WAZ: In the WAZ Talk: Uwe Lyko gives Herbert Knebel another ten years

Meal.
Even at 68, Uwe Lyko, aka Herbert Knebel, doesn’t want to know anything about retirement. And the fairy with three free wishes would only have to grant him one.

Is there still a difference between him and his highly popular fictional character Herbert Knebel? “Of course, otherwise it would be a clinical picture!” laughs Uwe Lyko. I agree That is the reason why there are no live interviews with Herbert Knebel, Lyko confessed in the video talk with WAZ editor-in-chief Andreas Tyrock: “Then I would have to keep thinking: what would Herbert Knebel say about it now? That would be a bit of a dragging conversation.”

How Herbert Knebel got his cap

As is well known, the chattering high-flyer from Altenessen is one of those rare people who were born as pensioners, and one of the involuntary obstetricians was – Helge Schneider. Because at the end of the 80s he was still experimenting with Lyko and later members of “Affentheater” in the rehearsal room. “There was a cap lying around on the heater when we were developing the Herbert Knebel, and I thought I’d try it out,” Uwe Lyko recalls. After the third appearance with Herbert Knebel’s Affentheater, Helge Schneider took him aside and said: “You know that this is my cap – but you can have it!”

In the beginning, the most important gag prop, apart from the glass block glasses, was a Breton fisherman’s hat (which is why Lyko’s daughter called out excitedly at a market in the middle of Brittany on holiday: “Look, here are all Herbert gag hats!”), today the caps (“sometime they will all be worn out”) come from a Dutch sailing shop.

The spatula test with the famous “Boh, believe”

In the language test with “Boh, believe” Lyko heard Tyrock “a slightly North German accent” with a grin – and revealed that he had borrowed this miracle weapon from his “Omma” in Duisburg when opening the conversation. “And what did your grandma think of that?” – “Oh, she was at a performance once and thought everything was great, including, as she said, all the applause and stuff. But put on something nice!'” Lyko’s fashion tip: dress once and stick with it, “and when you’re 70 or 80, you’ve been en vogue three times.” And you meet people with the fashion ideas of Herbert Knebel in the Territory still, preferably at drinking halls and on low-class football pitches. However, the “soccer fever” has subsided somewhat for the trained BvB fan Lyko, “not just because of the last World Cup, but because of the constant commercialization.”

Unlike Herbert Knebel, there are still ten years left until retirement

The latter wants to continue to cultivate the differences between Herbert Knebel and Uwe Lyko for quite a while, the 68-year-old doesn’t want to know anything about retirement for the time being, “I can still imagine that for ten years. Even if I don’t know if we’ll be able to do a completely new program again, we’ve had a lot of trouble with the new one.” At least an arrival, this “Go to hell, baby!” Otherwise you have to think of Uwe Lyko as a happy person Imagine that he would only ask one thing of the classic fairy with the three wishes: “I would like to play the guitar like our guitarist Ozzy Ostermann!”

The comedian, who has just published a book about Ruhrdeutsch together with Sigi Domke, can laugh a lot about the poetic cabaret artist Erwin Grosche, whose new program he recommends, as well as the young talents Till Reiners and Moritz Neumeier, who are currently performing as a duo with “Schund and ashes” are on the way. Torsten Sträter and Jochen Malmsheimer continue to make Lyko cheerful, “and I can also laugh at myself.” Why is Revier such a good breeding ground for comedians? “Well, someone from the Ruhr area is already funny in itself”, because of the brusqueness and the openness – and: “The melting pot has always been a breeding ground for talent.”