo-Nazi. Then it’s not.) The same
goes for those politically incorrect jokes about Turks, Poles and
other foreigners that for many years were only told in private.
They’re officially okay now as long as it’s understood that you
don’t really mean it.
* * *
Which brings us back
to Böhmermann, who just happens to be a Schmidt disciple. In the
late-night show’s latter years when Schmidt was exhausted from too
many late nights, Böhmermann was his sidekick — and it shows. The
Süddeutsche Zeitung recently called Böhmermann a comedian who likes
“to put one meta-level on top of another.” So, on the meta-level
in this case, Böhmermann goads Erdoğan into taking legal action —
and exposes him as an autocrat who has no regard for press freedom.
Coming at a time when Merkel depends on Erdoğan’s support more
than ever, this is somewhat clever.
On another
meta-level, though, Böhmermann knowingly toys with the long-standing
German tradition of racist jokes about Turkey — a nation that many
people here still consider culturally inferior, and love to make fun
of. The Turks living in Germany know the gibes about goats and smelly
döner kebabs. They’ve heard them all before. So they don’t care
whether there’s a meta-level or not. Because when someone says that
he isn’t saying something and says it nonetheless, the bottom line
is that he said it.
Or to put it another
way: Böhmermann’s crude little poem, in the end, is just a crude
little poem and not a comical masterpiece. Which isn’t saying that
he should go to jail for a joke. There’s more at stake here than
the humor of it. But that’s on the meta-meta-level, I guess.
Konstantin Richter,
a German novelist and journalist, is a contributing writer at
POLITICO. He is the author of “Bettermann” and “Kafka was Young
and He Needed the Money.”
Authors:
Konstantin Richter
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