Dear Friends of German Comedy,
Achtung!
Starting this Thursday: German television entertainer Otto Kuhnle and I will perform an extended version of our Edinburgh show ‘Four World Cups and One World Pope’ at New End Theatre Hampstead from 16-25 November (not 19+20) at 9pm. Please join us for an evening full of Teutonic jolliness featuring German folk songs, garden gnomes, and standing up for law and order. Tickets are £13/£9. Schnell, schnell! Call 0870 033 2733 to book your tickets. Jetzt!
Please feel free to continue reading this monthly bulletin now you bought tickets.
Thank God we’re done with Remembrance Day for this year as I struggle to appreciate the misty-eyed nostalgia of the occasion. I don’t want to spoil the party but I know for a fact that even during the war it wasn’t all good.
As always it was football that really dampened my mood. More precisely Germany’s U21 surrender to England. As if missing a penalty and not qualifying for Euro as a consequence wasn’t bad enough our players were put in the doghouse for racism following Anton Ferdinand’s claims that German players called him ‘monkey’.
Don’t be silly! We’re not talking about the publishers of Oxford Dictionaries but dumb footballers. Have you got a vague idea what an extensive knowledge of colloquial English is required to know that ‘monkey’ can be used as a derogatory term for a black person?
However, Germans often refer to the British as ‘Inselaffen’ (island monkeys). See, it wasn’t racism. It was merely good-natured nationalism. Phew!
Enough about insults – let’s talk proper criminals. An Al-Qaeda terror suspect vanished from Belmarsh maximum-security prison after breaking a control order. For legal reasons he cannot be named, which makes it even harder to track him down. Having in mind that there are hardly any free prison cells I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that HM Prison Service actively encouraged his disappearance. What strikes me as very bizarre is that someone who committed the offence of removing his electronic tag can’t be named. At the same time tabloids were free to report unproven rape allegations against one of my fellow stand-ups, who turned out to be entirely innocent.
This month’s bulletin has been brought to you by the German Daily Mail.
Auf Wiedersehen
Henning
