What’s actually going on with German humor? Well, it was never competitive on the international market. But over the years we had grown to love him. Every now and then he was able to brighten up our gloomy everyday life a little between dusty office plants and slow-flowing after-work traffic jams – still better than root canal treatment or tax returns. But recently our humorists have been taking a threatening turn. And this year everything suddenly got completely out of hand.
Monika Gruber for example. Until now, she had always been content with her existence as a humor expert who reliably joked to herself. But last June she suddenly thirsted for more. She left the stuffy cabaret stages behind and conquered the market square. She gave a speech at a demonstration against Robert Habeck’s heating law, which she had previously promoted intensively on Facebook.
Bavarian cabaret artist organizes anti-heating law demo: sounds like a humorous idea from Gerhard Polt. But Gruber was completely serious about her absurd event. She positioned herself next to a protest sign that said “Stop the heating ideology” and shouted uncontrollably at the crowd: “The majority don’t want an electric car, the majority don’t want to change their gender, they don’t want to be told that they only have ten grams of meat allowed to eat per day.” It was her farewell to ambiguous cabaret. She had arrived on the side of strident populism.
It was the same demo at which Hubert Aiwanger launched his infamous attack on the Berlin elites. “We want to bring back our democracy,” shouted the Bavarian Deputy Prime Minister. The cabaret artist had degenerated into the stirrup holder of a right-wing populist agitator. Shortly afterwards, her colleagues Bruno Jonas and Helmut Schleich supported her in an interview. The trio’s conclusion: There is something like the dictatorship of a left-wing uniform caste in politics. A bold statement given the AfD’s recent successes.
It’s not just in the problem state of Bavaria that many comedians are drifting further and further to the right.
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