Studio interview

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Studio interview (also the interview or Plastologie ) is a cartoon - Sketch of the German humorist Loriot . Divided into four separate sections, it is part of the first episode of the television series Loriot , which was first broadcast in March 1976. The content of the sketch is a television interview with a scientist who is able to enlarge his own body parts through breathing techniques. With the TV parody and the science parodyAs well as depicting failed communication, the sketch takes up three basic motifs from Loriot's television work. In addition, it contains some sexual allusions, a design element typical of Loriot.

Studio Interview was also shown in the 1997 re-cut of the Loriot series . The text of the sketch first appeared in 1981 and has since been included in several of Loriot's anthologies.

plot

The total length of the sketch is about six minutes. Two men are seen sitting on chairs in a television studio. Both are drawn as typical Loriot bulbous noses. The one on the left is the TV presenter Gilling, the one on the right is Professor Häubl, who holds the Chair of Pneumatic Plastology. Gilling would like to interview Häubl, but has to wait for the show to begin because, as he suspects, something is wrong with the technology. Gilling tries to bridge the waiting time with small talk . He speaks of his zodiac sign ( Pisces ) and that of his wife ( Capricorn ). However, Häubl only goes into this to a very limited extent by speaking of his long-haired dachshunds . Since they are still not on the air, Gilling Häubl asks if he knows three (generally unknown) people from Gilling's environment. Häubl denies this every time and in turn responds with a question about Professor Duwe, who is unknown to Gilling, in order to explain to Gilling the absurdity of his questions.

When the interview finally begins, Häubl is initially no longer interested in conducting the interview due to the long waiting time. After Gilling's remark that everyone else would be happy to be able to spread his nonsense on television, he finally gives information. Pneumatic plastology enables plastic changes in one's own body through breathing technology. He also demonstrates this when asked by Gilling. He holds his breath until his head turns red, thereby enlarging his index finger, which is about 30 centimeters long and eight centimeters thick. Shortly afterwards, he also enlarges his ears ten times. He also guides Gilling in a self-experiment in which he enlarges his nose to a length of about 20 centimeters and a thickness of 15 centimeters. In contrast to Häubl, whose body parts return to normal size after exhaling vigorously, Gilling does not succeed in making his nose smaller again. Häubl blames Gilling's clumsiness and advises him to come to his office hour at the end of August.

Production and publication

Loriot in 1971 during an autograph session

The cartoon was made in the animation studio Loriots, which he founded in Percha on Lake Starnberg near his home in Ammerland in the early 1970s and where he employed up to five people. As is usual with Loriot's cartoons, Häubl and Gilling's mouth movements are in sync with their spoken words. To achieve this, a large number of individually drawn phases was necessary. As with almost all of his cartoons, Loriot took on the two speaking roles himself.

The animated film was shown for the first time in the first episode of the series Loriot , which bears the title Loriot's Clean Screen and was broadcast on German television on March 8, 1976 . The film is divided into four sections, which are shown throughout the entire episode. The first part is shown before the title is displayed, making it the first contribution in the entire series. This is initially just about Gilling's assumption that something is wrong with the technology. The second part contains the conversation about zodiac signs and long-haired dachshunds. In the third section of the film you can see the dialogue about the unknown people. The fourth and last part of the cartoon is introduced by an announcement from Loriot, who is sitting on a green sofa. In it one learns the names of the two people represented for the first time. In contrast to the animated film, the first names Gillings (Hartmut) and Häubls (Wilhelm) as well as the University of Tübingen as the seat of the Chair for Pneumatic Plastology are also mentioned here.

Loriots Clean screen was after the airing of Manfred Sack in the period reviewed positively. You have to laugh a lot and loudly at the mocking jokes. He rated the animated film studio interview as "a beautiful, harmless, not entirely meaningless nonsense."

