Trivia

As he hated traveling, he refused to tour in the United States.

Originally trained to be a carpenter.

There is a statue of Karl Valentin located at the heart of the Viktualienmarkt in Munich.

Valentin starred in many silent films in the 1920s, and was sometimes called the "Charlie Chaplin of Germany".

In 1959 based on private initiative the Valentin-Museum was established in the Isartor in Munich. This museum shows absurdities from parts of his legacy.

He kept a remarkable photo archive of his onstage personae, from a mad scientist to a talking beer mug.

A statue of Valentin was placed in the Viktualienmarkt in Munich. People still come and place flowers on this statue.

Legendary German comedian, whose jokes and sketches became legendary, although they were more profound as they seemed to be.

"The Karl Valentin Museum" in Munich at the "Isartor" is dedicated to him and his unforgotten humor.

In the 1920s and 1930s, he became Germany's most popular comedian and cabaret artist, often collaborating with Liesl Karlstadt.

After founding the "Panoptikum", a chamber of horror, in Munich, he lost all his savings. Liesl Karlstadt, who also had invested in the project, was hospitalized due to mental problems after the bankruptcy.

Was admired by many artists and authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and Kurt Tucholsky and still inspires many writers and cabaret artists in the German speaking countries.

After performing in a Munich bar in February 1948, he was coincidentally locked in the building and had to spend the night without any protection from the cold. The next day he was found. Karl Valentin caught a cold from that night and died within a few days.

The Nazis forbade him to make any more films after 1941 and he was forced to make a living from making and selling wooden utensils.

After the school he learnt the trade of a joiner from 1897.

In 1902, he began his comic career, enrolling for three months at a variety school in Munich, under the guidance of Hermann Strebel. His first job as a performer was at the Zeughaus in Nürnberg (Nuremberg).

Karl Valentin came from a reasonably well-off middle-class family; his father had a partnership in a furniture-transport business. Valentin first worked as a carpenter's apprentice, and this experience proved useful in the construction of his sets and props later in life.

His real career began in 1908 when he had first successes as a comedian at the "Frankfurter Hof". There he also met Liesl Karlstadt who became his stage partner in 1911. With her he has an enormous success at the "Simplicissimus".

He developed a reputation for writing and performing short comic routines, which he performed in a strong Bavarian dialect, usually with his female partner, Liesl Karlstadt.

Karl Valentin remained immortal after his death. Later generations discovered this unique comedian again and his name became cult.

He already met his future wife Gisela Royes in 1899 who worked as a maid servant in the house of the Fey and they lived together as a couple.

In 1911 Karl Valentin got married with his long-standing friend Gisela Royes, at that time they already had two children.

In 1923, Valentin appeared in a half-hour, slapstick film entitled Mysteries of a Barbershop (Mysterien eines Friseursalons).

Karl Valentin inaugurated his "Panoptikum" in 1934 which he had to shut down only 13 months later. Through it his partnership with Liesl Karlstadt went on the rocks because Valentin lost nearly her whole fortune with this project. The outwards always cheerful looking actress didn't have a light life with Karl Valentin because he was a hypochondriac. After all she attempted suicide which fortunately failed.

In 1922, Bertolt Brecht, had appeared with Valentin and Karlstadt in a photo of Valentin's spoof of Munich's Oktoberfest.Brecht regularly watched Valentin perform his cabaret routines in Munich's beer-halls, and compared him to Chaplin, not least for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology.".

With the outbreak of the war he wasn't as successful as before. The Nazis boycotted Karl Valentin because of the "tendency to poverty" of his plays, finally Karl Valentin got into economic poverty through it. Now he had to produce small household items in order to earn his living. The audience had forgotten the lanky comedian.

In the wake of his father's death Valentin took a three-year break from performing during which he constructed his own twenty-piece one-man band (with which he eventually toured in 1906). Valentin also took musical studies, learning the guitar with Heinrich Albert.

Karl Valentin attended a Munich comedian school in 1902 and had first guest performances. But his career got stuck at the beginning when his father died. He took on the forwarding agency together with his mother. But in 1906 he sold the agency and built a music apparatus made of 20 instruments. He went on tour with this "Orchestion" but it was a flop.

In the 40's he appeared only one more time in a movie called "In der Apotheke" (41), after that he concentrated again to his comedian career. In his "Ritterspelunke" he was very successful with his young partner Annemarie Fischer.

It was as a stage performer in cabarets that Valentin built a reputation as one of the leading comic performers in Germany during the Weimar Republic.

The film script was written by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Erich Engel, and also featured Valentin's cabaret partner, Liesl Karlstadt, as well as an ensemble of stage, film, and cabaret performers, including Max Schreck, Erwin Faber, Josef Eichheim, and Blandine Ebinger. Although the film was not immediately released after it was completed in February 1923, it has come to be recognized as one of the one hundred most important films in the history of German filmmaking.

Karl Valentin had his great breakthrough as a comedian on the screen in 1912. His first movie was "Karl Valentins Hochzeit" and was a great success. In 1914 followed "Der neue Schreibtisch", but he laid the foundations of his legendary repute with countless appearances for cabarets where he enraptured the audience to enthusiasm.

Bertolt Brecht wrote: But the man he [Brecht writes of himself in the third person] learnt most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employer and made him look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice. When the Augsburger [Brecht] was producing his first play, which included a thirty minutes' battle, he asked Valentin what he ought to do with the soldiers. 'What are the soldiers like in battle?' Valentin promptly answered: 'They're pale. Scared shitless.' This anecdote has become significant in the history of German theatre, since it was Valentin's idea of applying chalk to the faces of Brecht's actors in his production of Edward II that Brecht located the germ of his conception of 'epic theatre'.

The notable critic Alfred Kerr praised him as a Wortzerklauberer, or someone who tears apart words and language to forcefully extract and dissect its inherent meaning.

Along with Karl Kraus, he is considered a master of gallows humor.

His comedy would often begin with a simple misunderstanding, on which he would insist as the sketch progressed.

Valentin's naive sense of humour produced sketches that in spirit were loosely connected to dadaism, social expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.

His sketches often parodied and derided "shopkeepers, firemen, military band players, professionals with small roles in the economy and the defense of society".

His art centered mostly around linguistic dexterity and wordplay-Valentin was a linguistic anarchist.

Many contemporary artists, including film-maker Herbert Achternbusch and Christoph Schlingensief ("Valentin is one of the greatest for me!"), trace their artistic roots back to Karl Valentin.