punctual state of innocence, childhood. The overflowing working store of our personal computer is erased straight away. We are emptied. We are prepared to listen again, to receive. And a great, a just wonderful lucidity comes upon us - if the joke was good.

In parentheses: If funny effects are not calculated well, if they are overdone or misplaced, you may endanger your documentary as such. You will spoil the whole construction; break the chain of arguments. The listener, who permanently roars of laughter will be deaf for the thoughtful side of the show. Laughter should reduce an emotional and intellectual overload, but it shouldn’t be a substitute for emotions and ideas. The ability to stirr up emotions and cool down them as well belongs to the dramaturgical techniques we can learn from all skilled dramatists since Shakespeare.

Let’s summarize: amongst all the bits and bites of modern communication laughter is an everlasting human element - so complex, that it can’t be digitalized - except for it’s sound. Laughter always is a live-performance. Unplugged. Being documentarists, we never go for laughter for it’s own sake. Humour - like feature-making on a whole, as Peter Leonhard Braun used to say to his Berlin colleagues - is not a catalogue of tricks, it’s an attitude - towards life, towards our job, towards our subject. It’s a sign of sovereignty, of critical distance - which is one oft the virtues of the documentarist, too. Otherwise we would work in another part of town - in the quarter between Fools Lane and Idiots Square.

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