Kurt Krömer turns 50: the anarcho clown

Kurt Krömer (50) is an exception in the German comedy scene. Instead of making his audience laugh with well-prepared punchlines, he relied on subversive practical jokes and spontaneous interaction with the audience and stage guests right from the start. He uses his biting Berlin snout like a weapon.

As Krömer, who was born on November 20, 1974 in West Berlin as Alexander Bojcan, reported in an interview with the “Tagesspiegel”, he began his flashy comedian career as a teenager. He developed his notorious dry sense of humor and his ability to make his counterpart display brazen insolence as a survival strategy during his school days in rough working-class districts such as Neukölln and Wedding.

“I was fat during puberty,” Krömer explained in the conversation. “And back then, in seventh grade, of course you were teased about it. And that’s when I noticed that I was gaining respect through my sayings. I was able to counter verbally incredibly well, and then things calmed down. Of course I have that too applied to teachers.”

With his death-defying audacity, he was able to gain respect even from the tough boys at his school who ran around with knives and ripped off money from other classmates. “I wasn’t the thug type,” said today’s star comedian. “Jackets weren’t taken away from me either, nobody wanted my things anyway. I always went to C&A or H&M with my mother. They took the others’ jackets off and then gave them to me so that I had something decent to wear.”

This may have been one of the reasons why Alexander Bojcan began training as a men’s outfitter after leaving school in the tenth grade. After a short while, however, he broke off again in order to keep himself afloat with jobs as an unskilled worker on construction sites or in cleaning crews.

During this time, in the early 1990s, he began to bring his strange insults to the stage. First in the tiny variety theater “Scheinbar”, where he performed without a fee and initially with only modest success. “In the beginning the spectators were taken aback. Then the next day you go back to the construction site…” remembers Krömer. “But somehow I thought to myself: Keep going, it’ll be okay. Besides, I had broken off my apprenticeship and blocked everything, so the only thing that could come was the stage.”

He quickly took over his stage name from his former German teacher. Kurt Krömer was simply easier to remember, and the name also had a perfectly posh sound. He explained to “Stern” with his usual open-heartedness: “I look like people who have been working in a management position at Stadtsparkasse Paderborn for 50 years, a bit stuffy and stuffy, but who still spread punk. You look like Heintje , but speaks like Marilyn Manson”.

With Kurt Krömer he had developed an entertaining fictional character whose transitions to the middle-class person Alexander Bojcan were deliberately kept fluid. As the comedian admits, it wasn’t always easy for him to tell the two characters apart. With some persistence he played the weird anarcho clown on small stages until he finally made a name for himself in his hometown of Berlin.

He finally celebrated his big breakthrough in 2004 with his first TV format “The Kurt Krömer Show”, which was broadcast on the “rbb” channel until 2005. The new shooting star of the comedy scene was awarded the German Television Prize in 2006 for his next show “Bei Krömers”, which inspired him to go even further and continue with “Krömer – The International Show” in the ARD night program.

After an excursion into the film world, including a leading role in the film comedy “An Island Called Udo” (2011), further TV spectacles followed such as “Krömer – Late Night Show” (2012-2014) and most recently, from 2019, his famous infamous interview show “Chez Krömer”, to which the comedian described himself as inviting “friends and assholes” to have extremely confrontational conversations with them in a kind of interrogation room to lead. His last broadcast made headlines in December 2022, in which the conversation with comedian Faisal Kawusi (33) escalated to such an extent that Krömer quickly canceled the show in annoyance and left his guest sitting alone in the wings.

At this point, Krömer had already published his autobiographical work “You may not believe everything you think,” in which he described the depression that he said he had been suffering from for decades. His therapy and his preoccupation with the illness also made him rethink his stage character Kurt Krömer. “With the therapy, the corset of having to be either an asshole or a nice guy became too tight for me,” he revealed to “Spiegel”.

With new stage programs away from the television cameras and in his new one, he wants to appear less provocative and more vulnerable and private in the future. Regarding his last stage show “Die Gönnung sucht” he said: “The program is 90 percent autobiographical, every gag has a real core. It would be boring if, at the age of almost 50, I were still making the jokes that I did before I’ve done it for 20 years.” And he added: “You have to evolve as a comedian.”