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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Germany’s humour crisis

Roger Boyes, the Berlin correspondent for the British newspaper The Times, laments the lack of laughs on German television.

Published: 6 April 2010 14:48 CEST
Germany’s humour crisis
Photo: DPA

I don’t watch much TV – I’m apparently too young for shows made by Germany’s public broadcasters and too old for what the country’s private channels produce.

But I’ve always been able to stay awake for Günther Jauch’s millionaire quiz show, if only because I have fantasies of becoming a telephone joker helping someone get rich. I see myself with a wide grin like Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker in Batman movie, sitting in an internet café surrounded by young helpers, their fingers poised on Google, ready to generate the perfect answer that makes Günther Jauch’s production company €1 million poorer.

So, of course, I watch the programme, my social life being particularly barren on Mondays, to train myself for the day that someone wants me to be a joker.

Recently, however, something odd happened on the show. Jauch made a risqué joke. Not the usual schoolboy humour that makes the studio audience giggle – he was particularly effective a couple of weeks ago with an observation about cleaning up cats vomit in a shared apartment. In the chair was a bright and hairy eastern German. He was doing well and if he had me as a joker we could have reached at least €125,000, splitting it after the show.

Jauch, making the compulsory small talk, asked the man from Thuringia how he intended to spend his winnings. “On a new parachute,” he said and it emerged that he liked to drop out of aeroplanes. A good parachute apparently costs around €5,000.

Then came the joke from Jauch: “Not a Möllemann model?”

At least that’s what I think I heard. There was a ripple of uneasy, buttock-shifting laughter from the studio audience. Even Jauch seemed to be chewing his bottom lip, worried whether he had gone too far. Well, I think he did. It wasn’t funny. It was grossly offensive to the family of Jürgen Möllemann, the Free Democratic Party politician who jumped to his death in 2003, but also to anyone who has lost a relative in a violent fashion.

Now, on the whole, I’m in favour of breaking taboos and stretching the boundaries of humour. That’s maybe because I am English and we are notoriously fuzzy about what constitutes good taste. I even thought German talk show host Harald Schmidt dressed up as Hitler was funny – he was not mocking Holocaust victims but rather the film “Downfall” and our odd enduring fascination with the Führer.

But Harald Schmidt is late-night television; Jauch is family viewing. And he crucially failed the amusement test. Many of the audience probably could not even remember who Möllemann was, what he stood for and who hated him. If you make an offensive gag, it has to serve a purpose.

The fact is: something is going wrong with German TV humour. It is, of course, a universal phenomenon that a very small number of executives exercise too much power in television. Their cautious standards and uncertain taste has a bad influence on commissioning. They are not risk-takers.

Germans love to laugh, their language makes for really inventive wordplay, but they are badly served by television comedy managers. There is a significant gap between the wit that you can now hear around an urban German dinner table (really!) and the lame, inappropriate jokes served up on TV, both public and private.

When numbskulled entertainment managers fail the cause of comedy in Britain, it usually enriches the stand-up comedy scene. In the back rooms of pubs across the country you can hear sharp, anecdotal humour. This has not happened in Germany. Instead you get Mario Barth renting out Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and making even more lame Man-Woman jokes than he cracks on television. You get comedians like Dieter Nuhr writing books in an attempt to be taken seriously – and thus sacrificing the essence of his humour, his precise timing. You get Stefan Raab losing concentration before he can bring his jokes to a successful conclusion. The proud Teutonic tradition of Cabaret, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung argued the other day, has also lost its fizz.

It does not look good. That is the hidden message of Günther Jauch’s strange faux pas about a dead, mostly forgotten politician: Germany’s largely laughable TV is suffering a humour crisis.

Sadly, there’s no punch line for this one.

For more Roger Boyes, check out his website here.

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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Le Havre rules: How to talk about French towns beginning with Le, La or Les

If you're into car racing, French politics or visits to seaside resorts you are likely at some point to need to talk about French towns with a 'Le' in the title. But how you talk about these places involves a slightly unexpected French grammar rule. Here's how it works.