1997 Loriot rearranged his television work and divided the six old, 45-minute Loriot episodes into 14 episodes with a length of 25 minutes. In this new cut, which is also titled Loriot , contributions from other Loriot programs such as Cartoon and Loriot's Telecabinet were also included. It had become necessary because at the time, German TV stations no longer allowed broadcasting slots for comedy formats that were longer than 30 minutes. Studio Interview is part of the sixth episode Unusual from the Concert Hall, Bad Luck in the Studio and a Living Room Disaster , which premiered on May 27, 1997 at Das Erste . The sketch is divided into the same four parts as in the original version, but Loriot's announcement about the last part is missing. In addition, the film was shown in the show for Loriot's 70th birthday on November 12, 1993 in one piece.

In the 1984 VHS collection Loriot's library , which contains many skits by Loriot and a few of cartoon , the studio interview is included in one version without interruption. The DVD collection The Complete TV Edition from 2007 contains this version as well as the animated film as part of Loriot's Clean Screen . During the compilation of the DVD collection, it became apparent that there were two versions of the film that only differed in the pattern of Häubl's tie. While he was wearing a polka dot tie on Radio Bremen's MAZ tape , it was striped in a film from Loriot's archive. Due to the better quality, Loriot and his friend and colleague Stefan Lukschy decided on the striped version.

The text of Studio Interview first appeared in 1981 in the anthology Loriot's dramatic works , which contains the texts of most of the skits in the Loriot series as well as some other television works by Loriot. The sketch is assigned to the chapter on culture and television . The text has since been published in other anthologies by Loriot.

analysis

In the person of Gilling, one can see clear criticism of television, which Loriot already expressed in earlier skits. In several places, Gilling proves his obvious incompetence and poor preparation for the interview. So Häubl has to draw his attention to the red light on the camera that indicates the beginning of the interview. He changed the name of Häubl's chair to “plasmatic pneutology”. Even after a correction by Häubl, he is not able to pronounce the correct name and uses his modification again instead. Another twist of the word he made when he said that Häubl was in a “legal public institution”, a twisting of the phrase under public law . Also Gilling's exclamation "Sa-gen-haft!" In response to Häubl's simple statement that pneumatic plastology is based on new findings in the psychosomatic field, made clear from the perspective of Germanist Uwe Ehlert, who dealt with the representation of misunderstandings in Loriot's work in his dissertation, Gillings only handled the subject of the interview in a very superficial manner.

Häubl's behavior is also rated negatively. According to Uwe Ehlert Häubl, his claim that Gilling could use his method himself without prior knowledge shows that he is a scientist who overestimates himself. After Gilling fails to reverse his nose, Häubl quickly goes over to reproach Gilling, thereby denying himself any responsibility for the accident and wanting to make himself unassailable as a scientist. Häubl's reaction to Gilling's question about the usefulness of his development reminds Germanist Stefan Neumann, who did his doctorate on Loriot's life and work, of clichéd answers from real scientists to such questions. According to Häubl, scientists work unselfishly in the service of humanity and science is not a question of usefulness, but of progress. In the end, however, Häubl himself questioned his unselfishness when he quotes Gilling in his office hours. In addition, Uwe Ehlert points out a logical error in Häubl's argumentation, because research “in the service of mankind” also assumes that the results are useful.

In addition to parodying television and science, faulty communication plays such a central role in the studio interview that the Germanist Felix Christian Reuter describes the animated film in his dissertation on Loriot's television sketches as “a real treasure trove of communication disorders”. The first such disorder occurs at the beginning of the sketch. When Gilling asked whether there was something wrong with the technology, Häubl replied that he could not ask him that. Gilling does not understand this answer acoustically and asks: “What do you mean?” Häubl then repeats his statement, which Gilling now relates to his second question. As a result, the two fail to clear up the misunderstanding. After a brief back-and-forth, they return to the original problem in that Gilling does not understand Häubl's statement that he shouldn't ask him about technical problems acoustically. Here the sketch is interrupted for the first time in the TV version, which resolves the disturbance and the two can continue their conversation in the next part undisturbed.

