Comedy review: 1000 years of German humour

Published on Tuesday 12 May 2009 19:21

1000 YEARS OF GERMAN HUMOUR *** THE STAND, GLASGOW

HENNING Wehn and Otto Kuhnle's show debunking stereotypes about Germans disappointed at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, not because Wehn isn't a sharp, risk-taking stand-up and Kuhnle an endlessly inventive, wonderfully silly variety act, but because the timeline structure of the production was a needless distraction. The show has improved markedly since August, however, not least because Wehn and Kuhnle have almost completely ditched the whiteboard and history "lesson" format.

A greater sense of the shambolic suits Kuhnle, whose set pieces are marvellous when they work, as with his supposedly kinky and certainly eye-watering rendition of Love Me Tender, and even better when they're touchingly rubbish, as with his somersaulting gnomes. Few of his turns were the same as when I caught them in Edinburgh and it's no slight to imagine him an excellent children's entertainer.

By contrast, Wehn seemed to be performing within himself. The novelty of his nationality permits him to establish a non-PC perspective, eliciting laughs from the Luftwaffe's levelling of Coventry, but he couldn't quite extend this into satisfying routines about the sex offenders register or ironic sexism, falling short of boundary-pushing outrageousness, but never going far enough to justify the awkwardness.