Popular Posts

  • The Great British Class Fiasco
    It's been a bad week for my blood pressure. I'm trying manfully to ignore the hooplah arising from MT shuffling off her mortal coil...
  • The Bullshitization of Everything
    Last weekend I began watching the BBC's documentary Ted Hughes: stronger than death . To be honest his poetry leaves me cold, but when ...
  • Version of Record
    Don't get me wrong, I'm a great fan of "online first" academic publishing and I look forward to the day when the outmoded...
  • Prolier than thou
    Fair dinkum cobber, the land of the cultural cringe has come up with its own version of the Great British Class Survey and like the origina...
  • Oxford BusTravel and Social Dysfunctionality
    Sometimes one is just left speechless.  My daughter starts secondary school later this week. She's been going to a primary about 3 ...
  • I'm so excited
    As Kate Fox points out at great length in Watching the English we are, on the whole, a reserved lot.  We find introductions awkward; we ar...
  • On metaphors - cultural and social capital again
    Recently, as you no doubt know,  I've been beating up on the use of the term "capital" in phrases like "cultural capital...
  • Into the mystic - Bourdieu and MCA
    What is it with Bourdieusians and multiple correspondence analysis? Why do they place  so much faith in one modest little data reduction to...
  • Causality fascism
    While in Turku I heard a term that was new to me "causality fascism". Actually, in the usage, there is an important distinction t...
  • On Irrelevance in British Sociology
    I noticed last week a certain amount of disgruntled tweeting about the British Sociological Association , mainly to do with the cost of att...

Caveat Emptor

The opinions expressed on this page are mine alone. Any similarities to the views of my employer are completely coincidental.

Thursday 25 August 2011

German humour

The Guardian is running a story today about the death of Loriot (Vicco von Bülow) one of Germany's best known popular comedians. As far as I can see the German sense of humour is not that different from the English, though there is a difference about when people think humour, especially irony, is appropriate - not during working hours for instance. Loriot has something of the flavour of Monty Python crossed with some of the observational humour of Not the Nine O'Clock News. My favourite sketch is the delightfully silly Weihnachten bei Hoppenstedts in which the paterfamilias spends part of Christmas assembling the son's model nuclear power station (with predictable results). I couldn't find a version with a good english translation, but the Guardian links to another classic with english subtitles, The German Yodelling School.

Posted by Colin at 02:30

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)