Comedian Baydar
Photo: Katharina Dubno / DER SPIEGELWhere does the fun start and where does it end? Can sexist jokes be funny? And racist? And if so, who can tell whom, when and where? And who can laugh?
In short: What is satire allowed to do?
An age-old question and more topical than ever. The outrage began a few years ago with religious sensibilities, the Mohammed caricatures, the "Charlie Hebdo" murders. But seriousness has long since moved into secular religious communities: The "New York Times" abolished the caricatures after there had been allegations of anti-Semitism. The "Emma" cartoonist Franziska Becker experienced a shit storm because some of her older drawings are said to be racist and Islamophobic. The gay comic artist Ralf König became the focus of young queer activists.
The comic and the caricature have a problem today because they can't help but work with stereotypes, including optical ones. But it doesn't just hit the drawn gag: Böhmermann and Erdoğan, the gender jokes by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer at a carnival session, the grandma as an environmental pig in a satirical video of the WDR, most recently the police, your friend and hangman. Pardon! You don't joke about that. Or?
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