Harald Schmidt drove Germany into insomnia. Or at least the part of the Germans who once wanted to be led into the night very late in the evening with his dirty jokes, finely soaped chats with big and small celebrities and all kinds of witty games.
Then it was already after midnight and there was no longer any thought of enough rest. How long has it been?
No other German mocker before or after him managed to gain a foothold with a late-night talk show in this country. Thomas Gottschalk tried his best, but failed (of course!) because of himself. Anke Engelke took over after Schmidt’s self-chosen TV farewell in 2003, but was then even counted by Rudi Carrell. Women couldn’t do that. The hyper-talented Engelke could also do this very bony, male parade format, at least a little. But then she wasn’t allowed to go any further.
Basic care for some, aloof for others
However, Schmidt did not disappear from the stage at the time. He used the time off for a comprehensive trip around the world with his family. He always wanted to be private as well as “media slut”. According to his own statement, the Neu-Ulmer always saw himself as a canteen mime who kept the rest of the staff happy before and after the screening.
So Schmidt, who, together with his Sancho-Panza blend Herbert Feuerstein, established one of the most frivolous stupid shows on German television with Schmidteinander and had previously driven “Understand You Fun” mischievously to the wall as moderator, returned after a year of consciously enjoying boredom and continued to joke on ARD. At a princely salary that possibly even exceeded that of the directors.
However, the show then suffered from its austerity program of all things: no more than two days a week. Later, the frequency became even lower, Oliver Pocher was added as a point partner brushed on riot, changed the channel – until Schmidt, once “basic supply” for the time being and a stroke of luck for Sat1, got such low ratings on pay TV on Sky that they no longer did were measurable.
You could call that tragic, also because there is no comedian in this country who at the same time makes jokes about Poland, talks about the Goncourt brothers and reenacts Shakespeare scenes with Playmobil figures. If Schmidt didn’t care so provocatively. Each interview is now a report from the life of a pensioner, a mock staging of one’s own lack of interest.
Of course there is a successor, Schmidt knows that too. Jan Böhmermann, who wrote jokes for him in the late phase of the show, never made a secret of wanting to step into the fine leather shoes of his role model (but would also prefer to inherit Gottschalk and Lanz at the same time). But because the policeman’s son is a lousy stand-up August and, in addition to his sometimes brilliant studio and internet activities, hardly dares to do anything aesthetic, all that remains is non-binding irony and a disdainful seriousness, which shouldn’t be confused with satire at all. His viewers may not even know what he would be talking about if it were suddenly about Dostoyevsky, the Berlin Volksbühne or father talks on the playground.
But it was precisely in this terrain that Schmidt preferred to fish. With the cheese-faced Manuel Andrack, he got his own production manager in front of the camera in order to integrate him as a seemingly carefree chattering sidekick and as a parody of the typical German petty bourgeois. An almost ingenious coup that Böhmermann tried to repeat with the ex-“Harald Schmidt Show” author and former Udo Brömme actor (but without any discernible success, because Kabelka remained, until he finally disappeared, only scornfully laughing prompter).
In his show, Schmidt enjoyed making fun of the bourgeois audience to which he himself belonged. According to the motto: I know them, because I am like that myself. He often mocked AZ celebrities nastily, but the prerequisite was always that they could also listen carefully with an annual salary of more than 200,000 euros. A Twitter shitstorm today has more power than any meanness of Schmidt.
Germany was never understood better than with Harald Schmidt: he drank wine and spat it out with visible disgust. He visited the Ikea studio. He sent secret Santas to his staff at Christmas. He spent hours telling stories about traveling across the country on the ICE and slipping from one delay to the next. Often enough he was accompanied by a camera. The “Harald Schmidt Show”, which was never a one-man show, also developed into a large amateur theatre, a fun playground where everything was possible – of course also because the budget was limited and the audience was very busy also made do with cardboard walls.
Harald Schmidt always seemed to know what he was doing
Of course, the “Harald Schmidt Show” is Schmidt’s life’s work, who occasionally travels the world on the “dream ship” at the expense of fees and almost ended up as police chief in the Black Forest “crime scene”. But since Schmidt himself is the biggest role in his life, the boy from Swabia doesn’t need anyone else. Everything else – the tangled interviews on fixed occasions, columns in “Focus”, a video blog in “Spiegel”, books about Thomas Bernhard and the chip shops in his novels – are just mischievous accessories.
You have to put it this way: Harald Schmidt didn’t do much wrong after the star of the “Harald Schmidt Show” began to decline after its heyday between 2000 and 2003. But the relevance that the self-declared conservative had fought for at times was visibly lost. Perhaps the spirit of the times overtook him. That happens in his profession. At some point only the feuilletonists watched – and realized that the Beckett actor (Schmidt played Lucky in a production of “Waiting for Godot” at the Bochum Schauspielhaus) felt very comfortable in an absurd theater of self-imposed media decline. A restless spirit who understood that, if you do it right, you can’t go shipwreck in the German media industry.
On Thursday (August 18) Harald Schmidt, the irreplaceable and only king of the Late Night, will be 65 years old. He’s probably enjoying the eulogies in the newspapers of this country about his exploits, which are slipping further and further into the past, while enjoying a cappuccino. Probably not with oat milk.