Published: 30 November 2021 13:04 CET
Updated: 4 December 2021 17:47 CET
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre.
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre. It can be difficult to know what prepositions to use for places like this - so we have explained it for you. (Photo by AFP)

If you’re listening to French chat about any of those topics, at some point you’re likely to hear the names of Mans, Havre and Touquet bandied about.

And this is because French towns that have a ‘Le’ ‘La’ or ‘Les’ in the title lose them when you begin constructing sentences. 

As a general rule, French town, commune and city names do not carry a gender. 

So if you wanted to describe Paris as beautiful, you could write: Paris est belle or Paris est beau. It doesn’t matter what adjectival agreement you use. 

For most towns and cities, you would use à to evoke movement to the place or explain that you are already there, and de to explain that you come from/are coming from that location:

Je vais à Marseille – I am going to Marseille

Je suis à Marseille – I am in Marseille 

Je viens de Marseille – I come from Marseille 

But a select few settlements in France do carry a ‘Le’, a ‘La’ or a ‘Les’ as part of their name. 

In this case the preposition disappears when you begin formulating most sentences, and you structure the sentence as you would any other phrase with a ‘le’, ‘la’ or ‘les’ in it.

Masculine

Le is the most common preposition for two names (probably something to do with the patriarchy) with Le Havre, La Mans, Le Touquet and the town of Le Tampon on the French overseas territory of La Réunion (more on that later)

A good example of this is Le Havre, a city in northern France where former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who is tipped to one day run for the French presidency, serves as mayor. 

Edouard Philippe’s twitter profile describes him as the ‘Maire du Havre’, using a masculine preposition

Here we can see that his location is Le Havre, and his Twitter handle is Philippe_LH (for Le Havre) but when he comes to describe his job the Le disappears.

Because Le Havre is masculine, he describes himself as the Maire du Havre rather than the Maire de Havre (Anne Hidalgo, for example would describe herself as the Maire de Paris). 

For place names with ‘Le’ in front of them, you should use prepositions like this:

Ja vais au Touquet – I am going to Le Touquet

Je suis au Touquet – I am in Le Touquet 

Je viens du Touquet – I am from Le Touquet 

Je parle du Touquet – I am talking about Le Touquet

Le Traité du Touquet – the Le Touquet Treaty

Feminine

Some towns carry ‘La’ as part of their name. La Rochelle, the scenic town on the west coast of France known for its great seafood and rugby team, is one such example.

In French ‘à la‘ or ‘de la‘ is allowed, while ‘à le‘ becomes au and ‘de le’ becomes du. So for ‘feminine’ towns such as this, you should use the following prepositions:

Je vais à La Rochelle – I am going to La Rochelle

Je viens de La Rochelle – I am coming from La Rochelle 

Plural

And some places have ‘Les’ in front of their name, like Les Lilas, a commune in the suburbs of Paris. The name of this commune literally translates as ‘The Lilacs’ and was made famous by Serge Gainsbourg’s song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas, about a ticket puncher at the Metro station there. 

When talking about a place with ‘Les’ as part of the name, you must use a plural preposition like so:

Je suis le poinçonneur des Lilas – I am the ticket puncher of Lilas 

Je vais aux Lilas – I am going to Les Lilas

Il est né aux Lilas – He was born in Les Lilas  

Islands 

Islands follow more complicated rules. 

If you are talking about going to one island in particular, you would use à or en. This has nothing to do with gender and is entirely randomised. For example:

Je vais à La Réunion – I am going to La Réunion 

Je vais en Corse – I am going to Corsica 

Generally speaking, when talking about one of the en islands, you would use the following structure to suggest movement from the place: 

Je viens de Corse – I am coming from Corsica 

For the à Islands, you would say:

Je viens de La Réunion – I am coming from La Réunion 

When talking about territories composed of multiple islands, you should use aux.

Je vais aux Maldives – I am going to the Maldives. 

No preposition needed 

There are some phrases in French which don’t require any a preposition at all. This doesn’t change when dealing with ‘Le’ places, such as Le Mans – which is famous for its car-racing track and Motorcycle Grand Prix. Phrases that don’t need a preposition include: 

Je visite Le Mans – I am visiting Le Mans

J’aime Le Mans – I like Le Mans

But for a preposition phrase, the town becomes simply Mans, as in Je vais au Mans.

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