Loriot in the cinema: shortly before a humorous sugar shock

2023-04-24 16:50:38

Dmankind, perhaps especially its German part, suffers from increasing memory loss, by the way, to the extent that information is always and everywhere available at the same time in smaller and smaller electronic devices. The great forgetting of historical contexts – where one comes from, for example, in terms of mentality, where one definitely doesn’t want to go back again – has long since reached periods that are historically just around the corner, so to speak.

Stories that would have to have an H license plate if they were motor vehicles. Of which grandchildren and great-grandchildren only know scattered sentences, at which their soon-to-be-retired relatives regularly throw themselves away with laughter when they appear to be placed incoherently in the room.

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“I’m not yelling at you,” says one. “God, how primitive are men,” says another. “The duck stays outside”, “What a mean tone” and: “The dog can’t even speak.”

They are sentences like time machines that take people of advanced age backwards to the seventies. Scraps from the German history of mentality. Written down by a dissector of everyday life, habit and communication, pedantically polishing punch lines.

A man about whom one would very much like to know how he would deform what he encountered in the machine room of current discussion behavior between the sexes, in the media, in the Bundestag and at the breakfast table in terms of self-devouring speech behavior mechanics into absurdly funny dialogues.

Mr. Müller-Lüdenscheidt and Dr. Kloebner

Source: Studio Loriot/Salzgeber

This brings us finally to the first finding from “Loriot’s Great Animated Film Revue”, which has just been released in cinemas: Twelve years after his death, he is still missing as a virtuoso distorter of bourgeois German culture. Or right now.

31 sketches are drawn on the screen in eighty minutes. Compiled by Peter Geyer. Redrawn, recolored. Sparkling fresh and lint-free reworked like a newly built VW Beetle with pretzel windows in the showroom of a motor vehicle museum. The renovation of the miniatures, which are of course kept alive and almost completely accessible by Loriot’s house publisher Diogenes on DVD, on YouTube and regularly on various channels of German television, was necessary in order to bring them to canvas format.

However, nobody need fear that Mr. Hippentraut, the rabbit breeder, or Professor Bartels, the inventor of the family user, will turn Berta and Hermann and the breakfast egg into similar monsters as Maya the Bee and Wickie did after their last digitization push. The colors are saturated, the lines are subtly smoothed. Not an iota has been changed on the wooden animation. A loving caution was at work there. Loriot’s daughters were among the producers.

Trailer for “Loriot’s Great Animated Film Revue”

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That Geyer, the talking dog, Mr. Müller-Lüdenscheidt and Doctor Klöbner, the murderous forester’s wife and the scenes of a marriage escalating from a state of passive-aggressive calm actually flit by like a number revue without curatorial explanations, without information on how it came about, even without an obvious dramaturgical ulterior motive is rather unfortunate.

Despite all efforts to change things up, you sometimes have the feeling of being on the verge of a humorous sugar shock. Especially since not all skits are as good as the sentences you remember from them, and some have not aged as well as you would have liked.

Boomers who go on the big bulbous-nosed show with their children and grandchildren will have a lot to explain afterwards (for example, who was the uninhibited Hanseatic man with the gray quiff and the baring teeth in the end). But maybe that’s a good thing.

German humor and its reputation

Born from the mind of Beckett and Monty Python, Loriot’s linguistic works of art are where they are timeless (which, Geyer’s Revue shows, they usually are) and affectionately viciously ruffle the central object of their joke, the German citizen, a perfect antidote to flat jokes the comedian present. Lessons for everyone who wants to know how to take crumbling communication, of which there is probably more today than in the 1970s, to the extreme.

And for the fact that German humor (like British cuisine) can be better than its reputation. By the way, there is also a skit in the revue. But it’s not that good.