Dinner for One?
No laughing matter.....
Heidelberg
No laughing matter.....
An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal
that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however,
should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows
older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its
basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but
for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to
the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed
in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the
speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its
teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully
functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but
attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now
17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to
him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player.
Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares,
"Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is
astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you
could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never
say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German
child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."
I am driving around a select part of Germany ,
seeking reassurance that despite all the wars, and despite our current turmoil,
it may yet be possible to raise a laugh….
Stewart Lee, a small-time hero of mine and part-time intellectual,
researched the German sense of humour for The Guardian in 2006, and provided
the above offering by way of a starter.
It is a curious thing that the
German people have a reputation for a lack of humour, but Lee accurately
pointed out that the problem lies at least partly in the language, with its
rigid sentence construction which does not allow for a jokey reveal at the last
moment, and which disadvantages punning with its composite nouns.
What doesn’t quite add up is that,
apparently, every New Year for over 40 years, Germans have been laughing
hysterically at a black-and-white TV version of a sketch entitled Dinner
for One, written in the 1920s by Laurie Wylie. It was recorded (in
English) in 1962, with Freddie Frinton (who I remember used to do his drunk act
as a stooge to a prim Thora Hird) as the butler and 72-year-old May Warden as
90-year-old Miss Sophie. Since 1963, the
sketch has been screened at least 231 times to German audiences, making it the
most repeated show on German television, and, according to the Guinness Book of
World Records, the most popular show in TV history. In 2004, 15.6 million
Germans watched it.
You can see the sketch on YouTube,
but the gist is that Miss Sophie celebrates her 90th birthday in the imagined
presence of dead friends; the Butler drinks all the absent friends’ drinks, and
then escorts the lady to her chamber.
The recurrent question is, "Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?" to
which she replies: "Same procedure as every year, James."
And
therein lies a clue. History. In an extract
from Keeping
Up With The Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters, published in
The
Observer in 2012, Philip Oltermann wrote that By the time I moved to Britain, there was a commonly expressed view in
the German press that England was a country tragically stuck in the past,
obsessed with its glorious role in the second world war, unable to shake a
German's hand without making some daft joke about the Nazis – all true, to an
extent, just not the whole truth. In many ways, one British comedy had already
come up with a much more convincing explanation for this. John Cleese's Basil
Fawlty desperately tries to be serious when he meets his German guests at
Fawlty Towers, yet he cannot stop himself from reverting to the English
instinct of black-humoured wordplay: "That's two egg mayonnaise, a prawn
Goebbels, a Herman Göring and four Colditz salads." Basil Fawlty reminds
us that postwar Anglo-German relations weren't just complicated by changing
economic fortunes and a rapidly unfolding European project, but also by
increasingly divergent ideas of what humour could and should do…..
Should
we be laughing today? Should we be
backslapping our German friends despite our loss in the Brexit war? Or are the Germans laughing at us, with our
backward ways?
So,
in short, I recently visited some of the southern parts of Germany, including Tübingen, which, according to its own
website: lives from the complementary
interaction of the old town, the university and the civil community, that
Tübingen lives between professors and wine growers, and gains its peculiar
attraction and its unsurpassable "genius loci". Still, today Tübingen
is…. an "Athens on the Neckar ".
Tübingen is the small big city, "the place for which one is vainlessly in
search on earth." It is also
where Joseph Ratzinger (later, for a while, Pope Benedict XVI) fell out with
colleagues and undisciplined students in the late ‘60s, but we won’t go into
that. It is certainly a fine place, with a colourful punt-filled riverside,
delicate washed timber framed houses, and hip-hop filled beer halls.
Perhaps
typically for a town where about a quarter of the residents are students, it is
quiet in the morning. A street
and wooden burghers pray silently in the Stiftskirche St Georg.
I don’t get a strong sense of humour from the
damp cobbles of the Markt, but the Altstadt seems happy enough.
