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My Holidays With Loriot

Before I touched down in Germany for another Christmas and New Year's with my wife's family, I had never heard of Bernard Victor Christoph Carl von Bülow.

No, he's not some overlooked 18th-century Prussian symphonist with a new release on Naxos. He happens to be a comedy icon in Germany who adopted the stage name Loriot, and who died last year at age 87, triggering a 6-DVD set of his television programs, live performances and animation. My father-in-law received the set as a Christmas gift and we tore into it with abandon — and shrieks of laughter.

It's easy to see why Germans hail Loriot as a comic genius. He had that Bill Murray smirk of self-confidence, plus an arsenal of side-splitting personae in skits like "The Noodle," where he tries earnestly to propose to his girlfriend, or "The Crooked Picture," where one little adjustment to piece of art turns a living room into a disaster zone. You don't need to understand German to get a good feel for how clever and funny he was.

And for classical music fans there's the video above, Loriot's "Hustensymphonie," a brilliant and slightly twisted spoof of noisy concert halls. (You'll get what "husten" means soon enough.)

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.