You can count good sketch comedies in Germany on one hand: In the recent past there was the Bullyparade. If you want to go back even further, you have Loriot. With Smeilingen, the public broadcaster is now trying to revive this genre. Not only do they fail disastrously at this, they don’t take their audience seriously.
Where’s the joke? Smeilingen doesn’t even succeed with the simplest punch lines
Smeilingen is an ARD sketch comedy produced with the help of SWR. Meet in the village of the same name, Smeilingen eccentric residents meet each otherwhose cast is impressive: Uwe Ochsenknecht embodies the opportunistic mayor, Mirja Boes, as an undertaker, has problems taking her job seriously and Heino Ferch and Hannes Jaenicke form an overzealous police duo who in turn take their job too seriously.
In the show’s first sketch, the two police officers stop a pensioner couple in their car and treat them like serious criminals: They have to get out and explain at gunpoint and with their backs to the police what they are planning to do in Smeilingen. The answer that they just want to go on vacation causes laughter from the police.
Where’s the joke here? Is it supposed to be funny that two police officers in the village are overzealous about their work? Should the fact that an old couple is treated like this by the police make me smile? I often asked myself questions like that, because the way this first sketch goes is the same in the whole series – or at least in the episodes I’ve seen. because after three out of six episodes I had to stop the show.
Smeilingen adopts outdated clichés from the 2000s
The series is struggling from one bad sketch to the next and forgets to think through her characters and the setting through to the end. The influencer couple Isi and Leif (Tony Bauer and Negah Amiri), who moved from a big city to the village, does not pose any potential urban-rural conflictbut is only intended to show how incapable influencers in the countryside would be if, for example, they confused a crow call with their cell phone alarm clock.
Also the “queer supermarket salesman” (Nico Stank), dubbed “queer supermarket salesman” (Nico Stank) by ARD, who “bounces off all the stereotypes”, Unfortunately, it falls into exactly these clichés. He speaks in a high-pitched voice, chews gum in every scene and complains about his customers’ fashion choices. This inevitably reminds me of outdated characters like the gay Turk (Thomas M. Held) from Six Pack. But if in doubt, I’m more likely to forgive a sketch comedy from the 2000s than Smeilingen, which will still rely on such clichés in 2024.
Instead of Smeilingen you should watch good films again. The only bright spot in Smeilingen are the scenes with the postman Ole (Tim Alberti). However, this is not because of the well-written sketches; the borrowed soundtrack from Whiplashwhich accompanies the slapstick passages with the postman. The tracks from the Oscar-winning film made me want to just switch off this bad comedy and let myself be inspired by JK Simmons’ acting again.
In general, after three 30 minutes, I asked myself, what I probably could have done better with time. In 90 minutes I could have watched a Disney classic like The Lion King. I would have had a lot more fun with films like Crank or Zombieland. Smeilingen, on the other hand, is not only not worth his time, but has also contributed further to that I still can’t take (sketch) comedy from Germany “seriously”.