The king of schadenfreude makes a comeback on screen after ten years – “because an entire generation has grown up without good entertainment.” Does his humor still work today?
Stefan Raab: The star of his TV shows is always himself.
It’s already late on Saturday evening when Stefan Raab announces at a press conference what everyone has suspected: The boxing match against former world champion Regina Halmich (Raab lost on points after six rounds) was just a media-friendly setup for a bigger comeback.
After almost ten years of hiatus, the German presenter and entertainer will return to the screen. “I will make shows again.” Because he has been away for so long, “an entire generation has grown up without good entertainment.” Doing something again is “an obligation to our country.” Stefan Raab has never been modest.
Raab has signed a five-year contract with RTL. The show titled “You won’t win the million here with Stefan Raab” starts next Wednesday. The show will air on RTL+, the broadcaster’s streaming service. It lasts 90 minutes and combines all elements of Raab’s earlier formats: quiz, competition, and a humorous weekly review. A contestant can win one million euros if they defeat Raab.
“This is the course of time; modernity plays in streaming,” says Raab. Although his ideas for the new show come from a bygone era, the 57-year-old wants to embrace the modern world, the future.
Raab was one of the greatest entertainers in German television. But young people today hardly know who he is.
His legacy can be summarized as follows: In German television entertainment, there is a time before Raab and a time after him. Between them lies a revolution.
In the 2000s, teenagers and adults sat in front of the screen late into the night for Raab. His humor was different, provocative, indecent, and sarcastic – and above all, highly rated. Raab was a laid-back amateur who taught himself everything. He couldn’t do anything properly, but he could do a lot of things very well. He made music, hosted shows, and invented successful TV formats.
The star of these new shows was always Raab himself.
In 2015, he suddenly became quiet; the entertainer stepped down. For almost ten years, nothing was heard from him. On Saturday, he returned.
After Raab’s announcement, one wonders: What kind of entertainment and humor is about to make a comeback?
To find out, we looked at three typical shows. A journey into the past.
The boxing butcher – a spectacle (March 22, 2001)
Three times Stefan Raab boxes against Regina Halmich. Three times he loses.
Stefan Raab dances to the music of James Brown out of his cabin and makes his way to the boxing ring. He is wearing pilot sunglasses and a golden bathrobe with the words “Killerplauze” (killer belly). In Cologne, where Raab is from, “plauze” means beer belly.
Raab, a 34-year-old pale man, stands in the center of the ring and confidently raises his arms. No matter what happens next: he has already won. His victory lies in the television spectacle he is about to create. A fight between an entertainer and a boxing champion has never happened in Germany before.
Everyone wants to see the duel between Raab and Regina Halmich: those who like Raab, as well as those who hope he finally gets a proper beating. Almost eight million viewers watch the fight on Pro Sieben, with about as many men as women.
It’s 10 PM, and the ring announcer says: “Please rise for the national anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany.” There’s a moment of silence. Then a dark-skinned woman is shown, dancing awkwardly and singing the same line repeatedly: “I love the German land, I love the German land, I love the German land.”
The audience in the hall bursts into laughter. The woman is Verna Mae Bentley-Krause, an American who emigrated to Kaiserslautern in the 1980s and opened a flower shop.
The short video is a pattern for Raab’s humor: he showcases people who speak funny, look funny, and do funny things. Whether these people are rich celebrities or poor outsiders is irrelevant to Raab.
He mocks everyone; it’s all just fun.
Back then, many laughed at Raab’s jokes in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It’s the delight in the misfortunes of others that drew people to their television sets.
Before the first bell sounds, a porn actress walks through the ring and announces the round. A boxing expert throws in a few suggestive remarks and explains that Raab must be careful not to come too early if he really wants to take down Regina Halmich.
Then the fight begins.
Raab is larger and heavier than Halmich. But he boxes as he leads his shows: unprepared. “If you practice, you can’t do anything,” he once said. Each punch to the entertainer’s face evokes cheers from the audience in the hall.
The show operates under the motto “No more fun,” it’s a real fight, with real punches and real blood. At some point, Regina Halmich hits so hard that she breaks Raab’s nose. Nevertheless, Raab continues. After five rounds, he loses on points.
