Laughs Labour’s Lost: The lighter side of Wagner is sometimes lost in translation, feels Niall Hoskin

Review of Joachim Köhler, The Laughing Wagner: His Wit, Puns, Pranks & Dare-devil Stunts, tr. Tom Artin (Free Scholar Press, 2015).

March 2016, Volume 10, Number 1, 93–6.

Joachim Köhler is not one to shy away from difficult matters. His 1997 Wagners Hitler: der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker (Wagner’s Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple) made waves with its assertion that Wagner had ‘amongst others, inspired the persecution and extermination of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany‘. His recantation in the article ‘Wagner’s Acquittal’ (The Wagner Journal, viii/2) was no less sensational. Now he takes on a similarly thorny problem, one exemplified by Spike Milligan’s gag ‘German humour is no laughing matter’.