Authors

Alfrun Kliems¹;  ¹ Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

Discussion

Beginning with the Berlin’s Club of Polish Losers, established in the 1980s, the paper will discuss comedy by migrants, and namely on migration themes in Germany and the Czech Republic. The Polish Losers exoticize themselves, seal themselves off, offensively desecrate heroes, and engage in the destruction of meaning. Another format to be addressed is the Prague based “Stand-up comedy s pšizvukem” (Stand-up Comedy with an Accent), a group of artists coming from the Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, or Kazakhstan. They treat migration from an inter-Slavic perspective, or rather play with this label. Both examples, the “Polish Losers” and “Comedy with an Accent,” claim to scrutinize their countries of residence from a “foreign perspective,” including migration authenticity that has become part of a folklore business, or attribution industry. How both groups employ such clichés and ascriptions as foreign, East, or Slavic will be a major concern of the paper.