Germany mourns king of comedy Loriot | World news | The Guardian

Cover of Loriot

Germany is known for many things: reliable cars, punctual trains, a national reluctance to cross the road if the lights are on red. Comedy, though, not so much.

Yet the country’s reaction this week to the death of its most beloved postwar comic, aged 87, shows that Germans do indeed take their humour very seriously.

It is a measure of the devotion inspired by Loriot that when his death was announced the foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, told journalists at a press conference on Libya that he would take questions on the comic only after he had answered all Gaddafi-related queries.

Loriot – real name Bernhard Victor Christoph-Carl von Bülow, better known as Vicco von Bülow – was a national treasure who combined the eloquence and linguistic dexterity of a Stephen Fry with a Peter Sellers-style sense of the absurd. Pretty much every German newspaper on Wednesday carried a picture of him on the front page, or one of his cartoons, rather than an image from the battle for Tripoli.

via Germany mourns king of comedy Loriot | World news | The Guardian.

German for Foreigners … subtitled 🙂

Strange Random Comedy Quote:

“In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.” – Christopher Fry (English Writer, 1907-2005)

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