Is there anything more gratifying than the “victim” of an “offensive” joke turning around and saying that, actually, they found it hilarious? Take the German ambassador’s comments on Sunday. Asked about the controversial Fawlty Towers episode, The Germans – in which Basil Fawlty bombards a German family with Nazi references before engaging in a frenzied bout of goose-stepping – Miguel Berger felt it was time to set the record straight. It will, after all, be 50 years next October since the episode first aired.
“We here at the embassy think the iconic restaurant scene is funny,” said a spokesman for the ambassador, ahead of an adaptation of the BBC comedy series opening on the West End, based on three episodes, including The Germans. “To quote Basil Fawlty, we think it’s ‘veally good’.”
Had the BBC possessed even an ounce of supposedly non-existent Germanic humour, they wouldn’t have removed that iconic episode from their streaming platform, UKTV, four years ago, because of “racial slurs” (The Germans was subsequently reinstated with a warning about “offensive content and language”). And one hopes that the ambassador’s endorsement will shut down any fragile young whingers whose sanitised horizons haven’t yet been tainted by Fawlty Towers, and who would presumably be reduced to pools of molten offence three seconds into the episode. Because that particular episode isn’t just “veally good” entertainment, but a foreshadowing of the censorship we feel oppressed by today, when so many subjects are considered off-limits. Above all, it’s a lesson in the thing younger generations struggle with most: embracing discomfort.
There’s nothing comfortable about watching any of the 12 Fawlty Towers episodes, which were written by John Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth and aired between 1975 and 1979. Far from prompting the same cosy laughter as, say, Michael McIntyre, watching Basil Fawlty commit gaffe after gaffe while teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown induces a kind of hysteria in the viewer too. Even as we’re sobbing with laughter, we’re edgy, jittery, anxious: all the things young people fear (and, ironically, seem to suffer from) most.
From the moment the neurotic hotelier warns Polly not to “mention the war”, we know that he will do just that and worse. Because he’s Basil Fawlty, granted, but also because it’s human nature. When we’re told we’re not allowed to talk about something, it’s all we can think of. When we’re told we’re not allowed to talk about history – and all the hideously uncomfortable realities it contains – it doesn’t make those realities go away.
Obviously, Fawlty doesn’t last long. The slow car-crash begins with him repeating the German family’s meal request as “a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads”. This is followed up by him describing their requested food as “orders which must be obeyed at all times without question” and ends with him marching through the hotel with a finger over his lip.
Boom. In the eyes of young people today, what could be more offensive than this? (Never mind that the Germans are fine with it; as Gen-Zers, it’s their right to take on everyone else’s phantom offences.) Yet here is where the lessons can be learnt. You’ve heard of immersion therapy, when patients are exposed to enormous quantities of whatever they fear most? Well, I’d urge schools to use the episode as a de-fragilising Gen-Z resource. Why not send in Cleese, while we’re at it, as a kind of offence-spreading missionary?
Because if young people can just sit through their discomfort as they watch The Germans, if they can feel all that righteous affront to the tips of their fingers – really let it wash over them – then they will realise that offence doesn’t kill you. That’s right (whisper it): it makes you stronger. They may also realise that joking about atrocities can sometimes be the healthiest thing to do – certainly far healthier than pretending they never happened.
When UKTV took The Germans off their platform in 2020, Cleese wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “I would have hoped that someone at the BBC would understand that there are two ways of making fun of human behaviour. One is to attack it directly. The other is to have someone who is patently a figure of fun, speak up on behalf of that behaviour.”
That he should have had to explain comedy is truly scary, and does, for a moment, make one despair. But then I look at the German ambassador’s comments at the weekend and remember that, when it is understood, comedy unites unlike anything else on Earth.
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