Do Germans have a sense of humour? Apparently not, if you read the Daily Telegraph.
Alongside coverage of Germany's current fiscal woes, the paper today prints a separate front page story pandering rather cheaply to readers' prejudices about the country.
Frankfurt, the Telegraph reports, is to get a museum dedicated to the national sense of humour, a phenomenon, the paper claims, which has "so far remained largely unknown to the international public".
In case you had still missed the point, the piece runs under the very laboured headline: "For you, Tommy, ze joke is over!"
The institution in question is the Caricature Museum in Frankfurt, which will exhibit thousands of drawings and writings from Titanic, the country's best known satirical magazine.
According to the Telegraph, the museum's curator, Achim Frenz, "is hoping to shatter the stereotype of the humourless German". Really? Is a museum of domestic, largely political satire even aimed at foreign opinion? Does Frenz even care what the British – let alone the Telegraph - believes?
I'm no expert on what the Germans find amusing, so it's perhaps time to resurrect an old but highly informative Guardian article by the comedian Stewart Lee, who argues at length that the country does have a sense of humour – it just happens to be different from ours.
Based on an extract from the Wrap, guardian.co.uk's digest of the day's news
