Talk:German humour

This article is too short
I think this article needs to be expanded, how do you add that tag again?

88.196.9.53 (talk) 19:47, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

socialism, public tv
It could be included that Schramm, Pispers, Rether are all part of the extreme left. The left parties control the public media and have set up this kind of "fake socialist opposition" in order to ensure their own political hegemony. It is hard to explain, but should be added, since it is one of the reasons, why many Germans are still obsessed with communist or environmental movements — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.121.53.209 (talk) 01:24, 18 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah right, all Germans are communists. So much for neutrality! --89.204.139.238 (talk) 13:35, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The Extreme Left in Germany has little to do with propaganda and supposed media bias and comedians like Pispers and Rether. The extreme left parties and groups in Germany are actually not something you fear in public media, it's people who have controlled an entire German state by force for decades. And they had other ways to make you laugh than Kabarett in the political-correct state-owned channels. -- 92.231.45.160 (talk) 23:21, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Hahaha, and here you thought we germans have no humor whatsoever... :)) 212.23.103.107 (talk) 05:00, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

While it's correct to say that Schramm, Pispers and Rether are left-wing, it's important to state that the public TV and radio channels in Germany are not directly controlled by the German government (there is an article which details this). The current German government consists of the conservative CDU and the social-democratic SPD, both of which have nothing to gain from supporting left-wing comedians like Volker Pispers. Instead, the appearance of those comedians is a good example how independent German broadcasting is. It should be noted here that the new right-wing party AfD and their supporters often come up with conspiracy theories, most of which consist of how the German state and their institutions are subverted by communists. The original comment in this section speaks along these lines. 87.140.193.0 (talk) 19:25, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

British stereotyping
"Because having a good sense of humour is an essential part of the British..." Can you cite any reputable sources to support your claim that the British have a good sense of humour? If not, this section must be removed! --89.204.139.238 (talk) 13:45, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It is at any rate an essential part of the stereotype about Englishmen among Germans. As nothing can be brought against friendly stereotypes (excepting maybe proofs of falsehood), I think this ought to stay on the article. 93.134.250.164 (talk) 01:07, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * It is, at any rate, certainly a stereotype British people believe about themselves. Especially in contrast with Germans (another stereotype).


 * Nuttyskin (talk) 09:35, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Why the Guardian Article/Lee Stewart?
Why is the Guardian article referenced four times in the beginning? Lee Stewart might be a comedian, but he lacks any objective credibility to be referenced. The article is a subjective reflection on his visit to Germany, during the localization process of one of his shows. In which context does this qualify him to... anything?

it is a widespread stereotype outside the country that Germans have little understanding (or a distorted understanding) of humorous situations This statement is certainly true, but more or better sources are needed.

English-language jokes do not translate well because German grammar is less flexible.

He is neither a linguist nor a native speaker. How many years has he spent in Germany? He even admits that his humour is driven heavily by language/word play. Translating word play from language x to language y is difficult? Thats news? There are many many books on this topic.

It does not always allow for a sentence to be reordered so as to delay the punchline, one of the most common joke formats for English speakers. Same as before. Additionally:

- "one of the most common joke format" (vague, without source) - "does not _always_" (vague, highly generic as in "People do not always like Star Wars"... this has no information gain at all.)

New entities are named by creating compounds, sometimes resulting in extremely long words.

Again: Lee Stewart is not a linguist. Why reference him? Referencing him is just his POV and thus as good as yours and mine.

This means that fewer words have multiple meanings, so there are fewer opportunities to create puns.

This is just him being ignorant. (and thats why it is important to check the sources for credibility!) Just two examples out of my head:

'Schicht' can be translated as: shift, layer, coating, tier, seam, deposit, lamination, social class, ...

'Läufer' has 24 meanings: armature, rug, runner, bishop, carpet, halfback, ..., ..., ... (try it out: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4ufer ) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.93.78.76 (talk) 11:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I would even go so far as to completely delete the paragraph "language" and rework it from scratch. Stewart Lee's half-baked theories about language and humour in Germany lack every linguistic evidence whatsoever, yet have become almost viral in internet discussions about German humour. There are all too many discussions on the internet that unreflectedly reference Lee's article. As this alone gives the article some significance, I added Liebermans criticism on Lee but did not dare deleting the whole paragraph. But taking into consideration that Lee's article is that of a lingusitic layman and was heavily criticized the day after its publication already, it has no place in a serious discussion of the role of language in German humour. The man is a comedian who very briefly got a glimpse at the German language and that glimpse he got from the biased point of view of a native speaker of another language who doesn't even speak ANY German at all. Of course he doesn't know an awfull lot about the possibilities that German offers to its more eloquent speakers and therefore he just isn't a reliable source of information.