Gilling's attempt to bridge the waiting time is also to be assessed as a disturbed communication. In the conversation between the two of them there are some similarities in terms that suggest an alleged response to the other ("Capricorn and fish go very well. / I used to have two long-haired dachshunds, that didn't work at all."). Actually, however, both lead a monologue and are not interested in the statements of the other. According to Uwe Ehlert, this behavior, in which the conversation partner only serves as a key word, is often encountered in everyday communication. In Gilling's questions about various people from his circle of acquaintances, Felix Christian Reuter sees a parody of the rhetorical trick of name dropping , in which the speaker tries to enhance himself by naming prominent names.

In the studio interview there are also a number of sexual allusions that are typical of Loriot's work. Professor Häubl's enlarged finger is very reminiscent of an oversized phallus . When Gilling asked whether he could do this with any part of the body, the clichéd desire of many men for a larger penis echoed. When Häubl wanted to enlarge another body part, Gilling tried to prevent this, probably for fear of profanity on television. Häubl's tip to Gilling to think of something cold in order to make his nose smaller can also be understood sexually.

Classification in the overall work

At the beginning of his career, which began in 1950, Loriot worked as a humorous draftsman for various magazines. From 1967 his main field of activity shifted to television. He moderated the cartoon series , according to the subtitle "[e] in a foray across drawn humor". The series was initially conceived as a documentary program that was supposed to present humorous drawings and draftsmen from Germany and abroad. From the beginning, Loriot also contributed his own works. These initially consisted mainly of short animated films, which can be seen as a link between Loriot's graphic work and his later real film contributions. In the course of his television career, animated films were increasingly replaced by real film skits and were later limited primarily to depicting animals or abstract or absurd situations such as in studio interviews .

Compared to his cartoons produced for cartoon , studio interview is much more extensive with a length of six minutes. The subdivision of the film in the television episode was a new feature that, from Stefan Neumann's point of view, enabled Loriot to avoid length and also to make clear the passage of time, which is important for the sketch. Loriot used this stylistic device several times in the course of Loriot , for example with the men in the bathroom and the talking dog .

With the representation of a television program, Studio Interview takes up the most important basic motif in Loriot's television work at the time. Fictional television interviews were already shown frequently in the cartoon series, initially as an animated film, as in Family Users , later also as a real film, as in The Astronaut . In the single program Loriots Telecabinet , which was broadcast in 1974, two years after the end of Cartoon , a parody of a TV talk show formed the framework of the program. The first episode of Loriot was all about this topic. In addition to the studio interview , most of the other contributions, including the well-known sketch Der Lottogewinner , deal with television. In the subsequent episodes of Loriot , the television parody lost its importance. Instead, topics related to men and women as well as the family came to the fore, which mainly characterize the third and sixth episodes. These themes are also the main motifs of Loriot's feature films Oedipussi and Pappa ante portas .

The special form of the scientist interview has also been shown several times in cartoon . Like Häubl's ability to enlarge his body parts only through breathing techniques, these skits were also shaped by the representation of the impossible. In the animated film Rabbit, for example, a Professor Mutzenberger reports how he converted women into rabbits, and in the real- life sketch Professor E. Damholzer , the eponymous scientist presents a method for reducing people to sizes below a millimeter. With Loriot , the motif was taken up again in the fourth episode in the animated film The speaking dog , in which the head of an animal education college claims to have taught his dog to speak. From the point of view of Felix Christian Reuter, Loriot expressed his criticism of the belief in progress and his doubts about the feasibility of all things in the field of natural sciences and technology with these representations. Stefan Neumann also sees a connection with this type of sketch to the blind faith in science that prevailed at the time it was first broadcast and has persisted to this day. Another characteristic of Loriot's science parodies are made up technical terms that caricature the usual scientific language. “Pneumatic plastology” is an example of this. It is made up of the real adjective “pneumatic” (from ancient Greek πνευματικός pneumatikós , German “ concerning the wind or breath” ) and the invented word “plastology”. The latter in turn connects the morpheme "plasto", which is based on the Greek adjective πλαστός (plastos) ("formed", "formed", but also "fictitious", "false"), with the word ending -logie , which is common in science , which comes from the word λόγος ( logos ) .