After the match, Stefan Raab, sweating, stands next to a small table and says he couldn’t have lasted another round, “Women’s boxing is definitely not a mommy sport.”
The moderator had anticipated the loss. Yet, he never got used to losing. He still saw himself as a winner. An ambition he would later monetize.
Stefan Raab was born in 1966 in Cologne. He was an altar boy, attended a Catholic Jesuit boarding school, studied law for five semesters after high school — and then dropped out. In the meantime, he trained in his parents’ business, which ran a butcher shop in the Sülz district.
In an interview with “Der Spiegel,” Raab later said: “When my father wanted to open his butcher shop, there were already five or six on the street. Papa Raab knew: if he makes the best sausage, his store will work. And that’s exactly what happened.”
This principle was passed down from father to son: If you do something that already exists, you must be better than the others.
Stefan Raab didn’t sell sausages, but entertainment. And he did it in a way no German host had before him: he dared to do what all other TV producers found too silly or impossible: Raab let celebrities ride down an ice canal in Asian frying pans, played soccer with cars, and organized diving competitions off ten-meter towers. In 2007, he fought Regina Halmich again and lost once more.
On Saturday, Stefan Raab once again entered the ring against the former world champion. He looked fitter than in previous fights but still lost.
After the show, the question arises: What follows now? Apparently, Raab plans to copy his successful formulas from before. Retro television is trending. “Wetten, dass…?” is back, “Benissimo” is back, and also the game show “Geh aufs Ganze” with the plush red figure Zonk.
Will Raab still tell the same jokes in the new show as before? And can that still work?
The sarcasm – “TV total” (September 12, 2004)
Stefan Raab in front of his famous moderator podium with many buttons.
Yes, it can still work. With “TV total”, Raab relied on his ever-repeating successful formula: schadenfreude.
So also on that Sunday in September 2004. The show begins with funky big-band music and a colorful clip featuring the iconic “TV total” logo: a cartoonish tube television with devil’s horns.
The stage lifts Stefan Raab onto a pedestal, wearing baggy jeans, an oversized cardigan, and a gray t-shirt.
His look says: I don’t care about my appearance. I’m a normal guy, just like you. At the same time, there’s that grin which promises: This man will tell jokes that no one else dares to. When one of those jokes hits particularly hard, Raab laughs the loudest himself.
Behind the host, headlines or video snippets featuring embarrassing moments from the world of TV trash appear on a screen — the foundation of Raab’s humor. The show from September 12, 2004, is a perfect example.
Joke 1: A headline about Saddam Hussein, who is currently in prison and apparently gardening behind bars. Raab adopts a foreign accent: “He probably goes from cell to cell saying: Wanna buy a rose?”
Joke 2: A headline about British men who like to cry. The audience responds with a mocking “Ooooh…”. Then Raab looks for reasons why “one in three Brits” cries at least once a month: “Bad food, bad weather, or because they’re so ugly.”
Joke 3: A pop star goes to Oktoberfest. There, the woman with Indian roots meets three Scotsmen in kilts. The singer looks under one of the skirts and is shocked. After the clip, Raab mimics the woman and says: “Aaah, it looked at me! It has only one eye!”
Stefan Raab appeared in front of the camera for “TV total” almost 2,400 times. Most of the time several times a week. Since 2021, the show has been airing with a new presenter as part of the nostalgia TV trend. Reheating what used to be successful.
Raab’s humor has always remained the same, but he has creatively packaged it time and again. The most legendary were the many buttons on his presenter podium, which he referred to as “nippel” (nipples).
With the push of a button, he could insert embarrassing video snippets. For instance, a contestant from the show “Schwiegertochter gesucht” saying at one point: “I’m fat, yeah and?” Or a woman from the same show saying about a man: “He might not be the prettiest, but he’s nice.”
These snippets were a kind of GIF before the smartphone era. They were funny because they were completely out of context.
The dark side of this humor was also visible in these mini-clips: Raab brought people onto a stage to which they did not belong. Overweight, marginal, defenseless individuals. Although some of them stepped into the limelight more or less voluntarily, in TV trash formats or talent shows.
