The myth that Germans don't have a sense of humour is dying out. And rightly so.
When we lived in Berlin, a few hundred yards to the east of where the Wall used to run, the girl across the landing was called Nancy. Why, we asked her family, had they given her such an unGerman name? They said that when she was born, Ronald Reagan was President, and they decided to name their daughter in honour of his wife, Nancy.
Here is a German joke. East Berlin was full of that kind of irreverence. The regime’s pretensions were so ludicrous that it was difficult not to make jokes about it, and indeed about its various predecessors. And yet, at least among older Britons, the belief persists that the Germans have no sense of humour. These stereotypes take a long time to die, but at last a generation is born which knows nothing of them. When I mentioned to two 19-year-old Londoners that I was writing an article about the German sense of humour, they replied: “Ah yes, Henning Wehn.”
Because I watch almost no television, I had never heard of Henning Wehn. He moved from the Ruhr to the United Kingdom in 2002 to work in the marketing department at Wycombe Wanderers, and later related in a piece for Time Out :
I initially planned to stay in the UK for only 12 months to improve my English, but the good weather, the tasty food and the classy women made me stay. In order to blend in with the locals, I decided to get extremely lazy, spend money I don’t have and, most importantly, to unjustifiably bang on about my great sense of humour.
He became a stand-up comedian, styling himself the German Comedy Ambassador, and is very good on the British propensity to congratulate ourselves on our great sense of humour.
Not all Germans have a great sense of humour: far from it. But since not all Britons have a great sense of humour either, that observation does not get us very far. Angela Merkel is more ready than Theresa May to take a wry amusement in telling the men around her absolutely nothing. In 2005, a couple of weeks before she became Chancellor, I watched her on the campaign trail and noted:
“When Mrs Merkel smiles she is irresistibly reminiscent of Alec Guinness playing George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy . Mrs Merkel’s smile says, as did Guinness’s: ‘I know I don’t look the part in this high-profile role. I strike you as chubby and self-effacing, the reverse of glamorous.’
“But study the smile more carefully and you find yourself invited to share a different kind of joke: that this person who seems so ineffectual is actually the bravest, toughest, most intelligent character in the entire show.”
The career of Merkel, a Lutheran clergyman’s daughter from the Uckermark, north of Berlin, can be read as an extended joke against the Roman Catholic men from the Rhineland who assumed they would always control the Christian Democratic Union, and who to this day have no idea what she is thinking. For Helmut Kohl, Merkel was “my girl”, his token woman and Easterner. But when a corner of the carpet which hid so many of his dubious transactions was lifted, and it became the right moment to break with him, she was the only person with the guts and detachment to do so.
Perhaps that does not count, in English terms, as a joke, though to those of us who regarded Kohl as a disgrace it seemed amusing. But part of the charm of the German sense of humour is that although it overlaps with the British sense of humour, it is by no means identical to it. I fear we may quite often fail to recognise when the Germans are speaking or writing for comic effect. And there is a kind of self-important official German who, perplexed by some serious but unfamiliar thought expressed by a British visitor, assumes it must be a joke and sweeps it aside with the words “englischer Humor!” Monty Python enjoyed a huge success in Germany.
During my years in the late 1990s as the Telegraph ’s correspondent in Berlin, I neither proposed nor was asked to write about the German sense of humour, and now that I belatedly make the attempt, I realise it is not an enjoyable subject. There is a lot of wonderfully witty German writing, but a disproportionate amount of it is by German writers of Jewish descent: one thinks of Heinrich Heine, Karl Kraus, Kurt Tucholsky, a host of others. Tucholsky remarked in 1932 that satire had a lower border: one couldn’t shoot as low as the fascists. The Nazis hated him and burned his books.
Billy Wilder, born into an Austrian Jewish family in 1906 in Sucha, in Galicia, and brought up mainly in Vienna, came in 1926 to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist and screenwriter. In an early piece he wrote about being obliged when down on his luck to take work as a paid dancing partner in a hotel. His perfect lightness of touch, sense of the absurd, ear for dialogue and instinct for satisfying brevity are already apparent. Wilder left Berlin immediately after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and emigrated via Paris to the United States. Some Like It Hot is a flowering of the German sense of humour.
