Christmas (Loriot)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christmas (also Christmas at Hoppenstedts ) is a sketch by the German humorist Loriot . It shows the chaotic Christmas Eve of the Hoppenstedts, a middle - class family of four .

The sketch was first broadcast in December 1978 in the sixth and final episode of the Loriot series . Since 1997 it has been part of the 14th episode of the new cut version of the series entitled Christmas at Hoppenstedts , which is part of the ARD's standard program on Christmas days. The text of the sketch was first published independently in 1981.

action

You can see the living room of the Hoppenstedt family. Mr, Mrs and Grandpa Hoppenstedt decorate the Christmas tree with apples together. Grandpa Hoppenstedt states: “There used to be more tinsel !” Then his son and daughter-in-law explain to him that this year the tree will be “naturally fresh and environmentally friendly” and “[with] fresh natural apples”. After Grandpa asked when he would get his present, Mr. and Mrs. Hoppenstedt discussed the exact course of the events that followed.

Wife and Grandpa Hoppenstedt then carry a mountain of presents into the room. Dicki, the Hoppenstedts child, joins them. It only responds to the poem he has asked with the exclamation "Zicke-Zacke chicken poop". While they and their parents are starting to open the presents, Grandpa goes into the hallway and puts on a Santa suit. With that he enters the living room again, but is immediately recognized by his grandchild and demands that he finally get his present. The whole family is now hastily tearing open their presents. Father Hoppenstedt was given a lot of ties, mother Hoppenstedt a Heinzelmann suction blower, a combination of vacuum cleaner and hairdryer. Grandpa Hoppenstedt receives a record player that he tries out by playing the Helenenmarsch . His son then asks him to be comfortable and watch TV, which he then does.

Meanwhile, Father Hoppenstedt sets up one of the presents for Dicki, the game We build a nuclear power plant , which is based on a model of a nuclear power plant . The model explodes, leaving a hole in the floor through which you can look into the apartment below at a couple who are eating. When the husband reacts piqued, Mr. Hoppenstedt covers the hole with Christmas paper because he doesn't want to mess with "these philistines". Dicki is then sent to bed. Grandpa Hoppenstedt steps into the hole in the floor so that his leg hangs from the ceiling of the apartment. Father and mother Hoppenstedt plan to simply throw all packaging waste into the hallway. When they open the apartment door, however, an avalanche of rubbish falls on them and buries them under them. Above it, an elderly man with a Santa hat looks into the apartment and asks if you need a Santa Claus.

Production and publication

The sketch was created in 1978 for the sixth and final episode of the Loriot series produced by Radio Bremen . In contrast to many of Loriot's other skits, the majority was not shot in the studio, but in a private apartment. That is why it was shot on 16 mm film , which was otherwise mainly used for current reporting and which enabled a lower recording quality than the studio cameras. Only the recordings from the apartment below the Hoppenstedts were made in the studio.

The Hoppenstedt couple were portrayed by Evelyn Hamann and Heinz Meier , while Loriot took on the role of grandpa. Dicki Hoppenstedt was played by the then seven-year-old Katja Bogdanski. She got the role on the recommendation of the caretaker of her elementary school after no suitable child had been found at the casting, for which Hape Kerkeling had also applied. Bruno W. Pannek played the older gentleman at the end, and Grandpa Hoppenstedt's leg from the ceiling belonged to Stefan Lukschy , assistant director and editor of the show. The actors of the couple who live under the Hoppenstedts are not known.

Loriot VI was broadcast on German television on December 7, 1978 . Christmas is the last sketch in it and is therefore also the last sketch of the entire series. Unlike the previous episodes, most of the skits in the episode are more closely related. Almost all of the roles of Christmas appear in earlier skits. Grandpa Hoppenstedt can be seen in toys , the Hoppenstedt couple in the sketches Die Jodelschule , Kosakenzipfel and representative visit . Dicki also appears in the latter. The older man with the Christmas hat already offers his job in the yodel school and Kosakenzipfel . There you learn that he is a student. Some of the gifts could also be seen beforehand. Grandpa bought the atomic power plant in a toy store in Sketch Toys , and the Heinzelmann suction blower is shown to Ms. Hoppenstedt when she visits a representative .

