The comment

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The commentary is the last series published in magazines by the German humorist Loriot . Between May 1975 and January 1978, 138 episodes appeared in Stern . Part of it has also been published in book form.

content

The episodes of the series consist of a strip of pictures with four drawings, each of which shows a chest portrait of the typical Loriot bulbous-nosed male in different postures while he is speaking and which are reminiscent of individual phases of an animated film. Many of these drawings are used in several episodes. Below the picture strip is a sentence that the male nosy man makes as a comment. It is divided into four parts by ellipses, which are relatively evenly distributed among the drawings. The humor of the lyrics is often based on puns, and some of the lyrics refer to current events, such as the 200th anniversary of the United States . Issues such as pollution and nuclear power, which were of great importance in the 1970s, are also dealt with more frequently.

publication

Loriot was already working for the star in the early 1950s , for which he drew the series On the Dog, among other things . From 1954 he worked almost exclusively for the publishing house Th. Martens & Co. and its magazines Weltbild and Quick . The only exception to this was the children's series Reinhold das Nashorn , which appeared in Stern for seventeen years from 1953 and its children's supplement Sternchen . At the end of 1970 he terminated his contract with Th. Martens and switched back to Stern , where he initially published the series Loriot's Heile Welt between 1971 and 1973 . Almost two years later, the May 1st 1975 issue of Stern started the humor page Bottom Line . In addition to Loriot's comment , it contained a column by Wolfram Siebeck and a drawing by Peter Neugebauer . A total of 138 episodes of the comment appeared . The last episode was part of the January 5, 1978 issue, after which the bottom line was continued without Loriot's contributions. With the discontinuation of the commentary , Loriot's work for magazines also ended, apart from a few individual contributions.

In 1978 Diogenes Verlag published a selection of 107 episodes in the book Loriot's Comments . In contrast to the publications in Stern, they are provided with headings. In 1983, this selection was combined with a previously published selection of his last Quick series Loriot's Diary to Loriot's Great Diary . The headings are missing here, but each episode is assigned a date between 1958 and 1983. The book was distributed together with the other large-format anthologies of Loriot's Great Counselor , Loriot's Heile Welt and Loriot's Dramatic Works as Loriot's Collected Works.

Evaluation and aftermath

For the Germanist Stefan Neumann, who wrote his dissertation on Loriot's work, the series is of poor quality compared to other works by Loriot. Due to the lack of a relationship between drawing and text, the mechanisms characteristic of Loriot, in which the comedy is generated by a contrast between image and text, are no longer applicable. What remains is a kind of collection of aphorisms and word games , although the quality of the word games rarely reaches Loriot's other level. Neumann therefore only rates the series as a by-product of Loriot, who at the time was primarily concentrating on his work for the television series Loriot . An indication of this is also the design, in which the repetition of individual phases means that the drawing effort remains low.

In 2013, Stefan Lukschy , a longtime friend and colleague of Loriot, published a portrait of the humorist. The title The happy one does not beat dogs , a corruption of the saying “The happy hour doesn’t beat an hour”, comes from Loriot’s comments .

Book editions

  • Loriot's comments on politics, forensics, economics and finance, agriculture, culture, modern life, men and sport, and the world of animals and women . Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-20544-9 .
  • Loriot's Great Diary . Diogenes, Zurich 1983, ISBN 3-257-01647-6 .

literature

  • Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the comedy. Life, work and work of Vicco von Bülow . Scientific publishing house Trier, Trier 2011, ISBN 978-3-86821-298-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 209-210.
  2. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 32, 35.
  3. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 50.
  4. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 211, 395.
  5. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 211.
  6. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 54.
  7. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 209-211.
  8. ↑ Stefan Lukschy: The lucky one doesn't hit dogs. A Loriot portrait . 2nd Edition. Structure, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-351-03540-2 , p. 126 .