Editorial: In praise of ... German humour
The trouble with joking in German, the comedian Stewart Lee explained in the Guardian a couple of years ago, is the grammar. It is hard to set up a punchline when you have to put the subject of the sentence near the start - and anyway, big, clunky compound nouns don't lend themselves to the sort of double meanings that fuel British humour. If the theory is right then Germans don't lack wit, just the sort of wit that sounds good in English. That hasn't stopped generations of British writers from claiming Germans are humourless - it happened again yesterday when a satire museum opened in Frankfurt. ("We have only just opened the museum because until now we didn't have enough comedy to put in it," the Telegraph reported its director as saying.) The new Caricatura Museum turns out to be a serious affair, holding satirical cartoons from 1960s radicals, leaving the question of what Germans find funny unanswered. The cause of German comedy is not helped by the nation's dubious enthusiasm for situational slapstick: millions of Germans gather around their televisions at New Year to watch a deeply dull old British sketch, Dinner for One, involving an old lady and a drunk butler. Germans are puzzled to find that no one in Britain has heard of it. Nor is it easy to imagine Angela Merkel joking over the phone to Gordon Brown (unless the weekend saga of the bank guarantee that wasn't turns out to be an odd sort of hoax). But German humour is out there. The point is that the British don't get it.
· Read Jochen Hung's article on the Caricatura Museum