For a guy at the center of an international diplomatic incident, Jan Böhmermann is pretty self-effacing and modest. Funny, for sure, since comedy and satire are his profession. But also thoughtful and intellectual, as well as bemused that a performance on his weekly TV show has triggered a court case and raised the ire of Turkey’s leader.
Mr. Böhmermann, who met with the editorial board on Tuesday, is the German comedian who caused a ruckus in March by reading a crude poem intended to offend Turkey’s incredibly thin-skinned president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Erdogan, an autocrat who is doing his best to crush free speech in his own country and beyond, responded by formally demanding that the comic be punished under an obscure 19th century German law that allows prosecution for insulting a foreign leader.
The legal complaint seems to be having its intended chilling effect. Mr. Böhmermann said that as he returns to his show on May 12 after a hiatus of several weeks, he will be more cautious. Knowing the prosecution hangs over him, “I’m actually not allowed to say anything about the Turkish president,” he said, adding: “I’m not as free, as you can imagine. I go on stage and I have to think about what I can say.”
What few would have predicted is that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a democracy where free speech is supposed to be a cherished right, allowed the case to proceed. It would not have gone forward if she mustered the courage and good sense to say no.
Instead, she unwisely chose to indulge Mr. Erdogan because she needs his help in stemming another potentially overwhelming and destabilizing flow of refugees to Europe this year.
“We were completely surprised at the response of the chancellor,” Mr. Böhmermann said. When he and his team were putting together the segment on Erdogan, no one even knew about the obscure law he is now being investigated for violating.
The poem was intended to be edgy but it was “more like an illustration of an insult” than an actual insult, intended to “show the German public what satire is and what is allowed and what is not allowed in Germany.” He added, “we didn’t think about it too much.”
There are ironies in this story. One is that Mr. Erdogan used poetry to make a political point in 1997 when he was a rising Islamist-leaning politician and was jailed for four months by the country’s military and secular leaders. The other is that Mrs. Merkel has a reputation as a human rights defender and was even among the world leaders who gathered in Paris last year to show solidarity with the French people after the deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine.
Mr. Böhmermann called Mrs. Merkel’s contradictory reactions “quite strange,” especially since “we are not Charlie Hebdo. We don’t make fun of religion at all.”
He also finds her sense of humor lacking. Unlike President Obama who is “the greatest comedian in the world,” he said, “I’ve never heard Angela Merkel telling a joke and I can’t even imagine her being like funny in a natural way.”
Mr. Böhmermann expects to present his side of the story to prosecutors soon. He said he has “great confidence in the German judicial system” and is “pretty confident that they will deal with it in a just way.” The only just conclusion is to discard Mr. Erdogan’s spurious complaint and repeal the anti-democratic law.
In parting, Mr. Böhmermann offered some thoughts on the problems with being a German comic, reproduced below:
Jan Böhmermann: We proved that we are a complete humorless nation. […] I think it’s because of our language. […] In English you can make a joke and you don’t—you don’t ah, give away the punchline during the setup. But our language is so complicated that you always give away the punchline during the setup, because we like, put the verbs— it’s so, it’s strange, it really is strange. Yeah. It is, it really is.
Q: The location of the verb is a problem.
Jan Böhmermann: Yeah, the location of the verb. Put it at the end. You don’t know what a German wants to say to you until you get to the end. Very rude, or very nice, but you have—it’s always nerve-wracking to—you know, it’s tough, it really is tough to—it’s actually no joke. It’s tough to be funny in German.