Page - 60 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

60 siting futurity these films religious difference is depicted as unbridgeable and fundamentally cultural. It is understood as naturalized, some- thing one imbibes with one’s mother’s milk and language and is to be played for laughs. Their generic status as comedies comes not so much from the humor of their content, which is based on laughing at rather than laughing with. As Peter Verstraten points out of the Dutch versions of the genre, “[t]he primary function of the coarse humour in these films is to test the limits of ‘bad taste’” (Verstraten 2016, 83). In actor and theater founder Alexander Pschill’s astute analysis, Meiner Meinung nach ist die Komödie die beste Form, In- halte zu transportieren und sie einem Publikum näherzu- bringen, einem Publikum, das die Wahl hat, mit einem In- halt konform zu gehen oder nicht. Die Komödie erzwingt nichts. Die Komödie vermittelt von Natur aus die “kind hu- man message.” Sie funktioniert im Idealfall frei von Trends und Traditionen und entflieht somit leichtfüßig sowohl der Daumenschraube der verstaubten Erwartungen, also des Konservativen, als auch dem Diktat des bemüht Angesagten. [In my opinion, comedy is the best form to convey con- tent and bring it closer to an audience, an audience that has the choice to deal with context in a conformist way or not. Comedy isn’t extortive. In its nature comedy communicates the “kind human message.” Ideally, its functioning is free of trends and traditions and in that way nimbly escapes both the thumbnail screw of dusty expectations, that is, of the con- servatives, but also the prescribed views of the well-meaning followers of fashion.] (Affenzeller 2019). Because their idealistic liberalism is so bothered by talk of homogeneous cultures with “proper” locations that they can- not help but desire to show up their shortcomings, culture-clash comedies find themselves locked into the populist positions of tion reveals, much better than the more neutral “multicultural” does.