German Comic’s U.S.-Style Monologues Score Laughs
There was a time when Harald Schmidt had to work hard at his humor.
But now that Germany’s lone late-night comedian has hit on the proper balance of American technique and local content, he need only sit back and watch the veritable pileup of scandals that is the stuff of a stand-up comic’s fantasies.
Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose girth had been exhausted as a source of mirth after 16 years in office, has rejuvenated his joke potential with the shocking admission that he accepted at least $1 million in kickbacks.
The country’s current leader, Gerhard Schroeder, has been married four times and strikes a flashy, cigar-chomping pose that is easy to mimic.
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, also married to wife No. 4, has transformed himself from an overweight idealist to the picture of pragmatism, shedding 77 pounds and his pacifism for three-piece suits and the company of hawkish leaders at whom he once hurled rocks and insults.
And now comes George W. Bush into the White House, following the mother lode of monologue material that crossed the Atlantic during the Clinton years.
“Every mistake George Bush makes will be great for us,” says a gleeful Schmidt, who unabashedly emulates David Letterman and Jay Leno.
The 43-year-old comedian who has single-handedly forced late-night entertainment on fellow Germans has just celebrated his fifth year on the air here, disproving critics who contend that the U.S. comedy format is ill-suited to the more strait-laced German audience.
“This is a cliche, that Germans are more serious than Americans,” Schmidt says. But he acknowledges that there are more taboos in his country and that Germans are less willing to make fools of themselves on camera than those who happily take part in Leno’s “Jaywalking” surveys or Letterman’s pizzeria interviews.
Still, he is chipping away at these reservations. In one recent broadcast, Schmidt plucked a young couple from the audience to reenact a “love scene” from the film “Titanic.” The two were given scripts from a scene in which Jack teaches Rose how to spit from the luxury liner’s guardrail, and their voices were dubbed onto the original footage and played for the studio audience and a million viewers.
Many of Schmidt’s routines are unapologetic rip-offs. He tweaks his eyeglasses after a punch line, a mannerism of his declared hero, Letterman. The set of “the Harald Schmidt Show” is a near-carbon copy of the exposed brick and cityscape backdrop of his New York idol, as are his Top 10 lists and over-the-shoulder disposal of less-than-successful cue cards.
“There’s not much chance to vary the format--monologue, desk, guests--that’s the way it’s been done for decades,” Schmidt says. He readily admits, though, that he borrows a lot from overseas counterparts, especially Letterman, whose show he watches daily on a Dutch satellite channel.
He’s tried the “Tonight Show’s” Headlines segment, spotlighting funny double-entendres in news stories and ads. But he says the concept is more successful in the United States, where viewers more eagerly participate by mailing in local goofs.
Schmidt, whose tailored suits, short-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses give him the look of an insurance salesman more than a comic, says he envies his American models’ greater freedom to make fun of issues that remain taboo in Germany. No one here would laugh at the death penalty jokes Leno and Letterman tell at the expense of Bush, he notes, and any humor with a Jewish theme remains strictly off limits.
The comedian who studied cabaret arts at a school for the performing arts in Stuttgart, in his native state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, laments the steady rise of political correctness in Germany. When he told Polish jokes in the early years of his weeknight show, he was summoned to the Polish Consulate here for a lecture on the need to protect good postwar relations. He has also been criticized for too many one-liners at the expense of Ossies, the eastern Germans who brought unfamiliar customs and dialects to their western brethren with the 1990 reunification.
Despite those cultural barricades, these are bountiful times for German humor, Schmidt says. As a Roman Catholic, he believes that he has carte blanche to poke fun at the pope and some of the church’s more conservative precepts: “I know what I’m talking about in this field--it’s absolutely no problem,” he says in an interview in his austere office in an old industrial zone of this Rhine River city.
Schmidt begins his day by combing the newspapers for fresh joke fodder and checks in regularly with a network of 20 writers around the country, including the four-man core working out of an adjacent office. There’s a monologue conference at 4 p.m., a rehearsal at 5 p.m. and the taping an hour later for airing on Sat 1 channel after news and movies, usually around 11:30 p.m.
Although the nightly audience of 1 million pales in comparison with the late-night viewer figures racked up by U.S. comedians, Sat 1 executives say they are satisfied with the show’s audience share and the advertising it attracts. Schmidt says he expects to keep up with his 170-shows-per-year pace for at least a decade.
“I have the greatest job in German television because I just have to sit back and watch others do the work,” Schmidt enthuses, pointing to the shocking revelation that national soccer legend Franz Beckenbauer had a love child and Hollywood’s decision to make a movie on the life of Foreign Minister Fischer.
“This may be the first American film where a German official is portrayed without a Nazi uniform,” Schmidt told his audience the night that the film--to be called “Green Life,” after Fischer’s environmentalist party--was announced to be in production by Columbia TriStar.
Lampooning the choice of Al Pacino to portray the now slim and suave Fischer, a mock movie trailer aired during a late-December taping announced the casting of Cher in the role of dowdy opposition leader Angela Merkel, Brad Pitt and George Clooney to play two colorless government ministers and Charles Bronson as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Schmidt’s guests tend to suggest themselves from newly released films or music videos, he says.
And then there is the endless bounty of politicians who, although little-known outside Germany, are rich resources for this late-night comedy king. Schroeder and Fischer have proven great targets in the two years that they’ve been in office, but Schmidt says Merkel and the scandal-plagued Christian Democrats she leads offer even greater laugh potential.
Relishing the thought of the hard-nosed Merkel as the next chancellor, Schmidt launches into a credible rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Angie,” “with no loving in our souls and no money in our coats, you can’t say we’re satisfi-i-ied.”
“Ahhhhh,” he muses contentedly. “The possibilities are endless.”
