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"Best Comedian" Hazel Brugger: The established nominees got nothing
Photo: Willi Weber / dpa
The best punch line was of course the well-rehearsed applause.
The laughs out of the can, with which the German Comedy Award ostensibly thickened the corona-compliant and therefore naturally quieter auditorium, but with every precautionary cackling of canned food they again involuntarily and relentlessly drew attention to the fact that a lot of what was happening on stage was not was funny.
What is satire allowed to do?
A less urgent but just as fundamental question would be: Is it actually comedy when nobody laughs?
Perhaps at next year's awards ceremony you could really simply roll a Lachomat onto the stage that measures the actual reactions, sniffed out by a real, diverse audience: The award would be given to those who are laughed at.
That sounds naive, but it would possibly be the most seriously democratic way of awarding a joke prize, given that the two methods used so far appear to be rather unsatisfactory solutions.
Gags of fluctuating goodness and unexpected winners
So far, an industry jury has decided on the winners, which naturally led to a certain suspicion of chess.
With the change of the award ceremony from RTL to Sat1, viewers were allowed to decide for the first time this year, primarily by means of an online vote, and also by phone calls during the show - a procedure that, unsurprisingly, reversed the existing balance of power.
Hazel Brugger won the award for "Best Comedian" against the established nominees Carolin Kebekus and Martina Hill, Felix Lobrecht won in the corresponding male category against Luke Mockridge and Chris Tall, who were already inevitable.
more on the subject
Gender debate at the German Comedy Prize: Women have to laugh in their own category
In the "Best Comedy Show", the small funk format "World Wide Living Room" unexpectedly won against the competing products by Carolin Kebekus, Mockridge and Tall, and "Slavik - Auf Staats Nacken" won the "Best Comedy Series" award. , the joyn format of ex-East boy Mark Filatov.
"His price is the price of all of us," wrote Slavik buddy and roaring streamer Knossi on Instagram, who himself is currently being passed from TV show to TV show as the "Look here, we're modern and know the Internet" mascot : "Because from now on everything is possible."
Or anything completely arbitrary, because it finally proved what you already knew: that when judging humor, what matters is who you ask where and what is funny.
Or whatever she finds funny, there's something like that too.
Unfortunately, the organizers hadn't realized that women are funny too.
When the hopeless obscuration of the list of nominees was noticeable, a rather clumsy category for podcasters was hastily added.
This exhausting ignorance was then an omnipresent topic at the gala, starting with the painfully lazy idea of having the prizes served on a tray by a really old white man.
Most of the laudators also took up the topic, wrapped in gags of fluctuating goodness, and thus created a new, difficult-to-solve dilemma: Of course, something like this has to be addressed, but messing up the situation also means normalizing them.
As if it were all laughable after all, although in truth it is howling.
Criticism of artificial gender sorting
Katrin Bauerfeind's pleasantly sloppy laudation, with which she honored the all male nominees in the "Best Moderation" category, was particularly appropriate.
Laura Larsson and Ariana Baborie won the podcaster prize for "Herrengedeck" and in their acceptance speech they wished that there should be no artificial gender sorting in the future.
"Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could sit at the same table, man, woman, trans, black", asks Larsson - and laudator Tobias Sträter, who had previously also clearly spoken out in favor of common, self-evident price categories, burst at that very moment, in which the stage once belonged to women, with a not-so-funny joke from the side in between.
Joint table is difficult because: "It's Corona".
A tiny scene, but possibly symptomatic.
Why are you more ashamed of such dust jokes when you watch them than the people who make them?
Even apart from the gender debacle, many details of the gala seemed annoying, as if they had been waved off as "oh, enough" during brainstorming after the first half-hearted idea: Luke Mockridge's opening number, in which mischievously meant mishap followed mishap.
The wobble head animations of the podcast nominees.
The interludes from the "Comedy Academy", in whose Hall of Fame the greatest German prankster hung next to Loriot and Heinz Erhardt and a picture of Horst Seehofer.
The 90-second stand-ups performed by those nominated as "Newcomer" were also shockingly uncomfortable.
You would think that on such an opportunity you would unpack your best gags - but Simon Stäblein's only punch line attempt was the joke that he couldn't even play triangles as a child, Simon Pearce declared grandfatherly that he will be 40 next year, so he is twice that old like his fellow nominees.
"So I'm as far away from her as Laura von Wendler" - why are you more ashamed of watching such dust jokes than the people who make them?
Maria Clara Groppler, who won the award, also delivered jokes that, despite her female perspective, couldn't be more old-fashioned: "90 seconds - or, as I say: two times sex with my ex".
Where does German humor stand today?
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Chris Tall
Photo: Christoph Hardt / Future Image / imago images
Because then everything doesn't matter, after three hours of comedy award gala you switch over to RTL, where two-time nominee Chris Tall is currently performing live in a new season of his show "May he?"
starts, and you catch exactly the moment when he awkwardly pushes the two trash TV protagonists Jessica Paszka and Johannes Haller into a relationship outing.
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"Celebrity Big Brother": Hearts while rushing by Anja Rützel
Then Henrik Stoltenberg, the grandson of the transport minister and Bon-Schlonzo-Bonvivat from the "Love Island" season that has just ended (please just accept it, it would take too long to explain), in a bizarrely long, spectacularly uncomfortable live prank tricked into believing he was at a casting for a new dance show.
The joke I was hoping for: let him dance even though he can't dance.
The problem: Actually, he doesn't dance that badly.
The solution: You blindfold him and Chris Tall jumps at him, both of them fall over backwards onto an exercise mat.
It was only funnier when Tall got a slice of pressed cheese slapped in the face shortly before.
It's true: You really can't imagine a woman who could fill this slot more funnily.
Disclosure of the editorial team: The author was part of the jury of the German Comedy Award in 2017 and 2018.
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