ZDFzeit Loriot, Otto & Co - 60 Years of TV Comedy
From Loriot to Otto. From Heinz Erhardt to Hazel Brugger. From Dieter Hallervorden to Cindy aus Marzahn: an amusing journey through time shows who + what we Germans find funny.
The film offers highlights from six decades of German TV comedy. Oliver Welke, Ilka Bessin, Hugo Egon Balder, Abdelkarim, Wolfgang Lippert and Hazel Brugger have their say. Humor researchers analyze and provide insights into the history of laughter in Germany.
The documentary reveals how humor has changed, how women conquered comedy, when it's okay to make jokes about migrants, who we laugh at the most - and what that reveals about us.
Some artists have acquired cult status, many sketches are legendary. For example, when Loriot asks the housewife played by Evelyn Hamann about her "yodeling diploma," or unsuspectingly lets a noodle wander across his face while awkwardly flirting. "He has already held up a mirror to us," says Thomas Hermanns, inventor of the Quatsch Comedy Club, "especially to the post-war generation in the economic miracle and its club system. It hurts, but that's just the way we were." Loriot is therefore considered a master of his craft. "Classics are not timeless. Rather, they have hit the nerve of their time most clearly."
There were also cult-status jokers on GDR television: Helga Hahnemann shaped the humor landscape of the East for many years. Her stage was above all the successful show "Ein Kessel Buntes". In the West, Otto Waalkes and Didi Hallervorden cheekily mocked their way into viewers' hearts. Everyone was made fun of, authority or not.
With the rise of private television, comedy was given an ever larger stage from the 1990s onward. And more and more funny women: Maren Kroymann is the first to have her own satirical show on German television. Anke Engelke makes her breakthrough with her parodies. Ilka Bessin fascinates as the chavvy, honest Cindy from Marzahn: "I just looked terrible," says the artist from the East, "I came out and people were shocked at first."
Since the 2000s, the topic of migration has also been made fun of - artists like Kaya Yanar, Bülent Ceylan and Abdelkarim mercilessly skewer cultural prejudices + even earn laughs when they joke about terrorism: "Looking at the crises we have in a funny perspective always gives us breathing room," says humor researcher Eva Ullmann. This is also true when satirical shows like the "heute-show" take aim at high politics. German TV comedy was + is diverse and not only shaped by the zeitgeist, but also always a matter of taste.
Broadcasting on 28th of March 2023 at 08.15pm on ZDF
Music: POPVIRUS Library