In Praise of Grant

Under the Habsburgs and later in the period of harsh state censure under Metternich in the mid-19th century, these forms of humorous criticism of the times and politics were driven underground but continued to exist in the Viennese coffeehouses, where the literary scene gathered, but also among folk singers and couplet artists who continued to use critical humor, albeit in a slightly different form. In this period, a strong link sprang up between the two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna and Budapest, which in the meantime had developed its own brand of Jewish jargon comedy that quickly made its way to Vienna. Performances usually took place at the Budapest Orpheum, a seedy joint that finally settled in Leopoldstadt in 1892. Later, comedians and cabaret artists in today’s sense like Armin Berg, Fritz Grünbaum, Karl Farkas, Hans Moser, Georg Kreisler, as well as Heinrich Eisenbach, who directed the Budapest Orpheum for a long time, discovered this stage for their own special brand of dark entertainment.

The Viennese cabaret of the interwar period was in close contact with the cabaret scene in Berlin. The Jewish cabaret artist and chansonier Armin Berg took the song Der gewissenhafte Maurer (The Conscientious Bricklayer), written by Otto Reutter, and „Viennized“ it, i.e. gave it local color.

After World War II, the Viennese cabaret scene was partly refounded by returning Jewish refugees. Karl Farkas, who had managed to escape to the USA, reopened the legendary Simpl

Gerhard Bronner, who had fled to Palestine via Czechoslovakia in 1938, founded the successful cabaret group Namenloses Ensemble (“Nameless Ensemble) in the 1950s together with Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz, who had already been active in the interwar period.

In the early 1970s, Austrian cabaret seemed to be a „fossilized“ variety of bourgeois theater that could hardly keep up with the rapidly changing social, cultural, and technological world. New forms emerged in connection with the incipient student alternative and beisl (a typical form of Viennese pub) culture. The breaking point for this was the 1976 arena occupation, which was less a „belated 1968“ and more a „Viennese Summer of Love,“ as music journalist Heinrich Deisl analyzes in his book Im Puls der Nacht (“In the Pulse of the Night”). Artists like Roland Neuwirth & Extremschrammeln, Kurt Sowinetz or André Heller gave Viennese cabaret a distinctly rebellious and revolutionary potential.

Today, cabaret in Vienna has settled down a bit and become mainstream, especially due to its popularity on television, but it still retails its unique mix of the literary absurd, mixed with disrespect for authority and the use of Wiener Schmäh, a uniquely Viennese type of ironic-cynical humor that is sometimes wrongly translated in travel brochures as “Viennese Charme”.

The Viennese are inordinately proud of their bad manners, and they will give them free rein any chance they get. As a young journalist, I to share a desk with a guy from Favoriten, one of the distinctly less than posh districts of Vienna famous for the rough manners of its population, and his favorite expression was „Oasch“ („ass“), which he used to address just about anybody. After a while, I started using it myself, but of course I am not from Vienna, so the excuse is slightly lame…