After
Tübingen I attempt to scale the tallest
church steeple in the world, that of Ulm
I have to admit
that at about 135 metres, feeling that I had had enough steps and vertiginous
open stone work for one day, I decided to paraglide back down the narrow
spirals to prefer the 15th century wooden congregation
and stony
statue of Bach below in the quiet gloom.
But then Fränkische Bratwurst mit Senf in the lively market brings a smile
to my lips, as does a bottle of Erdinger
Weißbier Dunkel in a beamed Weinstube,
where conversation with a generous lady sipping Riesling from a half pint jug turns on the calamitous nature of
English beer….. Is that a joke?
Tübingen
survived the second world war almost unscathed because it had no industry. Much of Ulm,
however, was destroyed by bombing in 1944, and many of the places we visit on
this trip were subject to all kinds of violence and destruction during the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) which
may have caused as many as eight millions casualties (three quarters of the
population of Württemberg died
during this conflict). The war was
essentially between the Protestant Union and the Catholic League, though it
also involved Spain, France, Bohemia, Sweden, Denmark, England and the
Netherlands, and it raged all over what is now this part of Germany. Not
much to laugh about there.
But
then, as they say, shit happens. On the road from Ulm to Rothenburg ob der
Tauber, we veer into Northern Bavaria and pass the Nördlingen Ries, a 25 km wide meteorite crater, where Apollo 16
astronauts trained. This was caused
slightly before the thirty years war, and was not, as I first thought, divine
intervention to resolve the crisis on behalf of the Calvinists. This particular meteorite had a
diameter of about 1.5 kilometres and it impacted the target area at a velocity of about
20 km/s (45,000 mph). The resulting explosion had the power of 1.8 million Hiroshima bombs. Not much to laugh about there either…..
We then admire Dinkelsbühl, where the moat and walls
seem to have survived all conflicts, and
where Tessie Bear drives Noddy round and round the cobbled streets vainly
trying to find a parking space.
Then we
breech the traffic laws to enter Rothenburg,
passing the bus park and narrowly avoiding having the car crushed by the press
of mondial visitors…..
It’s no joke! I thought that, during the school holidays,
off the beaten track, there would be hardly anyone here! But, despite the Wars and the Meteorites, the
place is packed…..
Rothenburg was badly affected by both the Peasants’ War of 1525 and
the Thirty Years War - so much so that it slipped into insignificance and so
was preserved by ignorance.
It was then
pulverised in 1945 by allied aerial bombardment. But, miraculously, a spirit survived, and the
town has re-emerged, phoenix-like, from the dust. We stay at the rather fine Hotel Eisenhut on the uniquely preserved Herrngasse, and dine at the warmly
welcoming Weinhaus Zum Pulverer,
where a smiling hostess serves us cheese soup in an edible bowl made of bread,
and we learn what a Bembel is –
twice! I begin to laugh….
In the morning, thick mists
shroud the valley and swirl up above the walls and towers.
The sun burns like a cigarette through the silky
vapours and gradually the scene clears.
Across the cobbles a cohort of good protestants step briskly to take up
their positions in the choir of St
Jakobs Kirche,
while outside the Rathaus
a number of peasant types prepare to blow their bagpipes and squeeze their wolf
skins to amuse the day-trippers….
It is
interesting to note the different factions here, even in such a short
stay. No obvious antagonism, but a
simple divergence of preference. Nothing
to be alarmed about. Nothing out of the
ordinary. Nothing to laugh at either…..
We make our way across country,
through the Odenwald, to Heidelberg
where,
being Sunday, every biker with more than 500cc of nickel chrome, oil and rubber
within 100kms is necking Bitburger Pils
and inserting French fries into its beard, but, despite an EasyRider frisson with
our hostesses, we survive, to arrive in Heidelberg
before it, whatever, is too late. Almost nothing to laugh about….