At the moment when Grandpa Hoppenstedt turns on the television, the Christmas sketch is interrupted and Loriot VI shows the cartoon The Family User. A version of this film was already seen in Loriot's first cartoon series. For Loriot VI , Loriot shot it again. In 1983 publish VHS -Sammlung Loriots Vibliothek who also made instead Cartoon originating Cartoons Der Vampyr shown the family user replaced for the animated film Advent in sales call . Christmas was also shown in the program Loriot's 70th birthday from November 1993, this time the Beethoven trio from Loriot's Telecabinet can be seen on television.

In 1997, Loriot turned the six original 45 -minute episodes of Loriot into fourteen 25-minute episodes. Christmas is part of the final episode, Christmas at Hoppenstedts , which aired on July 22nd 1997 on Erste . While other of these new episodes have been compiled from material from different episodes, this episode is essentially an abridged version of the original episode Loriot VI . The sketches Salamo-Konzert , Die Jodelschule and Kosakenzipfel were removed , so that Bruno W. Pannek only appears as Santa Claus during Christmas . This time Grandpa Hoppenstedt sees an animated film on television with a boys' choir, which was also featured in Cartoon . The episode has now become a classic of German television programs at Christmas and is shown annually on various ARD channels. It has achieved a status similar to that of Dinner for One on New Year's Eve .

The text of the sketch first appeared in 1981 in the anthology Loriot's Dramatic Works , where it is assigned to the chapter Home and Family . The appearance of the older gentleman at the end is missing.

Analysis and classification

Many of the characters in Loriot's sketches correspond to the stereotypical image of a petty bourgeois , also pejoratively referred to as philistines or philistines. Loriot's comedy resembles that of Wilhelm Busch . These figures also include the Hoppenstedts, who, according to the ethnologist Jens Wietschorke, come from "the model book of the West German affluent philistine". The sketch Christmas at Hoppenstedts to the Wietschorke next Christmas , the skits Toys and sales call counts, he considers "[e] ne of the most relevant genre pictures of the petty bourgeoisie from Loriots spring".

Typical for the petty bourgeoisie is not only the need for order, which the couple shows through their precise planning of Christmas Eve, but also the constant demand and emphasis on cosiness . It is also typical, however, not to see oneself as a petty bourgeois, but to accuse others of being philistines, a behavior that the sociologist Karl Martin Bolte described as “ narcissism of small differences”. This is also shown by Mr. Hoppenstedt when he is upset about the couple below them.

The Hoppenstedts seem to have a great interest in environmental protection , a topic that was very topical at the time the sketch was created by the modern environmental movement . They express this interest right at the beginning by emphasizing the naturalness and environmental friendliness of their Christmas decorations. The fact that this is only a pseudo-interest is revealed by the abundance of gifts and the careless handling of packaging waste. This behavior is also considered typical of the modern petty bourgeoisie, who chases after new trends without critically examining them. The same is true of the toy nuclear power station, which can caricature the petty bourgeoisie's belief in progress as well as the careless use of nuclear energy .

The German scholar Stefan Neumann, who did his doctorate on Loriot's life and work, also sees the other gifts as part of Loriot's satire. Grandpa is given a record player "so that [he] can always play [his] favorite record in [his] room []". The "feast of love" thus serves to isolate the annoying old man even more from the family. The gift for Mrs. Hoppenstedt, a vacuum cleaner-hair dryer combination, is for Neumann the "symbol of the housewife par excellence" and is thus in complete contradiction to her emancipatory statements in the yodel school and representative visit . Mr Hoppenstedt's ties, on the other hand, are just a worn and therefore not very funny cliché.

The end of Christmas with the garbage falling on the couple is a rather dark and pessimistic conclusion to the Loriot series . According to Neumann, this pessimism appears several times in Loriot's work, but only marginally so as not to stand in the way of the comedy. In Christmas , too , he is weakened by the appearance of the older gentleman in the Santa hat. However, Loriot made it clear in 2004 in an interview with André Müller in Die Zeit : “I may still be optimistic on a small scale, but not on a large scale for a long time. I believe that we are irrevocably lost. "

Aftermath

Grandpa Hoppenstedt's saying “There used to be more tinsel”, for Stefan Neumann the “time-critical comment at all”, developed into a catchphrase and was taken up many times. For example, Diogenes Verlag , the regular Loriots publisher, has published several books with the slightly modified quote as their title. A podcast for the 75th birthday of Radio Bremen in 2020 also had this title. The phrase is also used in a wide variety of media, often in articles unrelated to Loriot, in which case tinsel is replaced with another word.

