Germans don’t really have a word for ‘funny’, which seems appropriate enough. The country’s reputation for humourlessness isn’t entirely unearned, as anyone who has heard their own joke explained back to them in clipped English knows too well. There are words that get close – witzig, komisch, drollig, humorvoll, and spaßig all somehow mean something close to funny. But the word Germans are most likely to use to describe the things that make them laugh reveals a culture that takes its merriment very seriously. English retains a certain suspicion of comedy: ‘funny’ derives from the Middle English ‘fon’, meaning to make ‘a fool’ of or ‘to be a fool’. When Anglo speakers say something is ‘funny’ it’s often unclear whether they mean ‘funny ha ha’ or ‘funny strange’. The German ‘lustig’, on the other hand, suggests neither madness nor idiocy, but pleasure and desire.

The greatest humour in the language has a kind of erotic intensity rare in the English-speaking world – Hollywood and Bollywood divisions between leading men and comic actors don’t really work for German speakers. The carnality and comedy of performers such as Klaus Kinski and Christoph Waltz have always been inseparable. Cary Grant used his wit to disarm his good looks. He made himself approachable and likeable by being funny. For Kinski and Waltz, by contrast, the comic often serves as a kind of seduction – you laugh at Waltz playing a Nazi and feel uncomfortable about the part of you that finds him compelling and attractive.

The lines between the comic (Lustspiel) and the tragic (Trauerspiel) have rarely been as neat in German-speaking lands. Take Till Eulenspiegel, Germany’s answer to Robin Hood. Eulenspiegel was an apocryphal wandering joker who delighted in fooling powerful nobles and wealthy burghers. East Germany’s main satirical magazine was named in his honour, and to play with his story has been a rite of passage for generations of German authors. Daniel Kehlmann’s recent novelistic account of his life begins with one of the trickster’s most famous gags: walking on a tightrope, Eulenspiegel convinces the citizens of a village to throw him their left shoes. Footwear was not taken for granted in pre-Industrial Europe. When Eulenspiegel drops them in a heap from his perch above the crowd, a mad rush to collect their property begins. One man is killed. Another is maimed. Till moves on. The villagers remember the joke as a moral demonstration of the pettiness and violence that lurks behind bucolic facades (the surplus of savagery of the Thirty Years War made for cheap laughs).

In English, we say a joke was a riot. In German, they mean it: einen Streich spielen, the word for a prank or a practical joke, literally means ‘to play a beating’. A coup d’état is a Staatsstreich. Much of the best comedy in the language depends on the possibility of real harm for its effect, and its early literature is full of brutal gags like Eulenspiegel’s manufactured riot. Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668/1669) begins with the murder of the protagonist’s family by a roving band of soldiers, and follows him through conscription by various armies. He’s accused of espionage; subjected to deliberate alcohol poisoning in an attempt to induce brain damage; sentenced to death; shipwrecked; and enslaved. At some point, he thinks that by cross-dressing he might avoid conscription into yet another army, until the very real possibility of rape presents itself and he decides to take his chances fighting.