December 2011

Dear Friends of German Humour,
Cor blimey. What a blunder! December is the perfect time to shift merchandise what with Jesus’s birth and all that, and I’m not sending my monthly bulletin out ‘til the 20th.

But I am excused as I’m incredibly busy overseeing my flatmate’s chocolate consumption.

See, I got my flatmate, fellow comedian Hils Barker, an advent calendar, full to the brim with 24 pieces of tasty Milka chocolate. I got it from the German Deli near London Bridge. £7.90! They’re certainly not going to heaven.

Anyway, you know the sort of calendar, with the treats hidden behind 24 randomly numbered doors.

It’s important to remember us struggling day after day to find the right door and then struggling to open the fiddly, perforated flap symbolizes Jesus’s suffering when carrying his cross up the hill. And no, why we do this in the run-up to Christmas rather than Easter I don’t understand either. But that’s what faith is all about.

Unfortunately Hils isn’t committed to the chocolate-based atonement and I’ve had nothing but stress since. Early on I did a simple spot check and saw she was a day behind. Next time I checked she was two treats ahead of schedule!

What hope is there if an Oxford-educated woman at the peak of her powers can’t meet a target as simple as eating one piece of chocolate per day?

I’m not sure if this level of not caring and incompetence is a result of her gender or her nationality.

Anyway, since then I have rigidly enforced the eating but apparently that’s taking away all the fun. Fun??

Eating chocolate only when one wants is completely missing the point of the educational and character-building aspects of the advent calendar, whose primary purpose is the teaching of rationing and perseverance – one piece of chocolate every 24 hours until all the chocolate is eaten.

And then patiently waiting 341 days, 342 days in a leap year, for the next advent calendar.

A 342-day wait is an apt link to ‘My Struggle’, my new CD, and for which I have been waiting well in excess of 342 days. Without moaning!

Apparently I’m now too big to release stuff myself and convention has it that these days I need to involve an army of other people – a distributor, a label, a lawyer, an agent, a sound engineer and God knows who else.

At the same time I’m still such small business that I’m no-one’s first priority and as a result everything takes ages.

There certainly is something to be said for Britain’s course of going it alone!

Anyway, finally – please find below a link to the 2010 My Struggle CD. It’s good! You can order it here: https://www.henningwehn.de/merch.htm Hoorah!

Below are also quite a few dates of an upcoming UK tour next spring. Hoorah!

Lastly, I have been commissioned to record six BBC2 radio shows about different aspects of British society. Hoorah! I’ll be previewing the episodes early January at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon. Please note there are only 25 tickets per show. Please also note some of the kick-off times are rather unusual.

Tickets for the actual recordings are available here. www.sroaudiences.com

That’s enough festive commercialism for one year – have a lovely Christmas and please don’t overdo it!

Remember: one a day, every day.

Henning