Austria has managed to acquire three heads of government within the past year; on Sebastian Kurz was followed by Alexander Schallenberg, who was followed Karl Nehammer. There have been dozens of juicy scandals, thousands of newspaper articles about a country either in turmoil or in decline. And hundreds of thousands of intra-government chats that seem to have been written with no other purpose than to prove both theses at the same time and to keep the chancellor rotation machine running. Don’t say that nothing is going on in Austria.
Maybe there’s too much going on. And maybe that’s the reason why numerous well-known cabaret artists exercise great restraint in their current stage programs when it comes to topicality. You can’t keep up, and not just because Covid is still faster than politics. Joseph Hader In his current stage show, he plays a man you’d rather not know, a show-off, an asshole who throws up on humanity from the safe distance of his ignorant self. Michael Niavarani is working on a “History of Comedy” from the “Ancient Greeks to the Creeping Ancients”. Robert Palfrader relaunches his solo evening “Alone” about “believers, agnostics, atheists and everyone who wants to become one”. At times, Florian Scheuba does more journalism than political satire, because a higher number of hits is possible there.
Alone on stage, he marches effortlessly through the world history of impositions
and Thomas Maurer? The popular cabaret artist, a permanent member of the “State Artists”, also reported back in Vienna last week with a new solo program. It says “contemporary by passion” and avoids, with the exception of a few detours, current references to Austrian politics. If you wanted to sum it up in two sentences, his story is the story of all of us: We want to live consciously, enlightened, climate-neutrally and tolerantly. But damn hoe, it’s just too heavy.
Which is genetic, as the 54-year-old apologetically states, because a bad conscience has a “natural upper limit”. You can stop smoking and stop eating Leberkässemmel and be for the inheritance tax and use less energy and want to mega woke gender, but then come the subconscious and the addiction and the exhaustion and the nice outlets in the gas stations where besides Tchicks everything is there from the hard drive to the coffee table there. And there it is: over. Maurer’s Tour de Tourette meanders between the Aztecs and capitalism, Andreas Hofer and the Taliban, Jeff Bezos, high-tech and climate change. His eyes are on oligarch spaceships in the sky, not mediocre politicians on Earth. He prefers to work on the human sacrifices of the Aztecs than on the sacrificial myth of current opponents of vaccination. This may be partly due to the bitterness that Maurer’s father died of Covid a year ago, when the vaccine would have been available. Or the fact that the fight against the climate catastrophe is unlikely to be won in the Hofburg.
The Viennese is a good actor, which cannot be said about all cabaret artists. Alone on stage with a chair, he marches effortlessly through world history of impositions and changes, without any props, just qua facial expression, from the Aztec king to the Tyrolean national hero Andreas Hofer to the Viennese Bobo, who longs for organically grown cocaine with a seal of approval. He changed it consistently, only waiving the words “Nazi” and “asshole” with thanks. Despite all this, Maurer’s stage character is at peace with himself: the man does what he can, he makes an effort to live ethically. The high-tech oligarchs of this world should judge the rest. You can still hand over a bit of responsibility, right?