--79.232.80.153 (talk) 12:45, 25 May 2012 (UTC)


 * This paragraph is just wrong, it doesn't carry a single piece of meaningful information. I recently came across a discussion about German humor too and that paragraph was one of the first arguments risen. Which is funny, as a little while ago the argument would have been the exact opposite - German humor being too reliant on wordplays as to anyone not speaking the language could possibly comprehend the puns. I personally believe the latter is true, then again, I don't have any sources to back that up. Neither does Lee Steward though, it's his personal opinion. The Guardian article only talks about how English humor translates into German, quote "The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on ...". Well duh! And I've seen German comedians translating their programs into English, some of which *very* heavily relied on wordplays, like Christian Kokols "Beim Bäcker". Almost all puns got lost in translation, it's a universal problem. The gems of German humor are based on wordplays though, leading in part to the impression of a lack of humor in the first place. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.17.252.249 (talk) 12:12, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Unmitigated disaster
Wikipedia is missing an unmitigated disaster tag for "articles" like this one. --87.79.176.62 (talk) 15:29, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. I was about to start editing the article, as it is an area I claim to know a lot about, but then decided it was probably a waste of time.--Northtowner (talk) 10:19, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Merger proposal

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a

Merge Proposal and / or Redirect. Please do not modify it. The result of the request for the Proposed Merger of East Germany jokes into this talk page's article was: Not Done—No Consensus to Merge''. —    —     —     —     —

Proposal: Merge East Germany jokes to German humour

The page East Germany jokes was nominated for deletion three times, but consensus has been to keep the article. The article consisted largely of a list of jokes, until I removed them two days ago. Without the list of jokes, in consists of about six sentences and no cited sources. (Two of the four books listed as "Further reading" are, as far as I can tell, joke collections, and a third is a scholarly piece on education, not humour, in DDR. That leaves one potentially good source, but it is not available in any library near where I live.) The shortened content might easily be contained as a section of German humour. Cnilep (talk) 01:11, 13 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose If consensus is to keep the article, your blanking nearly its entire content and redirecting the page is a very poorly-disguised attempt to circumvent that consensus. Ditto with the repeated re-nominations.  Don't do this.  Abide by consensus, which is keep. 2001:5C0:1000:A:0:0:0:2037 (talk) 23:53, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment copied from Proposed mergers
 * East Germany jokes to German humour. See discussion at Talk:German humour. Cnilep (talk) 01:15, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a no-brainer. Proposer should proceed with the merge.  GenQuest  "Talk to Me" 20:47, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Cnilep (talk) 00:57, 15 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Support merger and removing of unreferenced, unencyclopedic list content. A few notable examples of jokes should be fine, only if they are put into context within the general topic and are actually discussed in reliable sources. The previous PROD did not encourage a trivial list of jokes, but only the general notability of the topic as encyclopedic article. GermanJoe (talk) 12:11, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The article may not be well written yet, but East German humour (a better title) is part of East German culture and should be kept distinct. Looking at the sources, a well-written article would be much longer. German humour is already a long article in itself and if we combine them we should logically also merge in other regional German humour articles and the whole thing would become quite unwieldy and amorphous. --Bermicourt (talk) 08:40, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose. East Germany had a completely different culture, political system, ideology, economic structure, etc. etc. etc. And this difference is reflected in that article. The proposal is like "Let's merge North Korean Culture and South Korean Culture, cause both emerged from Korea. I deleted everything from one article so you see that there is no difference. YOLO.", which is a stupid approach. --RicardAnufriev (talk) 03:54, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

— —  —  —  —  The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a WP:PM. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. GenQuest "Talk to Me" 22:36, 28 October 2013 (UTC) A copy of this template can be found here.

British Stereotyping
How about we delete this section?

