The UK’s Telegraph newspaper published an interesting report last week, the upshot of which was that Germans laugh very little. One in three Germans laughs fewer than five times a day. “When they do allow themselves a chuckle,” writes the Telegraph, “it’s more likely than not to be at the expense of others, with 77 per cent [of Germans] saying they liked to laugh at others’ misfortune.”
The Telegraph points out also that the Germans invented the concept of schadenfreude.
According to the New York Times, the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl once said that Germans were “so afraid to laugh that they would hide in the basement to do it.” The Times related Kohl’s remark in in a 2005 piece on the establishment of German “laughter schools,” where Germans learn to force themselves to laugh—mechanically—in order to relieve stress.
“For decades, we Germans have been the grandmasters of depression,” said the schools’ founder Heiner Uber: “At Uber’s laughing class in Munich, the session began with participants sitting in a circle and stretching, before moving on to the laughs. Uber instructed the students to clap their hands and breathe deeply to get the blood circulating. Then he told them to march in circles around the room chanting ‘ho-ho-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
“Uber emphasized that wannabe gigglers could train their bodies to laugh long and hard without having to resort to telling jokes… Laughing has been a lifelong vocation for Uber, who grew up in postwar Munich in a household where his father, a former Nazi soldier, forbade his children to laugh at the dinner table… his mother warned him at age 5 that “only stupid people laugh.”
The Telegraph reported on similar German laughter classes in 2004, in an article titled “How do you make a German laugh? Take him to a humor trainer’s lecture.” Thomas Holtbernd, the humor trainer in question, explained to the Telegraph that “For too long humor has been a taboo in many areas of life in Germany.” Laughter, says Holtbernd, is key to health, happiness, success, and workers’ productivity. He teaches his students that “there are five types of laughter, hey, hee, ha, ho and hoo.”
“‘There are many different types of humor and they all have their place” [Holtbernd] said, methodically running through sarcasm, satire, mimicry, parody and his favorite schadenfreude, which he illustrated with a picture of a pensioner laughing at a man who had bumped into a lamppost. The hall erupted.”
Speaking of Holtbernd’s laughter classes, a 43-year-old German told the Telegraph “as soon as I realized how useful it was for my health I learnt to laugh and I haven’t stopped since.”
Why are the Germans like this? That is a question for people who write longer columns. But I read something else about Germans in 2004 that has stuck with me.
In May of 2004, I was 13 years old and a lover of video games. The May ’04 issue of the video game magazine XBox Nation had a cover story on the much-anticipated video game “Fable”, and a friend at school—an XBN subscriber—gave me his copy once he’d finished it. Thirteen years later, I still have that magazine. There was something in that cover story I had a feeling I’d need to call on at some point in the future; something that, to an American, defied belief.
In May of 2004, Fable’s release-date was five months away, and its designer, English futurist Peter Molyneux, was doing press to drum up excitement. The idea of Fable, in short, was that you’d play a character who began the game as a child and ended it as an adult, in a medieval fantasy world. Molyneux explained to XBN that every decision you made as a child would affect the world you lived in as a man: “‘Right from the outset we want to pose this sort of moral choice,” Molyneux says. ‘While it’s impossible to become wretchedly evil as a child, there are definite opportunities for nastiness: Characters can be blackmailed, promises made and then not kept, defenseless children pummeled. An alignment meter tracks the main character’s good and evil deeds; as an adult, it will be possible to tell a hero’s bent by looking at his face. Evil characters will grow horns and attract flies. Saintly ones will beam and may have butterflies hovering around their bodies.”
At the time, this was cutting edge stuff, and made for exciting reading. The XBN article included a sidebar titled “An interesting psychological experiment”: “‘I always said you can tell a lot about a person by how he plays Fable,’ Peter Molyneux says. When [during a press play-through of the game,] Mark MacDonald, executive editor for Xbox Nation’s sister publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, opts to aid a small child being taunted by a bully in Fable’s early moments, Molyneux smiles broadly. He says, ‘there is this interesting psychological experiment I’ve found. American [journalists] always want to do good—absolutely, 100 percent of the time. German [journalists] always want to do the evil stuff; without any doubt at all, they would be beating up that little kid to a pulp now as we talk.'”
What makes the Germans the way they are? Perhaps all the light-hearted, benevolent ones emigrated to the United States and founded Wisconsin. Or else they were murdered by the Nazis. Robin Williams used to tell a story that a German reporter asked him why Germany wasn’t known for comedy, and he answered “Well, you killed all the funny people.” Times change and peoples change with them. Remember, in the 19th century, everyone knew that Germans were most notable for their composers and philosophers, and that the most fearsome warriors in Europe were the French.
