The Country That Forgot How to Laugh

In 1986, a man who kept getting parking tickets decided to do something about it. Not by paying them. Not by contesting them. By creating a comic.

Lucien Czuga called up a newspaper and asked if they wanted a three-panel strip. Then he went looking for an illustrator, found a man named Roger Leiner drawing cinema columns for the Tageblatt in a style reminiscent of Robert Crumb, and together they turned Luxembourg's comics world upside down for nearly thirty years.

The result was Superjhemp, a superhero who punched through the absurdities of Luxembourgish life with the force of a well-aimed satirical cannon. Politicians, bureaucrats, national pretensions, nothing was safe. The series sold over a million copies in a country of 600'000 people, which is either a publishing miracle or evidence that Luxembourg was desperately hungry for someone to tell it the truth, with jokes.

Now Czuga, in a Sunday interview with RTL, has delivered the punchline nobody wanted to hear: "There is not enough laughter in Luxembourg."1

This from the man who invented the country's greatest comic hero. If the person who built Luxembourg's humor infrastructure says the building is empty, you should probably listen.

The timing is instructive. A day earlier, Labour Day rallies saw the prime minister booed, the country's largest union declaring social dialogue dead, and statistics showing 43% of workers report daily stress with 36% showing burnout indicators.2 A country that cannot rest, apparently also cannot laugh.

Czuga's diagnosis is cultural, not economic. Luxembourg, he suggests, takes itself too seriously. For a place that spent decades building its identity around being a serious crossroads of European institutions, banking, and diplomacy, humor was always going to be a secondary export. Superjhemp was the exception that proved the rule: a brief, glorious window where someone was allowed to say the emperor had no clothes, and people actually bought tickets to watch.

The irony is rich. Luxembourg has one of the highest densities of multilingual, well-educated, internationally exposed people in Europe. These are exactly the conditions that usually produce sharp comedy, political satire, and cultural commentary. Yet Czuga observes a laughter deficit. Something about the place discourages the very thing that would make it bearable.

Maybe it is the size. In a country where everyone knows everyone, satire gets personal fast. You cannot mock the finance minister when your neighbour's cousin works in his office. In larger countries, comedy creates distance. In Luxembourg, it creates awkward dinner parties.

Maybe it is the wealth. When the numbers always look good on paper, the people pointing out what is wrong, the cracks, the human costs, the quiet desperations, become inconvenient rather than insightful. Comedy is, at its core, about pointing out the gap between how things are and how they pretend to be. When a country's self-image depends on the numbers looking good, the gap-pointers are not welcome.

Czuga knows this. He lived it. His comic was born from parking tickets, the petty bureaucracy of daily life that nobody with power cares about but everyone without power endures. Superjhemp fought the battles that real institutions ignored. And for a while, it worked. People laughed. They bought the books. They recognised themselves.

But Czuga also stopped. The series ended. And what replaced it? Not a new generation of satirists. Not a thriving comedy scene. Instead, a country that measures its success in GDP and wonders why 43% of its people are stressed, and the man who once made it laugh says it has forgotten how.

There is a Lëtzebuergesch word, "Pechert", meaning someone who has bad luck, a jinx, a schlemiel. Czuga's original comic character was a Pechert. The joke was always on the little guy who could not catch a break. In a country of banking secrecy and EU institutions, the Pechert was the counter-narrative. The reminder that not everyone was getting richer. The proof that humor could be a form of solidarity.

Luxembourg does not need more GDP. It needs more Pecherts. More people willing to draw the cartoon that offends the minister. More writers who make the banker uncomfortable. More laughter in a country that has every reason to be comfortable and somehow is not.

Lucien Czuga gave Luxembourg Superjhemp. The least the country can do is learn to laugh again.