Don't Mention Ze War!Follow

Doesn't it seem reasonable? The World Cup is something that keeps the world united.

That 1914 event was a showing that even in hard times people can put their differences aside and be civil.

Soccer is war anyway.

~Blix

Are you talking about that Christmas eve when British and German soldiers decided to get together and stop fighting?

Germans odd? You must be joking.

Here is another example of German oddness:

Borrowed from NPR's Day to Day

Every New Year's Eve, half of all Germans plunk down in front of their televisions to watch a 1963 English comedy sketch called Dinner for One. Walk into any bar in Bavaria and shout the film's refrain: "The same procedure as last year, madam?" The whole crowd will shout back in automatic, if stilted, English: "The same procedure as every year, James." Even though Dinner for One is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most frequently repeated TV program ever, it has never been aired in the United Kingdom or the United States, and most of the English-speaking world is ignorant of its existence. When Der Spiegel probed the mystery last New Year's, it found that the BBC had not only never contemplated broadcasting this veddy British nugget in the United Kingdom, the BBC's spokesperson had never even heard of it.

Dinner for One, also known as Der 90 Geburtstag (The 90th Birthday), has rattled around the cabaret circuit for decades. Written by British author Lauri Wylie in the 1920s, it presents a morbidly funny story in miniature—(just 11 minutes on TV): Elderly Miss Sophie throws her birthday party every year, setting the table for her friends Sir Toby, Mr. Pommeroy, Mr. Winterbottom, and Adm. von Schneider, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they've all been dead for a quarter-century. (You can watch all of Dinner for One here or read the English script here.) Her butler James manfully takes up the slack by playacting all of them. He serves both drinks and food while quaffing toasts on behalf of each "guest," a bevy of soused British noblemen and von Schneider, who toasts Miss Sophie with a heel-click and a throaty "Skål!" (Watch a sample of Mr. Winterbottom's patois here.) James waddles to and fro, trips repeatedly over the head of a tiger-pelt rug, declaims each guest's pleasantries boozily, spray-fires the table with mispoured drinks, and downs a little water from a flower vase. Each course begins with the signature refrain: "The same procedure as last year, madam?" "The same procedure as every year, James." The sketch ends with James' final "procedure": bedding the old lady himself.

In 1962, German entertainer Peter Frankenfeld stumbled on Dinner for One in Blackpool's seaside circuit. Frankenfeld was so charmed that he invited actors Freddie Frinton and May Warden to perform the sketch on his live TV show Guten Abend, Peter Frankenfeld. The now-classic black-and-white recording dates from a 1963 live performance in Hamburg's Theater am Besenbinderhof. (So deep runs the love for this broadcast that last year Frankfurter Rundschau interviewed a woman whose piercing laugh from the sidelines has achieved its own cult status.) Audiences clamored for repeats, and the skit fit nicely as a time-filler between larger broadcasts, so the German network Norddeutscher Rundfunk and its affiliates ran the snippet repeatedly in the 1960s, even reaching audiences behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The skit settled into its current New Year's Eve slot in 1972.
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The show's popularity spread to Scandinavia, where it is typically watched on December 23, as well as Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, Australia, and Latvia. The show has been broadcast more than 230 times. You can watch it dubbed in Plattdeutsch, a northern German dialect (with or without a German introduction), ponder its scholarly depths in a Latin translation, take in live Dinner for One supper theater, cook up Miss Sophie's traditional meal, or just drink briskly along with the actors, and the rest of northern Europe. There are many parodies as well: My favorite is the childrens' public TV station KI.KA's Dinner für Brot, featuring a puppet shaped like a roll of bread as James.

But why? How did a sliver of British humor come to dominate another culture's holidays—with apparently no connective thread back to its source? First, the slapstick of Dinner for One transcends the language barrier. Second, it offers a slight thrill of the verboten: After all, it features a very crazy old lady, a bevy of lecherous male friends, a big stench of post-WWII death, a hell of a lot of drinking, and senior-citizen sex. A third notion, floated by Der Spiegel and the Guardian alike last year, is that the film plays to Germans' worst idea of the British upper class: dotty, pigheadedly traditional, forever marinated in booze despite titles. The BBC counters with the more politic theory that Dinner for One "has become synonymous with British humor, on a par with Mr. Bean." British TV executives see it as fit only for foreigners, or they would rush to broadcast it themselves. Why Germany finds it so funny and the British don't is, according to Der Spiegel's Sebastian Knauer, "one of the last unsolved questions of European integration."

