The Germans and their sense of humour

Vegetarians and carbohydrate-fans are already starting to celebrate the long-awaited United Nations Year of the Potato. OK, it does not exactly rank up there with the World Cup but whether mashed, baked, roasted or fried, the potato is being honoured as the most loyal kitchen-buddy of the Germans. And may a good time be had by all.

Strangely enough 2008 is also the unofficial year of German humour and you can’t help feeling that this is more than a happy coincidence. Both the potato and German humour are buried under the soil. Both have to be excavated, scrubbed carefully and cooked before being made fit for consumption. So the good news is that we can save some money on balloons this year by celebrating both events in joint rave-ups. I can hardly wait for the invitations to clunk through the letter box.

What makes it humour year, is the 100th anniversary of the death of Max-and-Moritz inventor Wilhelm Busch. It is being used as an excuse not just to examine the life of Busch but to investigate whether the Germans have a sense of humour at all. Scheduled are Busch exhibitions in Hannover, Schleswig and Schweinfurt as well as endless academic conferences dedicated to the very earnest subject of German humour.

For outsiders this all seems a little odd. Why should a nation have to be convinced that it really is quite funny, that it has comic geniuses? The evidence is everywhere: in the laughter that bursts out in the local pub, in the long queues that form outside theatres where stand-up comedians are performing. The whole process is, how shall we say this, typisch deutsch. Somehow the Germans have persuaded themselves that their sense of humour is inferior to other nations. They apologise for cracking a joke among foreigners, often prefacing it by saying... “you’re not going to find this funny...” They attend laughter academies, go for laugh-therapy.

Above all they import thousands of hours of humorous television series from Britain and America. Sometimes it seems to the British as if they no longer manufacture cars (the Germans now do that for us), only funny-men. It began with Monty Python, Benny Hill, Mr Bean, Borat and now includes the regular plagiarism of English comic ideas(The Office became the television series Stromberg). Harald Schmidt, a genuine home-grown comic genius, had to borrow an American format - the late-night shows of David Letterman and Jay Leno - in order to make a lasting impact on German television audiences.

The fact is the Germans do not trust their own talent to amuse. You do not get taken seriously, you do not gain authority or win votes, by making people laugh. Look at the career of Joschka Fischer, a truly witty rebel who steadily lost his comic skills as he rose through the political establishment. Yet elsewhere the most successful leaders are often also the wittiest: Ronald Reagan, though no intellectual, had an eye for the absurd.

Now German opinion-makers have set themselves the task of raising the profile of German humour. So far they are not making a very good job of it. One commentator in the Rheinische Merkur began his critique with a joke (a daring innovation in German journalism). The worst EU scenario? asked Tilmann Gangloff: “the English cook, the Italians make the cars and the Germans crack the gags.” This is not only a lame joke but also wrong-headed. The English are becoming rather good cooks (look at the German bestseller lists - Jamie Oliver has a fixed niche), the Italians make Ferraris - and the Germans are genuinely funny. A bit slow perhaps, but funny.

The weekly Die Zeit meanwhile is taking German humour very seriously indeed. The lead article to a nine-page analysis traces the national comic tradition to Jean Paul and to Heinrich Heine. Sadly it was written with the lightness of a TIR truck. With friends like these, German humour does not need enemies.

Two features make German humour different, but not inferior, to British and American humour. The first is that wittiness is not part of everyday working life. Yes, there is the fabled “Berliner Schnauze”, the gruff proletarian put-downs of city-people. But it does not come at the speed or the regularity of workers in British or American cities. On the way to work in London I can trade half-witty remarks with the postman, the bus-driver and the cleaning lady. In German urban life, the rhythm is different: wittiness comes via the television, courtesy of Harald Schmidt and Stefan Raab, in the evenings after supper. The jokes are memorised - if you didn’t Bild Zeitung helpfully prints the best - and repeated in the office next morning.

There is, in other words, little sense of the absurdity of everyday existence. Partly this is because of the demise of yiddish banter, once a feature of the German marketplace, and still present on the streets of East London and the New York Bronx. German wit was sharper in the days of Kurt Tucholsky before the war and before the Holocaust.

Second, the German language restricts the possibilities of stand-up comedians. True, they can still surprise their audiences by inserting the word “nicht” at the end of a very long sentence, tricking the listeners. But the English language gives the stand-up comedian more possibilities. Comedian Stewart Lee gives one of his own lines as an example: “I was sitting there, minding my own business, naked, smeared with salad dressing and lowing like an ox...and then I got off the bus.” That is (mildly) funny because the audience is led to expect that he was describing a very private, perverse activity and the listeners are ambushed by the image of this all happening on public transport. The joke, claims Lee, could not be translated funily into German, simply because German sentence structure changes the nature of a surprise punchline.

So, instead, German comedians rely on dialect jokes and situational comedy.

And the best are very funny indeed.

That is my point for Wilhelm Busch year: German humour is different, more direct, less ironic, slower but also warmer, more heart-felt and (despite the Busch tradition) less cruel. It is fashionable to tell the Germans to be proud of themselves so I will not urge them to be more patriotic, to stand up for their humour when they hear a foreigner or even one of their own cultural critics bemoan the Teutonic wit-deficit. But I will say this: carry on laughing! For that too is typisch deutsch.