Bernhard Victor Christoph Carl von Bülow (short: Vicco von Bülow, born November 12, 1923 in Brandenburg an der Havel, died August 22, 2011 in Ammerland am Starnberger See), more commonly known under the pseudonym Loriot, was a German humorist, graphic artist and director, actor and writer. He is most famous for his cartoons, the sketches from his 1976 television series Loriot, alongside Evelyn Hamann, and his two movies, Ödipussi (1988) and Pappa ante portas (1991). Characteristics of his art For the most part, his work deals with problems of communication between individuals. (Loriot: “What I am interested in most of all are people whose communication fails. All that I consider comical results from crumbled communication, from talk at cross purposes.”) His cartoons hinge on the contrast between the presented situation, the dignity displayed by his typically big nosed characters and the picture’s caption. Inevitably one of these elements gets out of line, for example, when he combines the caption “We demand equal treatment of men and women, even if the suckling baby might temporarily lose weight.” with the picture of a bulbous-nosed man breast-feeding a baby in a distinguished manner. The topics of his cartoon are mainly drawn from everyday life, scenes of the family and middle-class society. The same contrast between absurd situation and dignified behaviour of his characters can be seen in his various sketches and movies. Loriot’s enormous popularity, his accurate language and sense of comic, which nevers wounds, led to the adoption of a large number of phrases and inventions from the series’s sketches into German common knowledge and everyday speech. Among these are certainly the ‘yodel diploma’, the ‘stone louse’, but also sentences like “With that, you have something of your own!”, “Please, don’t talk right now...” or the laconic “Oh, is it?”.