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Bunny jokes about an annoying long ear with a speech impediment conquered the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. As shallow as the gags seemed, they had a political origin: because the jokes are said to have originated in the GDR first - as a criticism of the shortage economy of real socialism.
Bunny comes to the pharmacist: "Do you have any carrots?" He says: "No, I don't have any carrots." The next day it comes again: "Do you have any carrots?" "No, I really don't have any carrots!" It's getting too stupid for the pharmacist , the next morning he hangs a sign in the window: "No carrots today." Bunny comes back: "You had carrots!"
Oh well.
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In the 1970s, the bunny jokes, which were probably the worst flat jokes of the time, conquered the Federal Republic, even a little flatter than the East Frisian jokes that were feared and rightly so.
Schoolyards, regulars' tables and the joke pages in TV magazines soon became indispensable without the jokes, which were mostly structured the same way.
The cheeky bunny always asks a question in public places, for example in the shop, at the doctor's, at the office, which begins with "Hattu...?".
But what the bunny wants is usually not there.
But it keeps asking for days until the situation escalates.
As ubiquitous as the bunny jokes were in the 1970s, not everyone was happy about them, especially not Germany's comedians: Rudi Carrell is said to have described the bunny jokes as "the most stupid thing that has ever happened in Germany", at least that's what he was quoted as saying in 1977 in the SPIEGEL by the satirist Henning Venske.
His colleague Otto Waalkes described the joke trend as simply "terrible", Dieter Hallervorden described it as a "dark chapter of German humor".
But as annoying as thigh-slapping à la "Has you got a lightbulb?"
Venske reported that the Bunny joke first appeared in the GDR: at the Festival of Political Songs, the largest music festival in the GDR, which he attended in February 1976 in East Berlin.
Although the subversive joke was not performed directly on stage, Venske said it was shared with the audience.
At the time, the »Hattu« jokes satirically processed the fact that in the GDR one too often found shops where the goods one was looking for could hardly be found.
Gisela Steineckert was a longtime mentor of the Oktoberklub, a group that organized the Festival of Political Song;
she later served as President of the Entertainment Arts Committee.
In 2017 she recalled the bunny jokes that were circulating at the time in "SZ-Magazin", for example:
Other contemporary witnesses reported that such jokes had been around even earlier, namely in 1973.
According to the linguist Richard Schrodt, the "clearly political dimension" of the bunny joke for GDR citizens resulted from the obvious references to the socialist economy of scarcity: "The bunny, which feeds itself mainly on undemanding food, glosses over the institutionalized 'current supply bottlenecks'," Schrodt wrote 2004 in his essay »Strategies of inauthentic speaking: irony and wit«.
The figure of the hare is particularly suitable because it is considered "weak and inferior".
In the jokes, however, he appears "in the role of the oppressed who sees through his oppressors."
By ironizing the defective system, the hare is putting itself above the system.
Schrodt explains that this was not new in socialist humor, even if it had become particularly popular in the form of bunny jokes.
But even before that, the deficiencies had been made fun of in completely bunny-free jokes:
Soon the jokes were making their way west as well.
Their fascination there was based on other factors, according to Schrodt: the rabbit protagonists offered children in particular an opportunity to identify with them, because the long-eared creatures “take on an inferior role, speak children’s language, ask penetrating questions about always the same thing” and “always want ... them have forbidden things«.
They outsmart the adults to get these things.
Bunny jokes soon lost their political ambiguity in the West.
That didn't harm their popularity, on the contrary: newspapers and magazines printed them, "Tagesschau" announcer Jo Brauner read bunny jokes on disc, the puns soon appeared in advertising and were even sung about in songs.
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But robbed of their satirical dimension, the ubiquitous bunny jokes became pretty shallow jokes: »Hattu?
Muttu!« – this simple basic construction increased the recognition value of the bunny jokes, but at the same time it was also the reason for the ephemeral nature of the bunny jokes.
The educator Norbert Neumann presented this in his humor story »From farce to joke.
On the Change of the Pointe since the 16th Century” in 1986: “People laughed at them for a while because they rediscovered the learned form with their childish language at the end – a point structure that usually wears off quickly in its effect.”
In the end, the bunny joke probably disappeared in Germany for the same reason that it first became known so quickly - because it was so flat.