German Comedy, Part II: How Germans View Their Own Humor

In the previous issue of JPCS, I examined how English-language scholarship on German humor has typically stressed the social and political elements of films and the corporate-governmental film industry production process. The preoccupation with the Ufa studio is just one way American scholars have perpetuated the notion that German visual arts were geared solely toward propaganda. I wanted to foreground the role ethnic prejudice has played in limiting scholarly inquiry into a neglected area. This second installment incorporates firsthand observations and interviews with native Germans to demonstrate what Germans have to say on the matter of their national character and supposed lack of humor. Before leaving for Berlin and Munich my central intellectual concern was to find how the American tendency to refuse Germans any capacity for humor influenced German self-perception. The secondary problem was how that which American popular culture associates with German identity—order, bureaucracy, anality—actually played out in Germany. In June of 1998, I left for Berlin and Munich. My field work began on the plane as I read the popular brand of Let's Go travel books, which observed, “There are, to be sure, certain German traits—industriousness, efficiency, and a mystifying refusal to cross the street against the light—but the generation of Germans who came of age after the war defy the negative stereotype of the humorless, heel-clicking German authoritarian” (59). I could not help but think of Freud's story of the borrowed kettle. Upon returning the pot to its owner, the neighbor is told there is a dent in the pot. The neighbor replies, “I didn't dent the pot,” adds, “The pot was already dented when I borrowed it,” and leaves saying, “I didn't borrow the pot anyway.” Similarly, multiple layers of denial permeate our understanding of German comedy. In our case, we might say, “Americans don't find German films to be funny, and so, at least to Americans, there are no German com