Just look at the survey. It's from a random dating site (badoo.com) and has 30.000 people participating in it. Wow... epic...

I assume that the "journalist", who reported it had nothing better to write about at the moment or he was just incredibly stupid if he believed in some significance.

Yes. "30.000 participants" appears to be very much and very representative, but only if one does not compare it to other sites and their sureys. Let's say www.gamefaqs.com "Poll of the day", like this one: http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/5320 (Do you bathe or shower?) It has 40.000 people in its survey, but nobody should derive any information from such a random survey or include this information in an wikipedia article, even if some journalist reported on it. --RicardAnufriev (talk) 19:13, 12 November 2013 (UTC)


 * p.s. Just to show how random surveys can distort the truth: Assume some bored journalist would refer to this survey http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/5293 and wrote "In an international survey with nearly 35 thousand participants more than 55% stated that they already have or plan to acquire Pokemon X and/or Y. Only less than 13% of participants said, that the have not or will not play Pokemon."


 * Yes, we could reference this statement, writing "Pokemon is or has been played by over 87% of people[1], making it the most popular and widespread medium in the history of ever."... but... do you see how stupid this is?
 * --RicardAnufriev (talk) 19:35, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

German article de:Deutscher Humor
It's funny how the Germans don't seem to care too much about their humour so far. ;) Let's create the article de:Deutscher Humor! -- Horst-schlaemma (talk) 11:44, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

That's superfluous. We Germans differ regionally too much, humourwise spoken. Since it (the local culture) is linked too much to our dialects, any merged article would be like the proverbial cleansing of augias' stable. The Northerners like it dry, grim or even as self-deprecating as the brits; the rhinanians effervescent or even silly up to a point of stupifying simplicity, the south-east and the middle-germans appear to be bittered-witty and the rich southeners care for a pseudo-dulled physicality that may only be explained with no real need for uplifting humourous episodes. Don't write a german article, that would undermine our well-prepared stereotype: we have no humour - that way guests will always be nicely suprised. --78.52.35.165 (talk) 04:48, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Original research
This article seems to have an awful lot which is not verifiable to sources but is merely things that people have added themselves. --John (talk) 18:16, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Perfectly true, as is shown by the fact that most of the “references” given are to primary sources. IMHO the article itself is a joke and needs a complete re-write. LiliCharlie (talk) 19:38, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree. Are you up for it? --John (talk) 20:48, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * No, I don’t have the time to bury myself in German humor studies. LiliCharlie (talk) 05:37, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I just removed a prod, but the article does have problems.--Milowent • hasspoken 00:44, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Otto / Heinz Erhardt
Why are Otto Waalkes and Heinz Erhardt not mentioned in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.4.93.248 (talk) 17:11, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

"Schadenfreude" section
This section provides absolutely no references for its claims. There is a Wikipedia page on Schadenfreude, which neither describes it as a type of humour, nor as typically German (the page lists synonyms in various languages, the only link to the German language being that the most commonly used English term is a German loanword). The author's claim that is a particularly German form of humour is rather dubious, as are his or her claims that this stems from Germany's history of Nazism.

Another major point of contention is the example of a "Schadennfreude joke" (whatever that may mean) given in that section: "enters through door, exits through chimney". This "joke" would likely be classed as hatespeech by mainstream German society, as well as the legal system. Providing this as a typical example of a German joke, without providing any further context, is just wrong on multiple levels. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:B07D:7E00:E0E3:4AEE:DD65:4378 (talk) 12:54, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Totally agree. While the whole article shows a certain lack of quality, that particular section was outright wrong and cringeworthy. I'm not even sure whether Schadenfreude deserves an extra section as being a characteristic kind of German humor. 2001:16B8:489B:8A00:3811:64EC:4875:25A (talk) 00:39, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

I agree, that "joke" isn't funny at all, and it does not convey the idea of "Schadenfreude" (I am German). The concept of "Schadenfreude" exists, but not necessarily in all parts of Germany. In the state of NRW, it's definitely there. My best example would be this sketch from Loriot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHE8OT5Bv9w The whole idea of this is how the protagonist tries to get rid of a peel without looking suspicious or weird. 87.140.193.0 (talk) 18:52, 5 March 2020 (UTC)