Die Welt ist Jokus
('The world is a joke')
Gags, pranks and satires
'You don't create humour; it is a state of mind. Something like a sixth sense. Above all it is, if you want to put it like that, a form of optimism.' – Cami
With their mini dramas full of subtle double entendres, Georges Courteline and Cami, who hail from France, continue to be hugely entertaining. The delicious catastrophes, the language somersaults, their ridiculing of the sublime and scenes from everyday life also highlight our worst nightmare, which is that the world is much crazier and at the same time much more mundane than we permit ourselves to believe.
The texts written by the Russian Daniil Charms are a fusion of nonsense, Kafkaesque menace and bitter sobriety. Peter Urban's translations have ensured that the works of this great master of cruel paradoxes, who died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad in 1942, came to be considered absurd classics in Germany: 'However, this Russian clearly states: it is not his works that are illogical or absurd, but the life he describes: that is the truly absurd.' Boris Aljinović takes us on a tour d'horizon through the deep abyss of the sometimes comical, sometimes sad, but also always exceedingly strange human existence at breakneck speed.
The stage and screen actor Boris Aljinović played one of the inspectors in the Berlin-set episodes of the long-running television crime series Tatort from 2002 to 2014. He has acted in productions at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin, the Ernst Deutsch Theater Hamburg and the Hamburger Kammerspiele, for example. He has also contributed to a number of audio book recordings. A wide audience also knows Boris Aljinović as a director.