And
it’s true. It would seem that most of
the world has moved here, to live in the epitome of romantic ruins, the
semi-derelict Schloss,
where in the
late seventeenth century French explosives split seven metre thick walls and
left whole sections of towers forever lurching into the ditch, which so moved
Mark Twain that he wrote of it as deserted,
discrowned, beaten by storms, but royal still, and beautiful.
The castle was at one time the palace of Frederick V
Despite
the impress of visitors and students, crowding the funicular and swelling
across the Alte Brücke, the city
quietens at night, and we are well looked after in both the Hotel Weisser Bock and the Heidelberger Kulturbrauerei, where Hausgemachte Bratensülze with Remouladensauce, Bratkartoffeln und Salat
goes extremely well with their home-brewed Oktoberfest beer…. Something
to make you smile….
Henning
Wehn, regular representative of Germany
on Radio 4, attempts to explain German humour in his own way: Having performed up and down the UK
The show is based on the six
iron regeln of the Fatherland’s hilarity bible ‘Lachen, Lachen, Lachen’
(‘Laugh, Laugh, Laugh’).
Regel 1) Be arrogant.
This is why Germans like Australians. It’s just their attempts of
coming across as jovial that isn’t consistent with German humour.
Regel 2) No self-deprecation.
How can trying to laugh off failure be regarded as a positive character
trait? Nobody deserves to stay in their job simply because they tell the tale of
their underachievement in an entertaining way.
Regel 3) Never ever laugh with failure.
Only ever laugh at failure. For example: Stuart Pearce 1990, Gareth Southgate
Regel 4) Don’t mention the war.
Because we lost. Admittedly we were the moral winners, but merely
winning the sympathy vote simply isn’t good enough. We’re not Scottish.
Regel 5) Physical humour is best.
Vorsprung durch slapstick. An old codger falling over or getting a cake
in the face is always funny. Even during a famine.
Regel 6) Stand-up comedy is pointless.
The best-case scenario is leaving the stage after plenty of hard work
to the same level of applause to which you were initially brought on to the
stage. Excitement can only be lost. What a waste of time.
Aren’t all these regeln refreshingly common sense? Definitely a lot
more than that mantra of British wit: ‘laughing about everything indicates a
great sense of humour’. It doesn’t. It indicates mental illness. Hence, be sane
and join Herr Kuhnle and my laughter revolution. You will visit us or we will
visit you. Auf Wiedersehen!
This brief tour of Baden-Württemberg has been a delight,
even though in seven hundred kilometres I haven’t heard a single joke. Apparently the rest of Germany
characterises the Swabians as hard-working,
frugal and rather boring. Maybe, but
I have also found them to be kind and hospitable. There may not have been a great deal of
laughter, but there was plenty of smiling, warmth and welcome.
In fact, I almost felt that our hosts were
sorry for us, in a small way, and that takes me back to Dinner for One. I suspect that the real reason the Germans
love this particular curiosity is that the joke is on us. We now sit alone at our table with places set
for absent guests. The procedure in all
its pomp is the same as it ever was, but no one else is present. I can just see a white haired, stork-like Theresa May sitting at the head of her table, toasting in turn the empty places of Angela Merkel, Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and François Hollande while David Davis, in white tie and tails, trips over the tiger-skin rug and spills the lemonade. You've just got to laugh....
In our imaginations all will always be the same; but from the outside looking in, it is a very comic, though somewhat sad, spectacle. The Germans have a very good sense of humour, but the laugh is on us…..
In our imaginations all will always be the same; but from the outside looking in, it is a very comic, though somewhat sad, spectacle. The Germans have a very good sense of humour, but the laugh is on us…..
To twist Bertolt Brecht’s
epigraph to his poem Deutschland:
Mögen Andere von ihrer Schande sprechen,
Ich spreche von der meinen
Let others speak of her shame
I speak of my own.
Or, to put it another way:
Up until now, everything has
been satisfactory
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