Abstract
Comedy is currently the most successful domestic film genre in Germany, and twenty-first-century German film comedies display diverse topics and approaches. Twark discusses several major German comedy trends, interpreting the directors’ depiction of contemporary social problems and German history in their films. Many recent German comedies portray the effects of German reunification and the socialist East German past with Ostalgie. Others parody Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich with ‘Hitler humour’. Transcultural comedies made by Turkish German directors and other immigrants and their offspring explore cultural clashes between various groups. Contemporary film comedies focusing on present-day Germany frequently reference past historical events and figures. Taking as her central case study Suck Me Shakespeer (Bora Dağtekin 2013), Twark reflects on these major developments in German comedy and considers why it has become so popular in the past few decades.
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Notes
- 1.
For examples of how this tendency expresses itself, see the Filmportal.de article “What You Looking At? and The Comedy of Immigration: The Foreigner as Laughing Stock and Walking Cliché.”
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Twark, J.E. (2020). German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’: Wildly Successful and a Lot Funnier than You Think. In: Lewis, I., Canning, L. (eds) European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_15
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