When a company was selling T-shirts with the slogan, Loriot's heirs went to court in 2019 and demanded an injunction against the use of what they consider to be a copyrighted sentence. The Munich I Regional Court , however, rejected this, which was confirmed by the Munich Higher Regional Court . For both dishes, the set did not reach a sufficient level of creativity . He experiences his specialty and originality by embedding it in the sketch Christmas at Hoppenstedts and the situation comedy. Without this embedding, it is "a rather everyday and unimportant sentence".

Audio-visual media

  • Loriot's library. Volume 3: The Hoppenstedt family or an idyll. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 1984, VHS No. 3.
  • Loriot - His large sketch archive. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 2001, DVD No. 4 (as part of Loriot 14 ).
  • Loriot - The complete television edition. Warner Home Video, Hamburg 2007, DVD No. 4 (as part of Loriot VI ).

Text publications (selection)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. The text of the sketch appeared under the title Christmas . The sketch is also named in Loriot's library and in the secondary literature by Stefan Neumann and Felix Christian Reuter. In the DVD collections Loriot - His Large Sketch Archive and Loriot - The Complete Television Edition, as well as on the website loriot.de operated by Loriot's community of heirs, he is called Christmas at Hoppenstedts .
  2. Stefan Lukschy : The lucky one doesn't hit dogs. A Loriot portrait . 2nd Edition. Structure, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-351-03540-2 , p. 152, 157 .
  3. Christoph Gunkel: Cult sketch "Christmas at Hoppenstedts": "Dicki, now look annoyed!" In: Spiegel Online . December 20, 2018, accessed November 22, 2020 .
  4. Stefan Lukschy: The lucky one doesn't hit dogs. A Loriot portrait . 2nd Edition. Structure, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-351-03540-2 , p. 157 .
  5. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 290.
  6. Loriot - Sketches. In: loriot.de. Accessed December 1, 2020 .
  7. 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. 457–458 (also dissertation at the University of Münster 2003).
  8. 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. 451 . Stefan Neumann ( Loriot und die Hochkomik. P. 412) names the Beethoven trio as well as the animated film Der Kunstpfeifer as an intercut. The same information can be found in Peter Paul Kubitz, Gerlinde Waz (ed.): Loriot. What! Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2009, ISBN 978-3-7757-2367-1 , p. 168 .
  9. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 418.
  10. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 403.
  11. Wolfgang Kaes : Memories of Loriot: There used to be more tinsel. In: General-Anzeiger . December 24, 2015, accessed November 28, 2020 .
  12. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 171.
  13. Jens Wietschorke: psychograms of the petty bourgeoisie: On the social satire of Wilhelm Busch and Loriot. 2013, p. 100.
  14. Jens Wietschorke: Psychograms of the petty bourgeoisie: On social satire with Wilhelm Busch and Loriot. 2013, p. 116.
  15. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, pp. 185, 192–193.
  16. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 181.
  17. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, pp. 197-199.
  18. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, pp. 187–188
  19. a b Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 296.
  20. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the hock comedy. 2011, pp. 297-298.
  21. André Müller: The human being is going under now . In: The time . No. February 7 , 1992 ( loriot.de ).
  22. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 351.
  23. Daniel Keel , Daniel Kampa (ed.): There used to be more tinsel. Bitter angry Christmas stories . Diogenes, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-257-23535-6 . Daniel Kampa (Ed.): There used to be more tinsel. Sneaky Christmas stories . Diogenes, Zurich 2006, ISBN 978-3-257-23588-3 . Daniel Kampa (Ed.): There used to be a lot more tinsel. Sneaky Christmas stories . Diogenes, Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-257-23677-4 .
  24. "There used to be more tinsel": 7 celebrities podcast on Radio Bremen. In: butenunbinnen.de . October 30, 2020, accessed November 22, 2020 .
  25. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. 2016, p. 14.
  26. No protection for Loriot quote: tinsel for everyone. In: tagesschau.de . December 20, 2019, accessed November 22, 2020 .