‘Sad Jokes’: Munich Review

Dir/scr. Fabian Stumm. Germany 2024. 95 mins

As the title promises, there are indeed glum gags in Fabian Stumm’s second feature. (“What do you call a sad coffee? A depresso”.) But the humour is philosophically resonant in Sad Jokes, a self-reflective fiction that muses on what we find comic about the human condition, and what can reduce us to tears. As writer-director Stumm chronicles the tribulations of a film-maker – played by himself – Sad Jokes sustains a light accessible touch alongside its stylistic rigour.

A self-reflective fiction that muses on what we find comic about the human condition

Following his 2023 debut Bones and Names, the Munich-premiering Sad Jokes should bring Stumm extra attention, both on the niche art-house circuit (the film opens in Germany in September) and with LGBTQ+ focused festivals and outlets.

A prelude illustrates the paradox of things being at once funny and not, as a succession of individuals deliver examples of melancholic humour, to a raucous accompaniment of canned laughter. Not that these jokes are calculated to crack everyone up. The gags are edited together in a flow of fragments, defusing their effect and establishing a tone of detachment that Stumm will maintain throughout. The sequence that follows is an eight-minute single take in Stumm’s favoured locked-off camera style. It shows a young woman, Sonya (Haley Louise Jones), tending to her young son Pino (Justus Meyer) after a spell away from home. Upon the arrival of Pino’s father Joseph (Stumm), a friend and Sonya’s mother, it emerges that Sonya has discharged herself from a clinic where she is being treated for depression – her distress emerging explosively as she is defensive towards against her nearest and dearest.

After this emotionally searing scene, the tone shifts strikingly as we follow the vicissitudes of Joseph, a gay film director who has agreed to share Pino’s parenting with Sonya – a friend rather than partner. He is now planning a new film, but has trouble telling a prospective producer (Godehard Giese) exactly what it will be: a comedy, Joseph says, but absurdist. Quite what that might mean emerges when Joseph gets his finger caught in a vending machine, in a scene accompanied by the kind of jangly piano that you associate with silent-era slapstick. It’s one of several moments in which Stumm tests our reactions to the way that music of different sorts can affect our emotional responses to a scene, or subvert them.

Throughout, Stumm juxtaposes different types of the absurd –  some flippant, some excruciating. In hospital, Joseph meets a woman whose broken arms haven’t affected her volubility (a very funny turn from Anneke Kim Sarnau); the reception for Joseph’s premiere is the occasion for a domestic dispute between his lead actress and her girlfriend, while an Italian guest pushes himself into the foreground; a hot date with a life model (Knut Berger) is sabotaged by the realities of parenting.

Stumm’s cast prove equally skilled at low-key naturalism and wry deadpan, either in ensemble settings or one to one with Stumm. His Joseph is a sympathetic connecting thread, but sometimes an infuriating one – just as Eric Rohmer’s perplexed characters can be (Rohmer being an overt reference early on). It is a mark of Stumm’s generosity with his cast that he gives the tour de force emotive moment not to himself, but to Ulrica Flach as Elin. She is Joseph’s drawing teacher, who once wanted to act and who can still deliver a Joan of Arc speech to bring a lump to the throat: a scene that asks us to weigh this almost casual evocation of intense feeling against, for example, Sonya’s authentically traumatised outburst.

Cool but not austere execution – with cinematographer Michael Bennett shooting the action against flat, neutrally bright backgrounds – gives the film a contemporary German art-cinema feel. It makes a distinctive stylistic signature for this intelligent, quizzical disquisition on acting, fiction, emotion and that staple of moral comedy, the perennial danger of being misunderstood.