In an old farmhouse on the outskirts of this Bavarian capital, a group of 20 Germans are flapping their arms up and down and clucking hysterically like chickens.
“Come on, you chickens, let me hear you cluck, cluck, cluck, and bock, bock, bock, and flap your wings like you mean it,” commanded Heiner Uber, a giddy 45-year-old professor of laughter, doing his own best chicken imitation and sending the group into fits of raucous cackling.
Helmut Kohl, a former chancellor of Germany, once said that Germans were so afraid to laugh that they would hide in the basement to do it. But Uber is determined to change that. The founder of a new chain of German laughing schools, Uber wants to help Germans grapple with 12 percent unemployment, dreary weather and a difficult history by teaching them how to have a good guffaw.
Check out the url for the article! IHT has a sense of humor.
Only Germans (well, some of them) would need classes about humor.
Fortunately, younger Germans don’t have that problem, based on my daughter’s experiences as an exchange student in northern Germany. The students visited us later in the year. They were very nice, and understood American humor well enough to laugh at the right places in conversations.
I hate clowns