On the death of Fips Asmussen: Obituary

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Fips Asmussen (1938-2020): A cigar, a sparkling wine before the performance, a stable table - he didn't need more

Karsten Trepte / picture-alliance / obs

About his age he liked to say that he didn't know it and that he was probably born sometime in the 1940s, "when my mother was still alive," and that was a real Fips Asmussen. A joke that, barely understood, is already over and has to make way for the next gag.

Fips Asmussen was born as Rainer Pries in 1938 in Hamburg. After an apprenticeship as a typesetter, he switched to the advertising industry, where he came into contact with artists and took a liking to them. He learned to sing and played the guitar. With sea shanties ("Heimweh nach St. Pauli") or sung persiflage ("Ein Korn im Feldbett") he even made it into the charts every now and then.

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1973 with Mrs. Barbara, St. Bernard and gold record

He took his first steps into cabaret rather involuntarily in his own pub on Ifflandstrasse, "The Violet Onion". When he sang his songs, he once said, people went to the bathroom. If he recited Brecht or Tucholsky, they would stop on the way to the toilet. If he told jokes, they stayed seated.

And so he went from singing to joking. He soon gave up working as a solo entertainer in his own pub - the nights that were awake and at times also boozy were detrimental to health.

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2000 in front of the "priest" in Wolfenbüttel

Instead, he sold his jokes on music tapes, later as long-playing records, and went on tour with them. He filled more than 50 records with his punch lines. Like James Last, he belonged in every well-stocked party basement record collection - although at the beginning it was mainly the gentlemen's evening for which he joked: "Not everything that has a hole is broken".

A ring pad full of jokes

His humor was coarse but effective - especially for guests who already had a certain alcohol level and the firm will to finally laugh below level: "What do you call a man without legs? Peanuts!". He didn't want to be forbidden to joke about minorities, because after all, minorities are all of us "in certain areas".

Unlike on the phonograms, his jokes were always embedded in everyday stories on stage, which dissolved as soon as possible - after a maximum of two sentences - into a punchline: "A chimney sweep goes to a pub and orders a grain. Says the landlord: open up House!". The satirical magazine "Titanic" speculated that Asmussen certainly knew "millions" of jokes. In fact, his repertoire fit into a ring block.

What he could laugh about himself, he applied it to his own program - and did not take it amiss if he was robbed himself. For Asmussen, the joke was still something like a commons, a cultural asset like the folk song. Something that could make the rounds from the school yard to the canteen.

The nonsense seemed immutable to him

He himself remained true to his method of quick jokes in quick succession for over half a century. So loyal that in later years he himself became a joke - or at least "Fips Asmussen" became a synonym for the shoddy throwaway joke. In fact, he was a hard-hitting professional entertainer who was reluctant to slip off the stage. A cigar, a champagne before the performance, a stable table - he didn't need anything else.

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1987 with a sailor's sweater

Anyone who comes to his program doesn't want to "see", they want to laugh. Point. So he saw himself as a service provider on the diaphragm. Aesthetic or political developments that humor may have made since the 1960s had to bypass Fips Asmussen. "There are no old jokes or new jokes," he once said: "There are only jokes that you know. Or you don't know them". And whether a joke works seldom depends on its depth.

Asmussen was a comedian before the name even existed - and before the profession could become so lucrative. He had only professional contempt for the timing of Mario Barth or the attitude of Markus Krebs. Some gags remained unchanged for almost forty years in his repertoire ("You have such soft hands ... are you unemployed?"), Because nonsense appears as unchangeable as the circumstances from which the nonsense arises. Occasionally, when he recited Tucholsky and his poem "The Other Man", he could even become contemplative. That was the soft Asmussen.

A Lemmy Kilmister of humor

Curiously enough, he recently experienced a renaissance as a "cult figure". From a purely mathematical and stylistic point of view, the audience should have died away in the last few decades. Asmussen, however, appeared in full houses to the end, undisputed by moral-political or aesthetic objections to his simple art. Anyone who had learned to laugh on Twitter knew again to appreciate the conciseness and ludicrous pace of his lecture.

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2004 at the "Musikantenstadl"

It didn't matter that his humor was basically always pressing the same button, always in the same quick succession. Anyone who wanted to feel ill saw an old white man telling slippery tales. Those who were more fond of him could recognize in Fips Asmussen a Lemmy Kilmister of humor - and pay tribute to his phenomenal perseverance. Humor is when he goes on.

After reunification, he turned his back on Hamburg, most recently he lived with his wife Barbara in Querfurt near Halle. He died there on Tuesday after a short illness. Fips Asmussen was 82 years old.