“The point of comedy is to make fun of everyone,” a Berlin friend told me recently. What matters, he argued, is that you make yourself look silly too. But along the way, you’re allowed to disrespect everyone as long as you are being creative enough. That, in his opinion, is what the genre is for.
I get what he means. Yet having followed enough of Germany’s tortured discussions around comedy and satire over recent years, something about this argument doesn’t feel right.
If German comedians make a joke at the expense of marginalised communities, whether immigrants, black people, queer people or Jewish people, any pushback tends to be simultaneously belittled as hurt feelings and blown up, usually in the mainstream media, as a threat to our democracy.
Upholding freedom of expression is obviously one of the most defining democratic values. I happen to agree with the German Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) who wrote: “What is satire allowed to do? Everything!” I just wonder why this argument seems to be made with the most conviction when the joke punches downwards at minorities who are already humiliated on a daily basis. Is free speech degenerating into the establishment’s weapon against “wokery”?
There does seem, however, to be a fine line in German bourgeois morality when it comes to dark humour punching upwards. This line was overstepped last week when the satirist Sebastian Hotz ridiculed the shooting of Donald Trump; the aftermath turned into something of an affair of state.
Hotz, 28, known by the pseudonym “El Hotzo” on social media, developed a huge following during the pandemic with cynical, left-leaning jokes about everything from nationalism to corporate culture and masculinity. This content has gained him a couple of jobs over the years, including a radio show at public broadcaster RBB, from which he was dropped after asking on X (formerly Twitter) what the last bus and Trump have in common. His answer: “Unfortunately, just missed.”
What Hotz’s 700,000 followers on X and 1.5 million followers on Instagram would probably think of as a rather unsurprising and mediocre El Hotzo pun caused controversy in the German press. Many commentators found it tasteless, even inhuman and harmful to our “democratic values” (again) to joke about somebody’s potential assassination, even if that person had attempted to overthrow democracy. Hotz followed up his post with: “I find it absolutely fantastic when fascists die”, for which he was accused by conservative journalists and politicians of inciting violence. When Elon Musk jumped in, appealing to the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to take action against Hotz, things started to get absurd.
For the past decade, the political right in Germany has been mobilising against public broadcasters whenever their employees or content reflect political views contrary to their own. Billionaire Musk has now hopped on that train by claiming that Hotz was paid by the German government to wish “death on the leading US presidential candidate and myself” (Hotz had expressed enthusiasm over a Musk tweet speculating on his own death in 2022).
Musk is wrong, at least when it comes to Hotz’s employment at RBB: the German state neither determines who and what to broadcast on public services, nor directly pays for them. Public broadcasting is financed through a licence fee that every household in Germany has to pay, thus causing a lot of frustration, especially among “fake news” conspiracists. Which makes it especially disturbing to see how quickly after a media furore fuelled by the right, the public broadcaster decided to drop Hotz as a radio host, with the words: “His remarks are not compatible with the values for which RBB stands.”
But wasn’t Hotz hired by the broadcaster exactly because of the cheeky humour that made him internet-famous in the first place? And is it correct that Hotz is wishing death on people? Interestingly, it is not just the owner of X, but dozens of German journalists who assume this to be evident.
For me, this indicates a major problem with media literacy. There may be a fine line when it comes to morality and sarcasm, but people working in media should at least be able to distinguish between a satirical social media post and, let’s say, a commentator on a live news show. Since when is satire to be read as an unambiguous message? Why is it OK to joke about statistically vulnerable groups such as transgender people, but inhumane to laugh about Trump’s bleeding ear?
The answer lies somewhere between my friend’s comment over lunch – comedy should ridicule everyone – and my discomfort about it. The comment didn’t feel right to me because it fails to consider the question of power, which for me is always the main problem with German humour.
It is almost as if many Germans get their best laugh when the power dynamics of their daily realities are simply reproduced in the form of a joke, instead of being challenged or inverted. It’s really an act of reassurance to hear that they are not the only ones to find it annoying that there are so many disabled parking spots. Some comedian says it out loud – they’re relieved, so they laugh.
Maybe the controversy over Hotz’s joke about Trump comes from the upending of that familiar dynamic. And although my friend believes that the one who tells the joke has to look silly in the end, in this case it’s debatable who is more risible: the joker or his critics.
Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist
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