Outsourcing the Bars

Klaas Heufer-Umlauf cannot rap. This is not a criticism—it is simply a fact about one of Germany’s most recognizable TV entertainers, a man so definitively white that he could be the dictionary entry for it, everything implied. And yet, for the launch of his late-night show Late Night Berlin, he found a workaround: let Siri, Alexa, and Google Home do the rapping for him, with all the violent obscenity a digital assistant’s voice synthesis can deliver.

The results are exactly as deranged as that sounds. Alexa, the cunt is back, plugged directly into the wall via USB, the assembled smart home devices announce. You’ll get fucked, snap your neck—send your mom a dick pic to the picnic. I connect my fist to your face via Bluetooth. Face update until facial recognition hard fails. There’s something genuinely funny about Alexa delivering all of this in her calm, helpful customer-service voice, and something slightly unnerving about how well it works.

The comparison that comes up immediately is Jan Böhmermann—Germany’s sharpest political satirist, best known internationally for the poem about Erdoğan that nearly caused a diplomatic incident—and specifically his satirical rap Pol1z1stensohn. Klaas has probably heard that comparison enough times to be tired of it. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s not quite fair either. What Böhmermann does has a harder target. Klaas is after something sillier and more self-aware, and at its best, this video earns that silliness.