“Radically funny – the power of satire” – a documentary on Hessian television is devoted to this complex topic. First things first: satire is male-dominated.
The ensemble is the same, the themes are new, the nerves are on edge. I tried the TV again so you don’t have to listen to Florian Schroeder. Quickly bring the good drop (tart Frisian) from the fridge and it continues with the second episode of the three-part short series “Radically Funny – The Power of Satire” on hr television on Thursday, February 10th at 10:30 p.m. I reported on the first episode last week.
It quickly becomes apparent that the verbal contributions this time were apparently not quite sufficient to fill the scheduled half hour with content, which is why long clips of dramatic scenes of street battles, rocket fire, natural disasters, protests and demonstrations as well as flight and expulsion are used to create an appropriate paint a bleak picture of the present. In order to underscore the horror, there is no shying away from including frightening grimaces of big world politics, which have a similar effect to shocking images on cigarette packs. Shahak Shapira skillfully opens fire and states that today comedians are apparently expected to do politics “because the politicians have now all become clowns.”
“Radically funny – the power of satire” (hr): Florian Schroeder spoke at “Querdendenken” Stuttgart
In this episode, more unwanted comic speakers (yes, all men) have their say in the form of particularly markedly insane imbecile artillerymen from the lateral thinking movement. In this context, Florian Schroeder’s great hour came, whose speech will be shown at Quermachen Stuttgart and yes, I too can’t help but pay tribute to this memorable performance. So I can’t avoid quoting Schroeder here, because with the sentence “It has become more serious and the satire reacts to this with much more attitude” he summarizes this highlight of his work appropriately. With the addendum “Sometimes I lack a bit of lightness” he neatly rounds off the whole thing.
To person
Dominic Harapat from Wetzlar is an author, production worker, local politician and Hessian state chairman of the party Die PARTEI. Due to his sleazy rhetoric and juvenile honesty, he is considered the perfect embodiment of the political grandchild trick, especially among older fellow citizens. Just a real professional.
Scattered throughout the episode, the language and goals of the satire become a topic again and again, as well as the different perceptions over the course of time. Accusations of sexism, racism or ableism against current as well as earlier satirical works have increased in recent years. While the former Kançler candidate of Die PARTEI Serdar Somuncu complains that he does not “muzzle” his program and instead wants to continue saying everything, PARTEI chairman and MEP Martin Sonneborn sees a lack of understanding for “improper speech” in society at large as a problem.
“Radically funny – the power of satire” (hr): Harald Schmidt would not go today
Author and Titanic columnist Ella Carina Werner is more understanding when young people no longer want to hear certain jokes. Christina Schlag from Browser Ballet notes that minorities and marginalized groups have now been given a voice and rightly resist being made fun of. “People have become more sensitive,” she notes, “but [we] also have to be careful not to ‘pay attention’ too much.” According to Schlag, satire has the task of provoking and “if I want to elicit reactions, then I have to I sometimes go a little too far.”
The cabaret artist Till Reiners throws in “If you look at such an old Harald Schmidt show, that would no longer work. Absolutely not!” The following is an excerpt from the same show, in which Schmidt and his sidekick Manuel Andrack discuss how to deal with racist terms, repeating them constantly. If that is no longer possible today, then I ask myself what makes “Nuhr im Erste” so different now. Or are there no old man jokes from the regulars’ table level of the Kreppelbach shooting club in this show?
“Radically Funny – The Power of Satire”: Women in satire are in the minority
After a brief detour to Facebook, Twitter, etc., which Shapira summarizes with “Social media is rubbish!”, the documentary finally finds its way to women in satire, starting with the problem of hate comments on the Internet, which are strikingly often made by women have the objective. With Sarah Bosetti, a great author is brought into play at this point, who above all embodies the artistic handling of it. She reports on when and how she is affected by hate comments and how she creates works of art from them, illustrated using the example of a love poem based on hate speech from her book “I have nothing against women, du slut!”.
With humorous interludes on equal rights, the topic of women and satire is brought more into focus in this episode and Bosetti, Schlag and Werner felt that this time they had a little more share in the show, but women are still underrepresented this week and it’s a shame , that no more female satirists have their say. At this point, it remains uncertain whether the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation didn’t want more from them or didn’t get more.
“Radically Funny – The Power of Satire”: humorous contributions to equality
Finally, Martin Sonneborn has the floor again, with an attempt to read out the first certified joke in the European Parliament before he is cut off and the session is tolerated. In a democracy, everyone can speak freely, but not everyone has to listen.
This part of the short series is again quite entertaining. Nevertheless, I would have liked a little more depth in the individual topics and would have gladly paid the price of largely doing without stock footage of war and crises. It would not have provided answers to the controversial questions of humor either, because all the verbal contributions can at best serve as suggestions for debate and opinion-forming within the given time frame. However, public broadcasting has already fulfilled its core task and who likes to do more than he or she has to? (Dominic Harapat)
