Germany is known for many things: reliable cars, punctual trains, a national reluctance to cross the road if the lights are on red. Comedy, though, not so much.
Yet the country's reaction this week to the death of its most beloved postwar comic, aged 87, shows that Germans do indeed take their humour very seriously.
It is a measure of the devotion inspired by Loriot that when his death was announced the foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, told journalists at a press conference on Libya that he would take questions on the comic only after he had answered all Gaddafi-related queries.
Loriot – real name Bernhard Victor Christoph-Carl von Bülow, better known as Vicco von Bülow – was a national treasure who combined the eloquence and linguistic dexterity of a Stephen Fry with a Peter Sellers-style sense of the absurd. Pretty much every German newspaper on Wednesday carried a picture of him on the front page, or one of his cartoons, rather than an image from the battle for Tripoli.
"Thank you for the laughter" was the headline in the tabloid Bild. "Through him, Germans learned to laugh", said die Tageszeitung. "What did Germans laugh about before Loriot came long? Nothing."
A graphic designer by trade, von Bülow started sketching cartoons in 1950 under the pseudonym Loriot. Having spent three years as a Wehrmacht soldier fighting on the eastern front, Loriot returned to a Germany very different to the one he had left. The cities were still reduced to rubble; families had been ripped apart. There was very little to laugh about.
By the time his first cartoons appeared, in magazines such as Stern and Quick, Germany had divided into two. Though he was born in the eastern state of Brandenburg, it was in West Germany that Loriot found fame and his eponymous TV sketch show between 1976 and 1978 was a career high point, with its hugely popular mixture of straight-faced slapstick and wry jokes touching on key German stereotypes.
Loriot was particularly good at poking fun at the German devotion to formality and earnestness. One of his most famous animations featured Herr Müller Lüdenscheid and Herr Doktor Klöbner, two naked men sitting in a hotel bath.
The cartoon begins with the former saying, "I don't wish to appear rude, but I would really like to be alone." The latter answers: "Who on earth are you?" The two then introduce themselves, with full honorifics. Herr Müller Lüdenscheid then says: "Would you mind telling me what you are doing in my bath?" To which the other man replies: "I was down in the basement ping pong room and got my room number mixed up." And on it goes.
In one TV skit, Loriot is on a plane, chatting up an attractive younger woman, played by his long-term sidekick, Evelyn Hamann (who died in 2007). The two have a tremendously highfalutin conversation, quoting their favourite Rilke poems while struggling with the logistics of eating elegantly on an aeroplane.
In another popular sketch, (here with subtitles) a group of distinguished adults are taking a class at the Modern Institute of Yodelling. In one famous line, a lady is asked by a radio journalist why she, as a woman, has been so keen to gain her yodelling diploma. "I think, of all people, a housewife with children should have vocational qualifications. Then, when the time comes, and your grown-up children go away or anything happens, then after two years at yodelling school I will have my yodelling diploma."
Loriot's trademark was his poker face. He once told Die Zeit: "You will not see laughter in any of my films. Nowhere. The audience should be the ones laughing."