The secret of Loriot's genius was his focus on physical, as well as verbal, comedy – but the English just don't get it
Over the last few days, I have spent a lot of time trying to convince friends and colleagues of the rare genius of Loriot, the German comedian who died on Monday. Let's just say I've struggled.
One reason for this, of course, is that English people can be supremely arrogant about their own sense of humour: a feeling of national entitlement comparable to the pre-1953 smugness of English footballers. The Pavlovian response ("German comedy, is it?") I've met again and again this week would just be a tad more credible if it was followed by an appreciation of any non-English form of comedy whatsoever: "Belgian stand-up: now we're talking." Empirically speaking, English people are among the least qualified in the world to pass judgment on comedy in other languages.
Another reason might be that it's just hard to come up with the right comparison. Some obituarists have called Loriot a satirist, but I don't think that's quite right: there's some mild social criticism in sketches like Christmas Eve with the Hoppenstedts, but in the main the tone is apolitical, and simply not acerbic enough to count as satire. The Guardian's Berlin correspondent Helen Pidd likens Loriot to Stephen Fry, which I think comes much closer, because like Fry, Loriot aka Bernhard Victor Christoph Carl von Bülow exhibited a rare brand of poshness that triggered warmth and affection rather than calls to mount the barricades.
Like Fry, Loriot was an admirer of his native language, a stickler for grammar and a collector of rare coinages. Unlike Fry, he never indulged in his own verbal dexterity, but exposed its absurd stiltedness. No sketch does a better job of this than the one with two naked gentlemen in a bathtub, whose physical intimacy is at odds with the bureacratic formality of their language ("Herr Doktor Klöbner!" "Herr Müller-Lüdenscheidt!").
The problem is: you need to speak German in order to get all that. You can only spend so much time trying to explain why the line "jetzt wissen sie, dass sie in einer Fremdwanne sitzen, und baden trotzdem weiter" is funnier than its translation ("Now you know you're sitting in the wrong bath and persist in bathing away"). You either speak the language and get its nuances, or you don't. Comedy doesn't translate.
Or maybe it does. In the end I found one clip which managed to elicit some involuntary chuckles. I'll defy anyone not to see a spark of true comedy greatness in this clip of a man getting his trousers caught while climbing over a seat in the middle of a classical concerts. Or this one, of people on an airplane drowning in plastic packaging while reciting Rilke. Or this one-act masterpiece without words.
The real secret of Loriot's success was that he was just as particular about physical comedy as he was about his choice of words: anecdote has it that he made his co-star Evelyn Hamann step into a pile of dogshit 34 times before deciding she had got the timing right. He was part of a generation of European comedians who still mastered the comedy esperanto of funny walks, awkward grimaces and collapsing chairs: Charlie Chaplin, Karl Valentin, the Pythons, Luis de Funes, Christian Clavier, Jacques Tati and Totò. These were comedians whose acts translated across language barriers.
These days, particularly in Britain, slapstick is a dirty word, a sign of comedic backwardness. Who still dares to laugh at Mr Bean or Benny Hill? There are honourable exceptions, like Lee Evans, but generally comedians have given up on physical comedy and handed the stage to the masters of CGI (personally, I blame the rise of stand-up and the all-pervading presence of panel shows).
Perhaps it is fitting that Loriot, who was born in the brief interval between the two world wars and rose to fame at the height of European integration, has died in the year in which the European project finds itself in deep crisis. He reminds us that in a decade when we were convinced that we were becoming more European, more cosmopolitan, more globalised, we actually became more insular. Only politics and business, the serious stuff, happens at global level, while we laugh in our own national leagues.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/25/loriot-jokes-language-barrier
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