Finally humor criticism again. What satire is allowed and not allowed to do is debated regularly and with unusual passion in Germany. Jan Böhmermann’s Erdoğan poem, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah’s “taz” column in which she directed police officers towards the landfill, or Luke Mockridge’s jokes about disabled athletes were collectively destroyed. Whether one can even speak of satire in all of these cases is part of the debate.
Traditionally, the outrage has come from the right, where people generally have narrower ideas about what is appropriate and what is not. In recent years, however, criticism has also grown from the left, for emancipatory reasons, some would say, because of cancel culture, others. The latter group, of course, includes Dieter Nuhr, the reigning king of the country that ARD regularly broadcasts from.
Be careful, lustful women
Most recently on June 18th, when the comedian cracked jokes about femicide on the show “Nuhr im Erste XXL”. It took a few days for a short clip from it to find a mass audience on social media, now the shitstorm is blowing.
“There are tens of millions of men in Germany,” says Nuhr in the video, so the probability of encountering a woman murderer with 300 to 350 femicides per year is “practically zero.”
He introduced the whole thing with a general criticism of blanket judgments “adorned with the crown of science” by using the word “structural” – perhaps in order to dumb down his viewers to the point that they would be more receptive to the following joke: “To be on the safe side, it would perhaps be better if you simply got to know your partner before sexual intercourse.”
The audience claps enthusiastically – which you can’t necessarily blame them for, as in recordings of this type, enthusiastic personnel usually provide the desired feedback by giving signs to the audience.
Nuhr therefore suggests: Women have themselves to blame if they are murdered, because they could have recognized the danger if only they weren’t so miserably lecherous. At this point it should be said again that femicides are predominantly committed in long-term relationships and that there are twice as many attempted femicides in addition to the 300-350. And the 136,000 documented cases of domestic violence in 2024 are also likely to have an effect on the “blanket judgments” against men, which Nuhr declares to be a critical but extremely porous superstructure of his program.
The clips are shortened
Most clips on social media end after the sentence about getting to know each other, and if this had also been the end of Nuhr’s number, one could actually have accused ARD of at least gross negligence in its editorial support. But it went even further: “Maybe just ask if he has a part-time job as a murderer of women.”
At this point, the transition to the absurd is finally complete and, at least on paper, meets the entry criteria for the satire category, which the ARD cites in response to the public outrage: “We can understand that the quoted passage is met with great criticism. However, artistic freedom must also be respected in satirical formats. ‘Nuhr im Erste’ is a well-known satirical program produced by the rbb. Dieter Nuhr is generally allowed to act as an artist against the background of artistic freedom formulated in a provocative and pointed manner.”
With his follow-up, Nuhr turns his first point into the opposite – after all, hardly any murderer would admit to wanting to kill a woman when asked. However, with this “joke” quality, he hardly provoked any laughter even from his studio audience.
Now, of course, one can only agree with ARD when it continues to write in its statement: “The boundaries of taste can be discussed and argued about.” And then reply anyway (you can probably still say): Dieter Nuhr is structurally unfunny.