Raab would usually justify himself like this: If someone pushes themselves into the TV spotlight, they should not be surprised if they are ridiculed. Yet the entertainer significantly increased these people’s visibility — with sometimes significant consequences.
For example, with Lisa Loch, a 16-year-old girl at the time who participated in a beauty contest. Raab joked that Loch was just her stage name and that her real name was Petra Pussy.
Raab used the girl’s name as a running gag. In response to the political demand to lower the voting age to 16, the moderator held up an alleged election poster to the camera. The poster depicted a blonde woman having sex who resembled Lisa Loch. The caption above read: “Lisa-Loch Party.” The caption below: “Loch for all.”
The young woman later stated that she suffered from bullying for years. She received obscene calls, was insulted openly on the street, and mocked with songs. For a while, she didn’t even dare to leave her home and had to undergo psychotherapy. Loch sued Raab and was successful: the entertainer later had to pay 70,000 euros in damages — for severe personal injury.
Regina Zindler experienced a similar situation. In 1999, she appeared on the TV show “Richterin Barbara Salesch” on Sat.1. It was about a neighborhood dispute regarding a chain-link fence. The way the woman with the Saxon dialect pronounced “chain-link fence” was enough for Raab to make her a figure of ridicule. He composed a country song that reached number one on the German charts and became a bestseller.
For Zindler, the aftermath was not funny. TV crews besieged her property, curious onlookers cut parts from her chain-link fence, and the house had to be guarded by the police. In the end, Zindler sold her house and moved to Berlin. She also had to undergo therapy.
When asked about the case, Raab stated in 2001 in one of his rare interviews that they had never featured “Mrs. Zindler” on the show, nor filmed with her. The clip came from a TV show in which Zindler had voluntarily participated.
That “Mrs. Zindler” had only gained this notoriety because of Raab, he omitted. She stated years later to the “Bild” newspaper: “Raab never showed any interest in us, never asked how we were. He dragged many people through the dirt, including us.”
Aside from mocking participants in TV trash shows, Raab also repeatedly made fun of homosexuals. This can be seen in a report from a football tournament for gays and lesbians.
Raab passes by women with short hair (“Somehow they all look like Scooter”), talks to paramedics (“Gays don’t need to warm up before the game,” or: “Is anything else going on? Twisting of the rosettes?”), and he hands someone a booklet named “Ficker” (instead of “Kicker”, the well-known football magazine).
Many seem to wish for this humor to return. Looking at the latest comments on YouTube under the video, the consensus is clear: Ah, those were the days when you could still make jokes about everything. It should be that way again. Nowadays, you can’t laugh about anything anymore.
Raab’s humor is destructive, sardonic. It resonated with a large part of the TV audience in the 2000s. The trick is simple: Those who make fun of others experience a feeling of superiority. Schadenfreude acts as an ego booster.
For a long time, Raab was despised by cultural critics. They labeled him a TV bumbling fool, the king of crude jokes, and a trademark of bad taste.
But that changed when Stefan Raab showed another, a serious side. One that had actually accompanied him since the beginning of his career at the music channel Viva: music.
Although his early successes were still silly antics, even during his participations in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), there was still plenty of frivolity — as a composer and producer of “Guildo hat euch lieb” (1998, 7th place) or as the singer of “Wadde hadde dudde da?” (2000, 5th place).
But gradually, seriousness displaced silliness. Stefan Raab became a music producer and thus a promoter of talents. In his own casting shows under the “TV total” label, he discovered artists like Max Mutzke or Stefanie Heinzmann.
However, Raab celebrated his biggest triumph in 2010. In his show “Unser Star für Oslo,” he discovered 18-year-old Lena Meyer-Landrut, an unknown high school graduate at the time. That same year, she brought Germany its first Eurovision victory since 1982.
Raab’s greatest triumph: Lena Meyer-Landrut wins the ESC.
Raab was also allowed to meddle in politics: in 2013 he co-moderated the Chancellor debate between Angela Merkel and Peer Steinbrück.
