Joko Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf
That’s why you have to be political today
Joko Winterscheidt (left) and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf in November 2021 in the program “Wetten, dass ..?”.
© imago images / Future Image
Joko Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf are mostly known as entertainers. In an interview, they now adopt a serious tone.
Joko Winterscheidt (42) and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf (38) regularly delight the TV audience with their entertainment programs. With the title “15 Minuten Live” they have already proven several times that they can also strike serious tones in the airtime they have gained on ProSieben. In a new interview with the “Spiegel” the duo strikes again serious tones.
Winterscheidt and Heufer-Umlauf reach “as jokers on duty” otherwise unreachable target groups
“It is not the time not to be political,” replied 42-year-old Joko Winterscheidt when asked what made him and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf speak out politically for the first time in 2015 at the height of the refugee crisis. Both moderators had “the feeling” “that we as the jokers from the service reach people who otherwise would not be reached”. Winterscheidt also wonders why “so few others in the industry open their mouths”. “Doesn’t cost anything, except maybe to lose a few people who shouldn’t be valued anyway.”
The Mönchengladbach native explains the changed use of the 15 minutes of PrimeTime airtime gained in the full-length show “Joko & Klaas against ProSieben” by saying that “all these urgent issues” had come forward. In the beginning it was “about this anarcho thing”, “about finding the coolest waste of time”. Later he and Klaas simply followed “an inner necessity”.
Moderator duo relies on “re-emotionalization”
Co-moderator Heufer-Umlauf emphasizes that many of the contributions in the format, such as the one that addressed the misery in the Greek refugee camp Moria, are about “re-emotionalizing”. “It’s about creating access,” says the 38-year-old. “Sometimes disasters seem so difficult to deal with that a displacement mechanism is developed.” The objectification of terrible things happens automatically, one brings with it “a level between us and the horror”. He and Winterscheidt wanted “to lead back to what is human in us. To the feeling that I would have if I were personally involved.”
However, none of this has anything to do with activism. “Apart from vaccinating, we don’t say what people should do,” explains the TV star from Oldenburg. They ask “to think about the world in which” everyone wants to live. There are simply two different things, “wearing Europe hoodies” and “really knowing what values Europe should stand for again and fighting for them”. “Our generation has to learn that first.”