GERMANY: Humour is a serious business in Germany and this morning's Humour Congress in the western city of Essen will prove just that.
The two-day forum, now in its third year, has been organised by Mr Thomas Holtbernd, a theologian and psychologist who has spent years urging Germans to lighten up.
"There will be presentations, all very jovial, and also workshops on clowning and 'laughing yoga'," said Mr Holtbernd, author of a recent volume Leadership with Humour, in which he urged German business types to unstarch their collars.
He says Germans are slaves to their Prussian past, where humour was taboo and showed a lack of self-control. "Being happy and laughing are often seen in Germany as something negative," he said.
It's a challenging time to have a Humour Congress, when many Germans feel there is little to laugh about. Unemployment is stubbornly stuck at 10.5 per cent, the economy has been a basket case for years and a round of social welfare cuts looms in the new year.
At the same time, it remains to be seen whether the famously plodding German humour will succeed in relieving the gloom. The sly, cynical prewar humour of satirists Kurt Tucholsky and Erich Kästner has long since been replaced by sub-Carry On comedy. The most successful German comedy film this year was a limp Star Trek parody replete with bodily function humour and homophobic characters.
The prevailing gloom in Germany is reflected in the drop in registered participants, from 400 in previous years to an expected 100 today. Mr Holtbernd blames the conference name, but admits that nothing better occurred to him.
"Humour Congress doesn't sound at all funny, rather serious and bitterly earnest," he says. "But many people who work with humour have the opinion that they aren't taken seriously."