The Swiss cabaret artist Emil Steinberger sits during a photo session in the Kunsthalle restaurant. Steinberger will celebrate his 90th birthday on January 6, 2023. (to dpa “Emil and the timeless jokes: Swiss cabaret artist turns 90”) +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++
Photo: dpa
The Swiss comedian Emil Steinberger is now 91 and is due to receive “The Golden Eye” in October, awarded by the Zurich Film Festival for his life’s work, and rightly so. He was always very active. First a postal worker, he trained as a graphic artist, became an advertiser, theater maker and cinema operator before he became known in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR plus Austria under the motto “E for Emil”, at the same time as Otto Walkes, who also relied on his first name over the 70 years .
But unlike Otto, Emil was never satisfied with clumsiness as a recipe for success. The Germans found Waalkes funny because he made fourth-grade jokes (which he had the leading “Titanic” people write for him), and Steinberger (who wrote his own gags) because he has a Swiss accent. Neither at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus nor at the “Kessel Buntes” did they know that the Lucerne native could present his rather gentle “grotesque miniatures” (“Filmdienst”) in three languages (Schwyzerdütsch, Standard German, French).
While for Otto social criticism consisted of making fun of Heino, Emil made fun of the paranoia about so-called foreign infiltration, the right-wing’s primal fear, in the 1979 film “The Swiss Makers.” His humor comes not from contempt, but from empathy. It’s an old-school humanism joke.
At 60, he wanted to free himself from the Emil figure so that he wouldn’t be “eaten up” by it, as he said. He moved to New York, wrote columns for the German-language press, came back, founded a publishing house and did cabaret again, while Waalkes froze artistically as a kind of BRD godfather of comedy. Waalkes is often asked whether humor can make a difference. He likes to say that people should laugh, that thinking is too tiring.
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