Biggest comedy audience-world record set by
Mario Barth
BERLIN, Germany --Some
70,000 people packed the Olympic Stadium in Berlin on Saturday
night for a show by German comedian Mario
Barth, setting a new world record for the Biggest
comedy audience.
The arena had been sold out for months for the
show, the final stop on Barth’s two-and-a-half-year tour “Men
are primitive, but happy.” The solo shows sold 1.7 million
tickets. Mario
Barth filled Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, a stadium Madonna
has yet to sell out for her current tour.
The 35-year-old comic, a Berlin native, is known
for broad humor about gender stereotypes. On Saturday he hit
familiar notes with jokes about shopping-addicted women, macho
men and beer.
He runs through a repertoire of clichés, from
parking to washing up.
Barth even uses his own girlfriend as the inspiration
for many of his jokes and says, “She has a good sense of humor
and I can’t really help that she is the way she is. It’s all
good fun.”
His audiences tend to be composed mainly of 20-40-something
couples, who, as the media has often reported, attend his
performances instead of going to couples' therapy. "He really
captures what relationships are like," one fan told local
radio station Radio Eins after Saturday's gig.
Before the show, Mario
Barth said American comedian Jerry Seinfeld was perplexed
when he heard of the world record attempt. “He couldn’t imagine
that a single man would perform in front of so many people,”
Barth said.
The crowd at the Berlin show was more than four
times larger than the previous world record-holder, a 15,900-person
show by American comedian Chris Rock in London. Photo:DPA (enlarge
photo)
German
rock group Silbermond opened for Barth as a surprise guest.
Singer Stephanie Kloss told the crowd the group had lost a
bet to Barth. “This is what happens when you have a beer with
Mario Barth and tell him, ‘You’ll never fill up the Olympic
Stadium,’” Kloss said.
His man-of-the-people shtick is clearly key to
his success. Born in Berlin in 1972, he grew up with five
brothers in the working class neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and
Neukoelln and trained at Siemens as an electrician before
heading to the Canary Islands as a package holiday host.
Mario
Barth came to the wider German public’s attention
when his bestselling “dictionary” German-Woman/Women-German,
based on his comedy show, was released in October 2004. The
book has sold more than 1.5 million copies and has been translated
into many different languages.
The record-breaking show in Berlin was recorded
by 19 cameras and will be shown on German TV in the fall.
A DVD of the event is also planned.
Mario Barth Olympiastadion 2008
Mario Barth - Women and movies - subtitled
Mario Barth - Women and movies - subtitled
- part 2 Mario Barth-Culcha Candela-HAMMA (funny helium
version)
