Ze famous German humour is a serious business. And no one understood this better than Count Bernhard-Victor Christoph-Carl von Bülow, known to generations of Germans simply as Loriot.
For half a century until his death in 2011, Loriot satirised – in cartoons, television sketches and movies – a very particular postwar German personality: uptight, snobbish petit bourgeois or – in his native tongue – verklemmt and verkrampft.
In his popular 1970s sketch show, Loriot created characters that could have been the appalling German cousin of Basil Fawlty or the late Patricia Routledge’s Violet Bucket.
He tried every kind of humour from the absurd (the “yodelling diploma”) to visual comedy (accidentally destroying a stranger’s diningroom) to untranslatable puns.
There is such a deep well to draw from that, after the third bottle of wine at German dinner parties, you can expect someone to start fielding Loriot punchlines like “there used to be more tinsel”, a joke about Christmas sentimentality.
Non-Germans are often at a loss with Loriot, as much a collective cultural campfire as comedian. You can bring such evenings to swift end by suggesting that most of Loriot’s jokes have dated badly, apart from the work he borrowed without credit from British and US comedians.
Of course given his 50-year career, it’s statistically a given that at least some of his jokes still have bite. In the 1970s, decades before today’s breast/chest-feeding rows, a Loriot cartoon showed a man holding a baby over the caption: “We demand equal treatment of men and women even if, for babies, this means temporary weight-loss.”
Loriot was back in the news recently with news that his archive is moving from his last home near Munich to Frankfurt. The Bavarians were furious, as this is not the first such loss. The entire archive of the city’s other celebrated comedian Karl Valentin, a Bavarian Buster Keaton revered by Samuel Beckett, went to Cologne. The delight over securing Loriot’s back catalogue was palpable in Frankfurt, particularly at its future home: the Caricature Museum in the old town, tucked in between the cathedral and the river Main.
“It’s great news, Loriot is the one thing we can all still laugh at,” said Ewald, a 70-year-old local man.
The Frankfurt museum’s 2023 Loriot retrospective – spread over three storeys – attracted a record 180,000 visitors in total, proving the old master had lost little of his drawing power.
Among the archive are more than 3,000 sketches, scripts and “piles of cartoon cells”.
“His comic artistry, which seemed to come so easy, was the result of hard work,” said Ina Hartwig, cultural minister in Frankfurt’s city government of the acquired archive.
A former costar of his television sketch show knew all about that. Evelyn Hamann claimed Loriot, as star-director, once demanded 34 takes of a scene where she stepped in some dog shit before he got just what he wanted.
But the Loriot archive may yet prove a poisoned chalice for the Caricature Museum. Until now it has largely been home to the work of local Frankfurt humorists who, starting in the 1960s, called themselves the “New Frankfurt School”, a joking nod to Adorno’s Frankfurt School of philosophy.
These Frankfurt satirists’ work is far less known than Loriot’s, appearing mostly in self-regarding satirical magazines with low circulation.
Many in this ageing club are still furious that Frankfurt is fawning over the Loriot blow-in rather than honouring their declining number and legacy.
Given that much of Loriot’s humour draws on epic German wells of repressed resentment, the looming satirist stand-off in Frankfurt has huge comedy potential – not that anyone here has noticed yet.
Nor does anyone seem concerned that German humour, what little there is of it, is now the stuff of museums rather than comedy clubs or television shows.
Some 14 years after his death, Loriot remains the high-water mark of postwar German humour. Though it’s arguable how high a water level we were talking about in Germany in the first place.
Two years ago, on what would have been Loriot’s 100th birthday, I was a guest on a German national radio show. While the delighted host repeated 50-year-old puns, and asked listeners for more, I asked why everyone was still obsessed with a dead German comic and not the living ones.
As someone who doesn’t laugh enough here, I asked listeners to send me in their recommendations of good, contemporary German comedians. Two years on, still waiting, I’ve defected to the Austrians.