As in the studio interview, incorrect or failed communication also plays an important role in Loriot's other interview situations. This theme is a central motif in Loriot's work and shapes not only his portrayals of public television appearances, but also those of private discussions, especially between men and women. In 1988 Loriot confessed in an interview with Hellmuth Karasek in Der Spiegel : “[...] I am most interested in people with a communication disorder. Everything that I find strange arises from the crumbled communication, from talking past each other, from the problems, from expressing oneself, but also from understanding what has been said. "The" almost inexhaustible fund "of examples of problematic communication used Uwe Ehlert in his dissertation on the "Representation of misunderstandings in Loriot's work."

Audio-visual media

  • Loriot's library. Volume 4: The stone louse and other catastrophes in film and television. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 1984, VHS No. 4 (in one piece).
  • Loriot - His large sketch archive. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 2001, DVD No. 2 (as part of Loriot 6 ).
  • Loriot - The complete television edition. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 2007, DVD No. 3 (as part of Loriot's Clean Screen ).
  • Loriot - The complete television edition. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 2007, DVD No. 4 (in one piece).

Text publications (selection)

literature

  • Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". The representation of misunderstandings in Loriot's work . ALDA! Der Verlag, Nottuln 2004, ISBN 3-937979-00-X , p. 297–315 (also dissertation at the University of Münster 2003).
  • 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 .
  • Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. Loriot's television sketches (=  Oliver Jahraus , Stefan Neuhaus [Hrsg.]: FILM - MEDIA - DISCOURSE . Volume 70 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-8260-5898-1 (also dissertation at the University of Trier 2015).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Loriot's Dramatic Works and Collected Prose , the text appeared as a studio interview . The text appeared in Das Frühstücksei under the title The Interview . This is also the name of the animated film in the VHS collection Loriot's library . In the DVD collection of his large sketch archive , the sketch is called Plastology . In the complete DVD edition, The Complete Television Edition, it is called Plastologie (studio interview) . The website loriot.de , operated by Loriot's community of heirs, writes “ Studio interview (also: Plastology )”. In the episode itself, as in most of Loriot's contributions, no title is given. Felix Christian Reuter calls the sketch in his dissertation Studio Interview , Stefan Neumann uses the title Das Studiointerview and Uwe Ehlert calls his analysis Studio Interview [Pneumatic Plastology] .
  2. ↑ All numbers for the enlarged body parts come from the stage directions of the published sketch text.
  3. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 45.
  4. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 226.
  5. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 255.
  6. ↑ Manfred Sack: Funny Loriot . In: The time . No. 12 , March 12, 1976 ( zeit.de ).
  7. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 304.
  8. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 415.
  9. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 411-412.
  10. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, pp. 459-460.
  11. ↑ Stefan Lukschy: The lucky one doesn't hit dogs. A Loriot portrait . 2nd Edition. Structure, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-351-03540-2 , p. 268 .
  12. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 305.
  13. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 306.
  14. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 308.
  15. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 307.
  16. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, pp. 311-312.
  17. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 256.
  18. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 309.
  19. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 164.
  20. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, pp. 300-302.
  21. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 303. Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, pp. 162–163.
  22. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, pp. 314-315.
  23. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 163.
  24. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 297.
  25. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 241.
  26. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 255-256.
  27. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 264, 269, 289, 298.
  28. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 220-222. Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, pp. 230-231.
  29. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 82.
  30. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 230.
  31. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, pp. 87-88.
  32. ↑ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 222.
  33. ↑ Hellmuth Karasek: "The Faun and his dream" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1988, pp. 216–222, here: 218 ( online ).
  34. ↑ Uwe Ehlert: "That is probably more of a communication disorder". 2004, p. 23.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles in this version on July 21, 2020 .