Switch! and its successor, Switch Reloaded, are German comedy shows, which parody other TV shows (and occasionally, movies) from Germany, the United States and sometimes other nations. The sketches are pretty short - just like what you'd get if you switch the channel all the time.Unrelated to the American Crime and Punishment Series with Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner.Some of the shows parodied by Switch!:
Large Ham: "Wait a bit!" (presents three glamourous photos) "My house! My car! My wife!"
Other guy (presents three not so glamourous photos): "My house! My car! My wife! Oh yeah... and that's my gun! And with that, I take your house, your car, and your wife!"
Argentina Is Naziland: The Goodbye Großdeutschland sketches, a Spin-Off of the Obersalzberg sketches, and at the same time a parody of Goodbye Deutschland! Die Auswanderer, a Docu Soap about German emigrants.
Asian Airhead: Mi Lei Long Di Do Di Delü, music channel moderator
As Himself: Hoecker does this when they are spoofing Genial daneben, a CelebrityGame Show in which he belongs to the regular cast.
Bestiality Is Depraved: They have to guess the word "zoo" on Hot Streak, so the first player starts with "you like animals, don't you?", and the second player suspiciously counters, "What do you mean by that?", and it ends with, "But that happened just one time!"
Calvin Ball: Langeoog-Lochen and other games suggested by Hoecker are this.
Camp Gay: The prisoners in "Hinter Gitterchen - der Männerknast" (behind little bars - the men's prison).
The Danza: "Alle und wir" has Tim as Tim, Tom as Tom, Lola as Lola and so on.
Department of Redundancy Department: "Hier ist Deutsche Welle Polen, mit Übertragung in Farbe! Und bunt!" (Untranslatable - "in Farbe" and "bunt" both mean "in color".)
The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Switch often seems to spare no effort to catch the feel of the shows they are spoofing, like creating sets that look uncannily close to the real ones.note If the show spoofed is from the same TV channel or channel group, the set may perhaps even be the real thing! Another example is that somehow parodies of American Series actually sound as if they were dubbed.
The Ditz/Dumb Blonde: Many female moderators, especially if played by Susanne Pätzold.
Felony Misdemeanor: Hanni of the young Christians calling Manni a "dummyhead".
Kent Brockman News: The parodies of Heute, the News Broadcast from the channel ZDF. And after the real Heute did introduce a virtual studio, Switch! gleefully incorporated it into its spoofs.
Mundane Made Awesome: Nelly van Sale and Mister Snoot, parodying various sales channels.
Also, a candidate in Wetten Dass (very popular German show where people bet that they can achieve something Crazy Awesome, like recognizing the color of crayons by taste) bets that he can take ten glasses and put them, in just ten minutes, NEXT to each other - with his four helpers!
No Swastikas: Quite remarkably for a German show, this is subverted to Refuge in Audacity levels in Obersalzberg (a parody of Stromberg, the German version of The Office). Here, none other than Adolf Hitler is the Expy for the Stromberg/Brent-character. And swastikas are everywhere in plain sight: On the wall papers, on coffee mugs, as patterns on clothes...
Paper-Thin Disguise: The comedians play the game "Who am I?" (where you put a sticky note with the name of a famous person on your forehead). One of them (a bald guy!) guesses correctly that he's supermodel Claudia Schiffer and says it out loud. Then, suddenly fans of Claudia ask for his autograph, and a photographer pays him to shoot a topless photo. Until the sticky note falls off...
Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Friedrich Nietzsche stating his famous "God is dead" (sorry, I meant: "God! Is! DEAD!!!"). Parodies an infamous German telephone sex ad with a dominatrix saying (rather narmy): "Ruf! <whips> Mich! <whips> AN!!! <whips>" - "Call me now!")
Timmy in a Well: In the Lassie parody, natch. It turned out he fell down a <something that rhymes with well> and broke his <something that rhymes with leg>.
True Art: Parodied with a "theme evening" of German-French TV station arte. The theme? "The dung heap".invoked
Unexplained Recovery: Mona Sharma was burned in the medieval version of "Facts, facts, facts", but returned in later seasons.
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