But the biggest reason for Dinner for One's popularity, I suspect, is the magic of repetition. The skit is mildly funny, sure, but much more important is that it has the mysterious quality of something that could get very funny after years of drunken viewing. The script itself, so laden with repetition, lodges in the brain and accretes in-jokes easily. (Like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Showgirls, which have achieved bad-is-good popularity through repetition, Dinner for One has a bad little kernel of a story and a crass creepiness.) And in a modern Germany many feel is teetering into economic free fall, a comfortable old-time ritual has an almost religious attraction.

Best of all, Dinner for One is a perfect foundation for a tidy drinking game in which you down four different liquors in 11 minutes, "the same procedure as every year." What more fitting way to ring in the New Year?


The Germans are more fucked up then Peter O'Toole on his birthday.

And then looked at the Polish fans and chanted Lebensraum!

With a giant sign that said "Zyklon B".

We can excuse and forget WWII.

We can even excuse and forget Lotthar Matthaus and Harald Schumacher.

But your fascination mit the Hoff? NEVER!!

Edited, Jun 20th 2006 at 7:05am EDT by RedPhoenixxxxxx

Wilkommen Ins (zum?) Assylum.

Thicken your skin a little and join the fun.

Stereotypes are our bread and butter! As a Brit, of course I have few teeth (and the ones I have are green and at angles), I live exclusively on boiled vegetables, and I apologise politely when someone punches me in the *******.

RedPhoenixxxxxx is surrounded in a pungent halo of Garlic and stinky cheese, can only recognise his female acquaintances from the waist down, and has a Masters Degree in "Surrendering to Germany"

Goalkeeper lives in a Live-Sex **** bar and has fathered several windmills, all by different mothers.

ToUtem is our token ColoUred brother who has an obsession with naming his thousands of illegitimate children with names that end in 'eesha'.

Flea'lo is of a brown hue, and will steal your gold fillings as soon as look at you, but can mow a lawn in her sleep.

YouShutUp is Scottish - he lives on deep fried Mars Bars and broken beer glasses, and will never celebrate a World Cup Victory. Ever.

So, like it or not, You (personally) bombed our Fish & Chip Shop, annexed the Sudetenland, and (assuming you're female) have more facial hair than Grizzly Adams.

Now there's a good Kraut and start baiting the Yanquis. It's your duty as a European!

Then why aren't you in the kitchen?

The more f*cked up the better else the memory will die with the Vets and the same mistakes will happen again.

Never be scared to bring up anything, never stand back from poking fun or ridiculing things that are painful, human nature requires it.

Yep

In France it's Portuguese women. Hence the joke:

What's the most common present for Mother's day in Portugal?

A Gillette Mach 3!

Haha, and people say French humour sucks.


Anyway, who cares if they are hairy as long as they shave

So, hotprinzessin, if Germany has learned its' lessons from years gone by, then why is there still such a large undercurrent of Naziism in your country? Xenophobia is rampant yet and is seen popping its' ugly little head up every election.

Mind you, that doesn't mean I think that the Fourth Reich is an impending danger, but let's face it, the German people are militaristic by nature and that will forever sit in the back of all their European neighbor's minds.

Is it tasteless when we joke about such things as Xyklon B and roasting people in the ovens? Sure it is, but after the horrendous century you guys just had, you might could understand why it makes for endless comedy-- that is unless you're Jewish... or Polish, or black, or Catholic, or slavic, or homosexual, or Communist, or even one of Adolph's close political allies. They all had an odd tendency to take a bullet to the back of the head or take showers en masse. Even back in WW1 the krauts were the first to use chemicals during the trench warfare.

You'll have to forgive us for failing to forget some of your country's previous, erm, "excesses." Not that you guys aren't cool or haven't been stand up allies during the Cold War and all, but like you guys clowning on us about Bush, we clown on you guys about gassing the **** outta everyone who ain't blonde, white, and blue eyed.

Totem

Pity. Those white stiletto heels could aerate the lawn, and stab any ebil wabbits!