McBunny
Member Since: 18 Sep 2008
Location: South
Posts: 679
 
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| Wetlands - or Are the British as humorless as the Germans? | |
Hi all,
I'd like to ask a question about Charlotte Roche's book. It was sold more than a million times in Germany which is quite a lot in a country that is known for it's poets but has more TVs sold every year than books...  
Do you think it is funny? 
The reason for my question is this:
I think this book is very funny. It is a joke. It is reality satire, in fact it is not a book which has been thought to be read it is just an ironic joke about the critics who try to read and criticise it, it is a joke about the people who buy and read it. The whole book is just full of excrements and really, really horrid stuff.
The real joke about this book is that it is so badly written and so weird, nobody would have ever bought and read it if it wasn't that disgusting. But since it is this disgusting it was a very big scandalous and people went and bought it. A lot of people who don't ever read books as well as very intelligent and well-educated people bought and read this book. This book is really disgusting but almost everyone who bought it read the whole book (including me) although you really have to force yourself to read on because it is really, really disgusting a lot of times.
But - and this is the funny part - since this book is so disgusting everybody talks about it and everybody reads it and so everybody wants to have read it so he can also talk about it which lead to the phenomenon of a whole nation having read one of the most disgusting novels ever written from the first until the last page.
In fact this whole book is just a perfect joke, it's a joke about the people who bought it, about the people who read it, about the critics, about the people who even went to readings, watched interviews with the author about this book, about the talkmasters who invited her to her shows, about the audience who wanted to listen to her - it just is a bloody good joke about really all of us.
I know Charlotte says, she had a big laugh when writing it, I bet she even has a bigger laugh when she sees people reading end even debating about the book, you can actually see and hear when she reads out loud scenes from the book, she has to try very hard not to laugh out loud!
So I think this is not a book it just is a very, very funny joke. 
It was also a joke about me, because I bought and read it, but I still think it is funny, because I think I am one of the very few German guys who can have a laugh - even about themselves. 
Until now, everything is fine: A British-German author (who is more British than German in fact) made a joke about the Germans and noone of them got it, the author on the other hand had a very, very big laugh. Nothing really new to us homour-lacking Germans. 
But I read some of the English critics about the book and now I am wondering:
Can it be that the British critics also don't get the joke? They are all talking about a badly written, disgusting book and don't understand why it sold that well. So, the British will have the same like the Germans: The book will sell massively, everybody will read it and everybody will find it disgusting, one more laugh for the author!
The thing that really surprises me here is that I would have thought the British have enough of the famous "British Homour" for getting this joke and therefore not to become part of the joke without recognizing it. But it seems at least the British critics are as "humourless" (and stupid) as the German ones, so next thing will be that the British-German author will have a big laugh about the British people because they didn't get the joke - just like the Germans! 
This brings me back to the original question:
Does the fact that British people don't get the joke and buy and read the book just like the Germans did mean that British people have in fact as less understanding of humour as the Germans do?
After all the years that I thought British people would be funnier do I have to realize now that this is just a rumour and in fact the British are as seriously-minded and unfunny as the Germans and Monty Python are just an exception just like the few good German humourists?
And now you.... RRS TDV6 HSE, 2006, bonatti grey, ebony interior, rear diff, s/c grille and vents, stormers, privacy, tasmods, iphone integration
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Thu Feb 19 2009 10:51am
no sh** 
