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What Is Funny? To Whom? And Why?: Humor and Personality in Germany
| Article
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20267 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,807 Words |
| Author
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Willibald Ruch
Willibald Ruch is a scholar in the Heisenberg program of the
German Research Council and assistant in the Department of
Physiological Psychology of Heinrich Heine University in
Dusseldorf. This article is based on cross-national humor
studies that he has conducted since 1988. |
During the last four years, German humor has been enriched by breathtaking and historic events. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the inhabitants of the former German Democratic Republic were free to pass to the West. They were greeted by jubilant western Germans bearing packets of presents, the media, and a gift from the state: one hundred deutsche marks in "welcome money" per person.
The media broadcast the touching meetings: Tears of joy were shed by relatives and strangers alike, and everyone wanted to know the visitors' desires. And what would they do with the hundred deutsche marks? One of the foremost unsatisfied desires of their brothers and sisters from the east, the westerners soon learned, was to taste bananas: "We have been working as hard as the people in the west, but we could never get bananas."
The banana became a political symbol. Upon losing the first joint election, a member of the Social Democrat Party remarked that this had not been a vote for freedom and democracy but a "vote for the banana." The need was satisfied sooner than some well-disposed westerners believed. Only weeks later an interviewed eastern German embarrassedly admitted that he shut the window of the car while crossing the border: "Otherwise people would throw in bananas and then the car would be full of them."
The eastern Germans had to orient themselves to a completely new world, and the new and prototypically naïve character of the zonie (an inhabitant of the Soviet-occupied zone) soon enriched the list of butts in the world of disparagement humor. The zonie's Trabi (a Trabant, a small, uniform-looking car with a plastic body) received even more attention. The Trabi was one of two types of car that an ordinary person in the east formerly could obtain--and that only after waiting up to ten years. The poverty and lack of diversity in the cars inspired the joke inventors:
"How do you recognize the Trabi-Sports?"
"Because of the Nike on the backseat."
"How can you double the value of your Trabi?"
"Fill the tank completely!"
Not surprisingly, the zonie caricature was popular only in the west. But in the east the Ossi (Eastie), a more neutral character
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