The “F” on the far left of the row of letters on stage is what Bruno Jonas is drawn to. F stands for woman, joy and freedom. “Our freedom gets around quite a bit. It was already in the Hindu Kush and now in the Ukraine,” says the cabaret artist with a mischievous smile. That smile is one of Bruno Jonas’ trademarks. If he raises his hand and tilts his head, the visitor knows that he is about to be mean. But Bruno Jonas’ side blows don’t come loudly or flatly, they sneak up quietly and gradually increase.
The cabaret artist, who spent his childhood and youth in the strictly Catholic Passau but has lived in Munich for decades, analyzes people with razor sharpness. He especially likes to take politicians apart piece by piece, downright dissects their weaknesses, and then put on that mischievous smile and insert a little pause in which the viewer can draw his own conclusions. Sometimes it takes visitors a few seconds to respond. But then they clap all the more enthusiastically. “My speech” is the name of the program with which Bruno Jonas brought this year’s humor festival in Bernried to a grand close on Friday. The appearance of the well-known cabaret artist, who performed Brother Barnabas on the Nockherberg from 2004 to 2007, attracted many visitors. Of the 300 seats in the summer cellar, 270 were occupied.
Bruno Jonas always updates his program according to the latest political developments. Chancellor Olaf Scholz can’t remember anything in the Cum-Ex scandal because he obviously can’t use the truth that would come to light. In general, the truth has no place in politics. The “fairy tale teller” Robert Habeck did not put insolvency and production in the right order and Annalena Baerbock sent a signal against the war in Ukraine with changing little costumes. You need a healthy double standard, especially in war, he says, adding: “I’m against war, but if I do, then CO2-free.” With that you could undermine Putin.
Bruno Jonas makes the audience think by drawing conclusions that the viewer hasn’t even thought of, such as that Putin’s lying propaganda cannot be compared to George W. Bush’s lying propaganda in the Iraq war. In between, he softly sings the lyrics of Heinrich Heine’s song “I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean”. This song runs through the program like a red thread. Heinrich Heine let the boat go down with the team at the end, says Bruno Jonas and the viewer understands the dig at the traffic light government. The cabaret artist keeps coming back to the Greens, to Anton Hofreiter and his role as savior and that the Greens will probably soon become a religious party for which you have to pay church taxes. “Friday for Future” will soon be renamed “Dictatorship for Future” and showers in sweaters will be suggested.
Incidentally, Bruno Jonas did not come to his speech that evening. But that has a system with him; because he already fails with the address. With a view to the gender debate and in times when people can choose their gender themselves, he wonders whether he should call the audience “those present” or “people”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/ starnberg/.”Lebende” would also be possible as long as “death” (too male) has not yet been examined in terms of gender. In his opinion, death could be replaced by energy transition (because the transition from life to death is ultimately an energy transition). Then the cabaret artist, whose career began in the 70s with performances with Sigi Zimmerschied in Passau and later through the show, pans windshield wipers became known to return to the letter “F”, meaning “Ms.” The word will disappear from the German vocabulary and will be replaced by “body”, he regrets. The cabaret artist continues the story of how the word woman stands in front of his front door and asks for asylum. Bruno Jonas sets punchlines in a targeted manner. You can tell that he spent a long time honing his sentences. “I’m working on ironizing the West,” he explains, for example, or: “You’re a cabaret artist if you still think.” And because Bruno Jonas likes to tell stories so much, he makes the audience laugh after the break with refreshingly relaxed telephone hotline experiences, before he transitions to “the humor zone in Bernried”, which is surrounded by a dense wall of German seriousness, behind which you can certainly laugh.