Michael “Bully” Herbig would no longer do his Karl May film parody “Der Schuh des Manitou” the way he did back then. “I made the film 22 years ago and it was a parody of films that were in cinemas 60 years ago,” explained the 54-year-old comedian and actor on the Radio Bremen talk show “3 nach 9” broadcast on Friday evening. Back then, it had to do with the joy of playing and the realization of dreams. Today he would no longer do it that way, said Herbig.
Why? “The comedy police have become so strict.” That takes a bit of innocence and freedom, the comedian said in an interview with Giovanni di Lorenzo. The film was released in the summer of 2001 and was shot in Spain and Bavaria from April to June 2000.
Herbig said he thinks it’s “totally right” that certain things aren’t talked about like they were 20 years ago.
“I have a total understanding of that, I’m totally open.” He just thinks that the discussion is sometimes a bit polemical. “I have the impression that everyone is so loud at the moment that no one is listening to the other. The only thing that connects the two camps is that you could say they are all dissatisfied with the overall situation.” Herbig said he didn’t have an answer for himself, a little at a loss. He’s trying to form a smart opinion. He was asked about the current raging debate about cultural appropriation and racism.
This recently increased again when the Ravensburger publishing house announced in mid-August that it would stop the delivery of two children’s books on the film of the same name, “The Young Chief Winnetou” and remove them from the program. In an Instagram post, Ravensburger wrote that user feedback showed “that we hurt the feelings of others with the Winnetou titles”. A number of users of the social media platform accused the company of giving in to criticism. There was also support for the decision.
Herbig said on “3 after 9” that making a comedy or film is much more difficult today than it used to be: “Because you have the feeling that you step on people’s toes very quickly.” If someone throws the argument at you, “You have hurt my feelings”, then you can’t say “That’s not true at all.”
He explained: “If at some point there is a catalog that says, about the person, about the people, you can make jokes, not about this culture group, not about these people either, then you get into such a rut – Well, then I don’t have fun with it anymore – then people have to do it who maneuver their way through it like that, but that takes some of the joy out of me and then I see, if you gallop further in this direction, that very dark times are ahead of us, because then at some point there will be people who will simply say, “I don’t do comedies anymore – that’s too hot for me.”
Herbig became popular in the 90s with the comedy show “Bullyparade”. The film “Der Schuh des Manitou” is about the two blood brothers who were wrongly accused of murder, Abahachi (Herbig) and Ranger (Christian Tramitz) – parodies of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. The film also features the gay Abahachi twin brother Winnetouch, who runs a beauty farm on the “Powder Pink Ranch”. Many like the comedy, which has had millions of cinema viewers, for others it is just a cloak. The queer gay cliché in it has often been criticized.
Herbig also said that it becomes very complicated when a group that is shown in the film is divided into camps. Then there are people who say “I find it funny, I recognize myself there, I feel caught, I can laugh about it” and others who say “I feel discriminated against or I feel insulted”. Herbig: “Then I no longer know who to listen to.”
As a director, Herbig will be bringing the film “A Thousand Lines” with Elyas M’Barek and Jonas Nay to the cinema at the end of September. This is a cinematic approach to the scandal surrounding the “Spiegel” reporter Claas Relotius, who goes by the name Lars Bogenius in the film.