The State Is the Problem, Not the Joke

There’s something fitting about Jan Böhmermann announcing the end of his legal ordeal in a press conference with no press—just a camera, a YouTube upload, and that particular brand of deadpan relief that comes from surviving an absurdity you always suspected would collapse under its own weight.

The backstory, for anyone who missed it: Böhmermann, Germany’s sharpest television satirist, read a deliberately crude poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on his ZDF show in spring 2016. The poem was designed to be legally borderline—that was the point, a meta-commentary on what a real insult poem might look like. Erdoğan, a man famously allergic to mockery in any form, sued. Angela Merkel, caught between protecting a comedian and protecting Germany’s diplomatic relationship with Turkey during the EU’s refugee-deal negotiations, chose the latter, publicly apologized for the poem, and allowed prosecution to proceed under a nineteenth-century law against insulting foreign heads of state.

The charges have now been dropped. The whole enterprise—the lawsuit, the state’s grotesque decision to permit it, Merkel’s apology—collapsed under its own absurdity, which was always where this was headed. I personally am happy that I can go out again and make jokes about any topic, Böhmermann said, looking visibly lighter. Now it’s clear: it was a joke.

What the affair revealed had nothing to do with the poem’s content, which was juvenile by design and obviously satirical by context. It revealed Erdoğan as exactly what anyone paying attention already suspected—a man so brittle about his own image that he weaponized international law against a comedian—and Germany as a country willing to compromise press freedom for diplomatic convenience. The case drew international coverage and did more damage to Erdoğan’s reputation than any poem could have managed. If a joke can cause a state crisis, Böhmermann said, that’s not the joke’s problem. It’s the state’s.

He’s free to make bad puns again. Erdoğan is still Erdoğan. The insulting-foreign-dignitaries law was eventually abolished. In the end, the joke won.