by Brooks Riley

Is German humor an oxymoron? Someone said that it was. It might have been Jay Leno, it might have been someone else. It could have been many people, all clutching a cliché as worn out as an old shoe, and one that never really corresponded to reality. That Germans have humor also interferes with our other clichés, most of them emanating from our own World War II movies, which indoctrinated us to the ‘Achtung‘ school of German intransigence.

The cliché that refuses to die was reinforced by a 2011 poll, which voted Germany the most unfunny country in the world. (With the British coming in 4th place and US in 5th, one has to wonder who was voting.)

Maybe it’s time to take another look. The video of a spontaneous combustion of laughter on a subway in Berlin went viral in 2011, racking up 3 million viewers who simply had to see it to believe it.

Germans like to laugh. They like to laugh so much that humor, a Kleinkunst (minor art) once dubbed the Tenth Muse, is more than just a cottage industry. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, their humor did not emigrate in 1933 even though many of its better exemplars did leave the country or were later arrested and murdered by the Nazis. One of those who stayed behind was the legendary Karl Valentin, a Bavarian comic whose nightly show began with music by Mendelssohn. One night during the Third Reich, he was visited by the SS, who told him he would have to stop playing that music because Mendelssohn was Jewish. Valentin answered: ‘Then you’ll have to turn off the lights, Edison was Jewish.’ So much for Achtung.

My introduction to Valentin was fortuitous. I wanted to hear Walter Schmidinger reading from the works of Thomas Bernhard at the Salzburg Festival. Sometime after I bought the ticket, Thomas Bernhard died. In his will he forbade the public performance of his works in his native Austria. A letter informed me that Schmidinger would be unable to read Bernhard but would read from the works of Karl Valentin. Karl who? I fully intended to return the ticket, but didn’t. On the evening in question, I debated whether or not to attend. My comprehension of German was nascent at the time, and although I knew Bernhard’s works in translation, I would probably not be able to understand much of this other guy.

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