Karl Valentin
German Humour: Does Germany Have a Sense of Humour?
Course 1 · Chapter 5 · Karl Valentin and Munich's Absurd
If one comedian could be offered as the answer to the stereotype, it would be Karl Valentin: a gangling Munich performer who took a sentence apart like a clock and showed that the pieces would not go back together. He worked in the beer halls and variety theatres of Munich, in short films and on the stage with his partner Liesl Karlstadt, and writers such as Bertolt Brecht admired him. This chapter looks at his comedy of language and logic, at the folk-stage tradition he came from, at his influence, and at the myths that have gathered around his life. Sketches and lines are described, with only short, attributed quotations. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
The Man and the Partnership
Valentin
Born Valentin Ludwig Fey in Munich in 1882 and died in 1948 (check). He took the stage name Karl Valentin and became a tall, thin, solemn-faced performer who wrote nearly all his own material. He was also a musician, an inventor of gadgets and a collector, and ran a small museum of oddities (check).
Liesl Karlstadt
Born Elisabeth Wellano in 1892, she became his stage partner from about 1911 and played comic roles in his sketches, including male parts, with sharp timing (check). Much of the team's best work dates from their partnership, which lasted into the 1930s and early 1940s (check).
The setting
Munich's variety stages, beer halls and small theatres, where short sketches and songs were performed before a mixed audience. The tradition had its roots in the Munich Volkssänger, the folk singers who performed topical songs and jokes in the pubs (check).
The Comedy of Language and Logic
| Method (check each) | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Literal-mindedness | A character takes an expression at its word, or insists on the exact meaning of a phrase, until the conversation stops making sense. The comedy is that the logic is correct and the result is absurd. |
| Pedantic argument | Two people argue over the proper way to do an everyday thing, such as photographing, binding a book or rehearsing an orchestra, and the argument grows more elaborate than the task. |
| Misunderstanding | A word is misheard or confused with a similar one, and the dialogue runs on two tracks at once. |
| Dialect | Valentin's Munich speech was part of the comedy, which makes translation especially hard and means that many foreigners meet him only through descriptions (check). |
| The body and the prop | His thin frame, his stiff posture and his inventive use of props gave a visual comedy that does not need words, which is why some compare him to silent comedians (check). |
Sketches and Films
- Stage sketches. Titles often cited include Im Photoatelier (In the Photographer's Studio), Die Orchesterprobe (The Orchestra Rehearsal) and Der Buchbinder Wanninger (The Bookbinder Wanninger), in which a simple task becomes a confrontation of logic and language (check the titles and what each depicts). The sketches were short and performed repeatedly, with variations.
- Films. Valentin and Karlstadt appeared in a number of short and some longer films from the 1910s to the 1940s (check). The 1923 short Mysterien eines Frisiersalons (Mysteries of a Barber Shop), for which the young Bertolt Brecht and the director Erich Engel are credited, is the best-known (check).
- A museum of his own. Valentin opened a museum of curiosities in Munich in the 1930s, which was short-lived, and a Valentin-Karlstadt Museum now stands in a tower of the old Isartor gate (check the dates).
Munich's Comic Tradition
- Volkssänger and the beer hall. Pub entertainers sang local songs and told stories in dialect, with an audience that answered back (check).
- Ludwig Thoma. The Bavarian writer Ludwig Thoma (1867 to 1921), a contributor to Simplicissimus (Chapter 3), wrote stories and plays full of rural and small-town satire, including the boyhood stories Lausbubengeschichten (1905) (check). His later nationalism and antisemitic writings are a troubling part of his record (check).
- The grumbler. Bavarian humour has a type known as the Grantler, a gruff complainer whose grumbling is a form of affection and wit (check). Valentin's solemn, complaining figures belong in this tradition.
- Later Munich comedy. Television series such as Der Komödienstadl, begun in the 1950s, carried the Bavarian folk comedy into the broadcast age, in a gentler form (check).
Brecht, Beckett and the Absurd
- Brecht. The young Brecht, then in Munich, admired Valentin and credited him as an influence on his own theatre (check). He is said to have learned from Valentin's cool, unemotional way of performing and from the use of comedy to break an illusion (check).
- Later writers. Critics have compared Valentin's breakdown of language to the work of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, and to later comedians such as Loriot (Chapter 7). Whether Beckett saw Valentin perform, as is sometimes said, is a claim, and should be checked (check).
- Why the comparison. What links them is a view that language and reason fail in everyday life, which is a common thread in 20th-century comedy and drama, from Munich to Paris to Edinburgh.
Life, Legend and Later Years
| Claim (check each) | What is documented |
|---|---|
| "The German Chaplin." | A popular comparison, made by critics. The two worked in different traditions, one with silent film and one with spoken language. Treat it as a label. |
| Valentin starved to death after the war. | He died in February 1948, in poor circumstances after the war, apparently of pneumonia after a chill (check). The story that he died of hunger is a legend, though real postwar hardship is documented. |
| Valentin was neglected in his lifetime. | He was very popular in Munich and respected by artists, and had commercial setbacks, especially in the later 1930s and 1940s as taste and conditions changed (check). |
| Karlstadt's later life. | She suffered depression and difficult years after the partnership ended, and was later honoured for her part in the team (check). It is a reminder that the partnership was the creation of two people. |
Exercises
Describe three comic methods used by Valentin and Karlstadt and explain why each is hard to translate.
Use the six-question method on the claim "Valentin starved to death in 1948", and write a careful replacement sentence.
Compare Valentin with a British comedian or sketch who plays on literal-mindedness, and say what is shared and what depends on the language.
Quick Reference
- Who: Karl Valentin (1882 to 1948) and Liesl Karlstadt (1892 to 1960), Munich (check)
- Method: literal-mindedness, pedantic argument, misunderstanding, dialect, props
- Tradition: Munich Volkssänger, beer hall and variety stage
- Influence: admired by Brecht; compared with Beckett and Loriot (check)
- Myths: "German Chaplin", starvation death (legend)