LOLA Issue Five

Comic Relief
Shahak Shapira
they’re just lazy comedians. They don’t need
to write a new programme every year, which
prevents them from evolving.
How do you think the German comedy
scene differs from America’s? In many ways.
Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle are two of my
favorite comedians. What I like about Louis is
that he’s of Mexican and Hungarian descent,
and he doesn’t talk about it. He talks about
things anyone could talk about. This style
makes it very hard to be original but he always
manages to find new angles. You hear it and
you’re like, ‘Fuck, how did I not come up with
that?’ In German comedy you have two types
of comedians: the clowns like Otto or Mario
Barth; they tell jokes. And then you have the
complete opposite: the teachers. They teach
you stuff like they’re your dad, but it’s patronising.
The cabaret show Die Anstalt or the
comedian Volker Pisbers are examples.
What I like about American comedy is that
it’s wrong. Dave Chapelle is wrong, he says
things that are wrong. Deliberately! He knows
that they’re wrong and the crowd knows they’re
wrong as well. I think that is one of the biggest
gifts of comedy, that it takes you to different
places, places you wouldn’t go yourself. Why
would you need me if I told you things that you
could come up with yourself? It’s fucking hard
to do that. It’s really hard to avoid Jew jokes
too, but I don’t want to be a Jewish comedian.
When making fun of different ethnicities
or religions, there’s a thin line between
being good at it and just being insulting.
When do you cross that line? A friend of
mine, Serdar Somuncu, said a few years
ago that every minority has the right to be
discriminated against. This type of comedy
is not new. It’s a legit thing to do, but
everybody does it now. I’m more interested
in making fun of majorities. I didn’t think
that way before, it’s just a thought that came
to me a few weeks ago. I see a lot of comedians
who have this list of different groups
they want to make fun of. They think: “I’m
so good at insulting people,” but they’re not,
because they’re not doing it with love. You
need to take your time if you really want to
insult someone. You can’t just go like: ‘Now
that we’re done with the blacks we’re going to
go to the Jews.’ It’s not funny anymore. And
why should the majorities get away? Why is it
always about minorities? They suffer enough.
Let’s make fun of old white dudes.
So is this your new routine? Making fun of
old white dudes? I’m trying to find my thing.
And I don’t want my thing to be too... thing-y.
I don’t want to be the fat guy that tells sexist
jokes all the time, although I’d prefer Bill Burr
over Mario Barth any day. And I don’t want to
be the Jewish guy either, there’s already one of
those. I try to avoid a niche. I want to find out
what my deal is, and if I need a ‘deal’ at all.
Do you feel under pressure to find your
own way in comedy? I’m trying my best.
My problem is that it’s very hard to do all the
things I do and not confuse people completely.
I did this Twitter project, for example, but
then I also do stand-up comedy. Who does
that? It’s not very common in show business.
They usually have one type of thing. I’m
very funny on Facebook, I know that. And
I’ve been writing comedy for years, because
writing advertisements is not very different.
I could do a TV show now and I could write
sketches, that could work. But that would be
easier for me than to be a really good standup
comedian. I guess I still need to show people
that I can do real comedy. Maybe I can’t,
maybe I will be a shitty comedian.
We doubt that. So what are your plans for
the future? I want to be a comedian but that’s
not the only thing I want to be. That’s the
problem: I’m really jealous of people who know
what they want to be. Even if it’s completely
fucking impossible, especially for them, at
least they know they have this one thing and
they might fail but they still go for it.
I hope I’ll get a TV show soon. But it takes
a lot of time. I have a TED talk coming up.
And I guess I’d like to make a bit more music.
I want to be a rapper. Like Romano. [Laughs]
I’m a big fan. He’s one of the few interesting
people in German music at the moment.
Maybe I will collaborate with him one day.
Read more about Romano on page 30. Follow
Shahak and get more details about his German
Humor show at facebook.com/shahakshapira
BY SHAHAK SHAPIRA:
Das wird man ja wohl noch
schreib-en dürfen!: Wie ich der
deutscheste Jude der Welt wurde
Shahak’s autobiography covers his
youth in Israel and Germany, the
murder of his paternal grandfather
in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre,
and his maternal grandfather’s
survival of the Holocaust.
‘90s Boiler Room
Shahak replaced the audio from
Boiler Room streams with 1990s
pop hits in a series of videos that
garnered international attention
and millions of views.
Yolocaust
To criticise the trend of tourists
taking cheerful selfies at Berlin’s
Holocaust memorial, Shahak took
photos from social media and
edited them to show the subjects
posing against horrifying scenes at
concentration camps. The project received
worldwide attention, but was
removed from the website after all of
the subjects asked to be taken down.
#HeyTwitter
Motivated by Twitter’s lack of response
when reporting homophobic,
racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic
tweets, Shahak made 30 stencils of
offending tweets and sprayed them
on the road outside Twitter’s Hamburg
offices. As employees arrived
at work, they were confronted by
the violation of their own terms of
service and hate speech policies.
Die PARTEI
Ahead of the 2017 German election,
Shahak hijacked a number of farright
Facebook groups, including
several used by high-ranking members
of the AfD. Admins were locked
out, then the groups were made
public and renamed ‘I