By now, even the last critics realized: This Raab must be taken seriously.
The pathological ambition – “Schlag den Raab” (June 4, 2011)
“Schlag den Raab” is a kind of modern gladiatorial combat. The longest show lasted over six hours.
Stefan Raab hates losing. When he plays games, he transforms into a child. To win, Raab does everything. He tricks, complains to the referee, and gets furious. Little of the clown from “TV total” remains.
It’s quite genius that Raab manages to capitalize on this rather unsympathetic trait. In 2006, he invented the TV show “Schlag den Raab,” a kind of gladiatorial fight. In 15 games, Raab competes against fighter pilots, criminal investigators, or sports students. Man against man – rarely against a woman.
Competitions include stacking boxes, mental arithmetic, curling, or speed badminton. At peak times, “Schlag den Raab” garnered four million viewers. The show is a marathon. The longest episode lasted over six hours until half-past two in the morning.
The format is so successful that it was sold in 18 countries, including America, Great Britain, Australia, and Hungary. There are board games and video games based on the show. Raab once said: “What we do with our show is the oldest confrontation in the world. I was surprised that no one had thought of it before me.”
On June 4, 2011, Raab plays against a Bundeswehr doctor, 29 years old and well-toned. Raab states: “I am as fit and aggressive as rarely before and want to deal a proper smackdown.” After a too-long intro, the two face off in soccer golf, inline skiing, or spaghetti grab. Childish games, played by adults.
After more than four hours, the two sit opposite each other in the final duel: They play the children’s game “Packing a suitcase.” Whoever wins this wins everything. For the Bundeswehr doctor, it’s about a million euros. Then he makes the crucial mistake and stumbles over his words.
Raab jumps from his seat and screams: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” He clenches his fists, shouts again “Yes! Yaaaa!”, causing his voice to crack while the doctor sits there dumbfounded.
That’s always how it is on “Schlag den Raab”: Raab seems to have the most joy when he takes others’ money. He does that quite often. In 54 episodes, he wins 38 times. It would never occur to him to give a rival something or to let them win. “Schlag den Raab” translates the absolute principle of performance into a family show.
Viewers know: Raab keeps going — even when he crashes on his mountain bike and loses consciousness, when he breaks his zygomatic bone, or when he slams down on the game podium out of frustration for a wrong answer.
Until December 2015. Then all of a sudden, it was over, Raab stepped down. Newspapers speculated: Does he want to spend more time with his family, which he successfully shielded from the media? Or is he just tired of the circus? To this day, it’s still unclear what really happened back then.
The new beginning – boxing match (September 14, 2024)
What is clear: Raab hasn’t really quit. Behind the camera, he invented new TV shows, often for Pro Sieben and together with the company Brainpool, which he had worked with since 1998. However, a few years ago there was a break. The entertainer withdrew from the company and, as a result, lost the rights to “TV total” or “Schlag den Raab.”
The relationship with Pro Sieben also cracked. For two decades, Raab was the face of the station. However, after his retirement, Raab also created formats for the major rival RTL. Shows like “TV total diving,” “Blamieren oder Kassieren,” or “Schlag den Besten” (a sort of successor to “Schlag den Raab”) moved to the competition.
Raab does what other moderators find too simplistic: Here he glides through a pool while hosting his diving show.
At some point, Pro Sieben likely found it too much. The station’s head Hannes Hiller expressed it to the industry magazine DWDL.de: “If someone has been regularly playing for Borussia Dortmund for years but is increasingly cheering for Bayern Munich in the fan section, a question inevitably arises: When is the right time for a change?”
This change of teams is exactly what Stefan Raab has now executed. The presenter founded his own company, Raab Entertainment GmbH, together with former Pro Sieben boss Daniel Rosemann in January. The two have found a home at RTL. Even the boxing match against Regina Halmich was aired on this channel.
The TV dinosaur Stefan Raab seems to be worth many millions of euros to the RTL station. A sign that his humor could still succeed today. Schadenfreude dies last.
It has worked since there have been humans.
This article was updated after the boxing match on Saturday evening, September 14, 2024.