Picnic Realism: Uses of Comedy in German Theatre

In current German theatre, there is a new kind of realism, a picnic realism, if you will, that is both funny and intensely thought-provoking.

This is a realism in the Platonic sense, giving access to the ideal world of forms. To do so, it relies upon the ideational function of comedy. As Bergson, Freud, and many other later theorists of comedy agree, to laugh at something, it is necessary to objectify it and detach from it emotionally. Bergson in his famous treatise on comedy argues that comedy's appeal to the intellect through the creation of types and its abstract, exaggerated, and performance-oriented depiction of the world is a form of realism: "realism is in the work [of art] when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality."¹

In contemporary Germany theatre, the ideational function of comedy is used strategically. Though the productions discussed here take up the weightiest possible themes or are based on some of the most deeply valued tragedies in the canon, comedy intervenes at jarring intervals. The performances constantly push at the extremes of tragedy and comedy, increasing the volatility and intensity of the response at each abrupt shift. The purpose and effect are a complete disorientation of the spectator who, through the fresh, abstracting lens of comedy, is given the opportunity to come to terms with the tragedy's heavy themes and ideas.

Taxonomy, even in the natural sciences, is an inexact art of attaching words to evolutionary phenomena. Crossbreeding is the name of the game, and different characteristics in a given species will fall and rise over time. So it is in theatre. I am not arguing for the invention of a new genre as distinguishable from its ancestors and contemporaries as fish are from fruit trees. Much current European theatre, however denominated (post-literary, non-narrative, postmodern, postdramatic), is punctuated by discontinuities. But contemporary German theatre is marked by a distinct reliance on the dialectical counterpoint of comedy. The specific disrupted narrative of what I am calling picnic realism oscillates between the furthest reaches of the frivolous and the frightful. As picnic realism spreads its explosives on the mind of the spectator, it creates a landscape pockmarked by terror. The radical swings in genre and mode of performance focus the attention on the breaking point of the performer as the connective mark, the tightrope walker, who draws the spectator into deep affection and repulses him with buffoonery, an unremitting push/pull motion between emotional identification and abstraction. Picnic realism thereby gains its intellectual objectivity while thrusting the unmentionable into view, using comedy to unlock a more powerful tragedy.

One might criticize the joke as a commercialization of serious theatre, trying to lure an audience in for a laugh. But one striking thing about all the productions I have in mind is that they do not pander, but rather demand a great deal intellectually and emotionally from the audience. The sort of humor that I explore is not the performance of a tragic script that has a few calculated jokes embedded in it to create variety. Nor is it tragicomedy as that term has been applied to certain of Shakespeare's plays. This type of humor should also not be mistaken for the obligatory laughter of Broadway audiences, who, habituated by the rhythmic one-liners of television comedy and striving to show that they are in-the-know, laugh throughout virtually any production, regardless of its content or temperament. These shows are not for the faint of heart or casual tourist. Bodily fluids spew forth liberally on the German stage. Sex, death, and violence—typically, disturbing evocations of each—are the order of the day.

This wholly inappropriate comedy is in a way a staple of theatre of the absurd. What I would argue is different in the current German application is that all plays become absurdist in this way: any classical text, any play, might lend itself under the appropriate hand to this kind of presentational twist.

The German spectator finds delight in picking a...