Get thee to an Institute

EVA ULLMANN took her master’s degree in 2002 on the part that humour has to play in psychotherapy, and became hooked on the subject. In 2005 she founded the German Institute for Humour in Leipzig. It is dedicated to “the combination of seriousness and humour”. She offers lectures, seminars and personal coaching to managers, from small firms to such corporate giants as Deutsche Bank and Telekom. Her latest project is to help train medical students and doctors.

There is nothing peculiarly German about humour training. It was John Morreall, an American, who showed that humour is a market segment in the ever-expanding American genre of self-help. In the past two decades, humour has gone global. An International Humour Congress was held in Amsterdam in 2000. And yet Germans know that the rest of the world considers them to be at a particular disadvantage.

The issue is not comedy, of which Germany has plenty. The late Vicco von Bülow, alias Loriot, delighted the elite with his mockery of German pretension and stiffness. Rhenish, Swabian and other regional flavours thrive—Gerhard Polt, a Bavarian curmudgeon, now 72, is a Shakespeare among them. There is lowbrow talent too, including Otto Waalkes, a Frisian buffoon. Most of this, however, is as foreigners always suspected: more embarrassing than funny.

Germans can often be observed laughing, uproariously. And they try hard. “They cannot produce good humour, but they can consume it,” says James Parsons, an Englishman teaching business English in Leipzig. He once rented a theatre and got students, including Mrs Ullmann, to act out Monty Python skits, which they did with enthusiasm. The trouble, he says, is that whereas the English wait deadpan for the penny to drop, Germans invariably explain their punchline.

At a deeper level, the problem has nothing do with jokes. What is missing is the trifecta of irony, overstatement and understatement in workaday conversations. Expats in Germany share soul-crushing stories of attempting a non-literal turn of phrase, to evoke a horrified expression in their German interlocutors and a detailed explanation of the literal meaning, followed by a retreat into awkward politeness.

Irony is not on the curriculum in Mrs Ullmann’s classes. Instead she focuses mostly on the basics of humorous spontaneity and surprise. Demand is strong, she says. It is a typical German answer to a shortcoming: work harder at it.