US media have savaged Til Schweiger’s “honey in the head”Remake. Now, Head Full of Honey, “” into German cinema. Why German comedies only to find Germans funny? American studies Professor Christof Decker called reasons.
Seven million spectators flocked to Germany in Til Schweiger’s Comedy “honey in the head”. Reason enough for the producers and Director to turn in his former home of choice for a Remake: “Head Full of Honey,” filled with Nick Nolte, Matt Dillon, and Emily Mortimer. The “New York Times” wrote of a “bizarre plot” and called the Film “disastrous”, the British “Observer” saw the “fiasco” of a “misguided Director”.
DW: Mr Decker, “honey in the head” is running in Germany very successfully, the Remake has been discussed in the United States and England crushing. The humor of understanding in Germany is different than in the Rest of the world?
Christof Decker: Yes, at least it has other lines of tradition than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. I teach a course that deals with weird shapes. We started with the silent film era: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy. Since there is a permanent dialogue with the audience knows something the character does not know. Something Funny is often the result. The silent film Comedy was hosted in the US on a global market and always with the question: Who is the audience, to whom the production is aimed? It was always about to push the Gag to the top, that is, to maximum comic effect.
Christof Decker, a Professor at the LMU Munich
This alignment with German Comedy is more difficult?
Since the times of talkies, this is a language problem. The question is not so much if the German humour is exportable, but: the German Comedy in one Form, the connector is compatible with what would be expected for a different audience?
The cliché about German States, they were grim and had no sense of humour.
I don’t think that this idea, which is referred to in culture studies as an essentialism and a quasi-congenital Defect would be true. People in Germany have a sense of humour. In Film and television is more likely to a professional environment that drives people to be really innovative, go one step further and not be satisfied with the more or less successful.
Because, you know, what works and is sufficient, in order to reach a specific audience and a specific audience?
Yes, this further professionalism not only possible, of course, if you talk to only the well-known audience, but makes The will be a much larger audience and understood by him of interest. This connection capability for a heterogeneous and diverse imaginary audience is missing very frequently in the German context.
Unrestrained self to Stand: up Comedian and actress Amy Schumer
Why does it work differently, why are we watching American comedies that consist of pure Slapstick?
To the functioning of Comedy with a perfect Timing, but also a certain lightness. Slapstick is hard work, but she looks and in the best case effortlessly. German Comedy act, however, often cumbersome and trying. Even in actually very formulaic-scale US-formats, such as the Romantic Comedy, one finds a abandon of the characters themselves: about the comedian Amy Schumer, the breaking classic genre. Also, the discovery of the ages as the source of a morbid, but amusing, Comedy is the American System with the Netflix Sitcom “Grace & Frankie”.
Stereotypes are the biggest Problem in the German Comedy?
May not. Any Comedy works with stereotyped characters and these are always associated with sharpness. German comedies, it lacks in dealing with stereo types, but to a certain degree of radicalism and ruthlessness. Stereotypes are for the Aesthetics of the Comedy is a Central Element. The question is: How far can you go with this presentation? And since the Anglo-American forms of Comedy are due to your extension of logic is often much more radical. They also go rather over boundaries. The motto for the Gag pen by Stan Laurel was: “Can you top this?”
The Original: Dieter Hallervorden as Amandus Rosenbach in Til Schweiger’s box-office success of “honey in the head”
The historical reasons for this?
Yes, the Comic is also a mode to negotiate cultural conflicts. In the German Comedy there is, in principle, always an inhibition to hurt someone. In the US the century is a audience out of turn, which could not be as uniform thought to have formed in the popular culture. It was always marginal groups. In a sense, the American public has been under – represented in the early days of mass and popular culture, is practically in small forms global: a different religious, cultural and ethnic origin. A famous short film of Chaplin is aptly called “The Immigrant”. These groups, it was in any way involved.
And all have in common the exclusion was the experience?
In some ways, Yes. In America there is a very different cultural drive spring, which arises from the very heterogeneous and dynamic society. The Jewish or African-American Comedy comes from a historical Position of the discrimination, for example, from a long history of slavery. The stereotypes need to be radical, because Comedy for minorities is frequently the only means to fight back. She often refers to not only the “enemy” of the majority society, but also on the own group, with your inferiority complexes will be the target of Comedy.
The German Film is designed for a homogeneous audience?
The implicit addressee is often a white, homogeneous middle class, which wants to see their life style, the Comedy, and the Oblique, intellectuals, non-conformists condemning. As a result, many areas of Comedy remain unused, and a global audience is not reached. When I think of the Situation with other areas of culture, comparisons, to me the only folk music – a Genre that only works in the German-speaking region and not exported, because the people to understand somewhere else, what could be appealing.
Translated to the Remake of “honey in the head” means to say, instead of condescending, this Film was too sophisticated for the US audience, it should say Vice-versa: We Germans are too undemanding in what we see in the cinema.
For a Comedy, it is, in fact, since the expectation seems to be relatively low. I see here a real Dilemma of the German cinema: The Comedy is far and away the most successful Genre that was produced in the last years, in Germany, about the “Fack Ju Göhte”series. At the same time, the German film Comedy seems to be only so successful, maintaining its provincial character and just not cosmopolitan. The Film “Welcome to the hard man”, one of the financially most successful recent comedies, illustrates a fundamental problem of the German film Comedy: it does not come without the tendency to associate the Comic with moral views or dogmas, to confirm at the end of the Status Quo from the perspective of the majority society, and not just from the margins.
Loriot and Evelyn Hamann make nonsense in “Pappa ante Portas”
You not a positive example for a German Comedy?
A positive counter-example – and certainly not the only one – is Loriot, who was in the staging of a perfectionist and precise Timing has been respected. He has also of Monty Python inspiration in that he wanted to be nonsense cultivated, and its Comedy not a simple moral formula to reduce. In addition, he had a strong penchant for physical Comedy, and he has addressed his audience as intelligent. Interestingly, he was able to develop his broadcasting format in the television and in the later films transferred.
The joke, the moral formula robs so that the raised index finger?
This is, without a doubt, a fundamental problem of the German Comedy, which can be to keep track of until the early decades of sound film, the UFA films back in the 1950s, was continued. It was not exportable, but the only successful Tradition in Germany.
The reason for this lies in the history: the longing for a good mood and healers of the world after the war?
After the war, the situation for humour, was certainly aimed at innovation. But if we follow the film historian Thomas brandlmeier, we must be for a Declaration to the 18th century. Dating back to the rise of bourgeois society. He speaks of a German Sonderweg of humor, various stage traditions were to have a moral function is sworn in. For the Comedy, the dominance of the word joke and the expulsion of the grotesque-Harlekinesken of the stage was now connected. In its place the Complacent and the Ordinary occurred. In the United States, however, a democratic culture has developed to this stage, was for the Comedy, both entertaining and sharp weapon in the ubiquitous struggle for recognition and rights. Both lines of tradition to act.
Christof Decker is American studies Professor with a research focus on Film and Cultural Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.
The interview was conducted by Torsten Landsberg.