Laurence Falconer: 'I balance taking the piss out of the Germans by taking the piss out of the Irish'
Top of the Morgen! by Laurence Falconer is a collection of funny and moving observations into a memoir.
Laurence Falconer had just one request before our interview properly began: “Can you hear me?” Does he mean literally? Figuratively? Was he even addressing me, or was this some novel marketing ploy to sell his book? He was speaking to me, after all, from deep within the south west German state of Baden-Württemberg. A picture postcard landscape bordered by France and Switzerland. The birthplace of the automobile, no less, and a fairytale province that plays home to the Black Forest, Lake Constance, and the Swabian Alb. I almost expected his cry for help to be delivered with a Dublin-accented Alpine yodel.
The answer was yes, I could hear Laurence - eventually - after a few minutes of Zoom panic, echo loops, disappearing audio and mutual technological incompetence. By the end of our conversation I had resolved that, had the call indeed dropped, he would’ve just interviewed himself.
“It’s always terrifying, the Zoom,” he laughs, settling into the chat.
It feels like an appropriately chaotic opening for the Dublin comedian and writer whose debut memoir, chronicles the surreal cultural collision that followed his move from Ireland to rural Germany. It was a move that was made for love, and one that has endured for what appears to be a burgeoning inner peace. The book is funny, wildly self-deprecating and deeply sincere - a rare thing in modern memoir writing, where polished irony often replaces genuine vulnerability.
Falconer, however, writes exactly as he speaks: fast, observational, profane, emotional and effortlessly conversational. His publisher, Penguin, remarkably, allowed him to keep it that way.
“I was genuinely shocked they let me write the book the way it’s written,” he says. “I kept waiting for someone to say, ‘Slow it down there now, Laurence.’ But they just kept telling me to keep going. And, if anything, to go further.”
The result is one of the funniest Irish memoirs in recent years, but also one of the most unexpectedly thoughtful. Beneath the stories about German bureaucracy, sexual conquets in techno clubs, beer halls and handwritten complaints about parking etiquette lies something more reflective: a story about identity, reinvention and the strange emotional dislocation of voluntarily becoming an outsider.
Falconer’s own route to becoming a published author was anything but straightforward. Before acting, comedy and accidental internet fame, he trained as an airline pilot in South Africa.
“I had terrible results in school,” he says cheerfully. “I hated school. I was working in an off-licence and my parents were going fecking mental wondering what I was going to do with my life.”
A flying lesson as a teenager unexpectedly revealed a talent for aviation, and before long he found himself accepted onto a pilot training programme in South Africa. Against his own expectations, he completed the qualifications and returned to Ireland on the verge of applying for airline jobs.
Then came a moment of panic.
“I was literally on the Ryanair website about to apply,” he recalls. “And I just got hit with this ferocious anxiety. I thought: ‘This isn’t what I want.’” Instead, he auditioned for The Gaiety School of Acting. If he got accepted, he decided, he would abandon aviation entirely. He got in.
“I basically just wanted to play guitar and act,” he says. “That was all I cared about.” The years that followed were spent moving between theatre productions, pub jobs, music and walking tours around Dublin - the latter eventually changing his life completely when he met a shy German woman visiting the city.
What followed became the backbone of : an Irish actor and musician relocating to a mountain village in Baden-Württemberg and trying to make sense of a culture that initially felt utterly alien to him.
“I probably had the stereotypical Irish perception of Germans before I moved,” he admits. “Very straight, hard-nosed, maybe a bit rude, quiet, very un-Irish.” His first proper exposure to Germany had largely involved “techno rave weekend excursions” in Berlin with his brother. “That wasn’t exactly the best environment to understand German culture,” he laughs. “We were basically just doing shedloads of drugs and hanging around parks.”
Rural southern Germany proved another world entirely.
“The terror of it was real at first,” he says. “I’m running my chatty Irish software all the time, talking a million miles an hour, and the Germans can just respond with ‘Okay.’ Or silence. Huge silences. And you think: ‘Oh Jesus, they hate me.’” Eventually, however, he realised something important.
“After a long time observing them interacting with each other, I realised: this is just how they communicate. They’re not being rude to me specifically. This is just a different culture.”
Much of Falconer’s humour comes from these tiny moments of collision between Irish emotional expressiveness and German bluntness. One particularly revealing example involved his pandemic-era self-administered haircut.
“In Ireland, people would say, ‘Ah Jesus, looks great, fair play to you.’ The Germans just went: ‘No. It’s bad.’”
Yet Falconer is careful never to present the Germans as cold caricatures. One of the strengths of the book - and of his hugely successful social media account, @irish_man_in_germany - is that the joke is usually shared equally between both cultures.
“When I’m taking the piss out of the Germans, I try to balance it with taking the piss out of the Irish as well,” he says. “I think that’s important.”
His videos, which now attract hundreds of thousands of followers, have been embraced enthusiastically by German audiences - something that initially surprised him.
“I genuinely thought they’d be offended,” he says. “But they really seem to love it.” In fact, Falconer says the stereotype that Germans lack humour is simply untrue.
The differences, however, continue to fascinate him. Germans, he says, possess a kind of national self-assurance that contrasts sharply with Irish social anxiety.
“There’s an assuredness about them,” he says. “I think Irish people are always trying to smooth things socially, always trying to make sure everyone’s okay. Germans don’t feel the need to do that.” That confidence manifests itself in wonderfully specific ways. Falconer recalls repeatedly receiving handwritten notes from strangers after parking his car facing the wrong direction on residential streets.
“Beautiful handwriting,” he laughs. “Paragraphs explaining the issue. In Ireland it’s absolutely unfathomable that someone would care enough to do that.” Yet he also admires what emerges from that mindset.
“You look around this place and it’s lovely,” he says. “There’s no rubbish, no graffiti, no broken buildings. The towns are absolutely gorgeous.” Southern Germany, he argues, bears little resemblance to the Berlin of popular imagination. Where Berlin represents counterculture and chaos, Baden-Württemberg feels deeply traditional, conservative and heavily connected to historical rituals and festivals.
“The Germans are actually much better than us at holding onto ancient traditions,” he says. “There’s constantly festivals, processions, celebrations - Catholic festivals, pagan festivals, carnival traditions. It’s all still alive.” Living there has changed him profoundly. Falconer speaks repeatedly about solitude, forests and the strange peace he found in German rural life.
“I’ve become very happy in my own company,” he says. “I go walking in forests all the time. I genuinely love that quieter life.”
The relationship that originally brought him to Germany, however, has since ended.
“It was horrible, obviously,” he says gently. “But we’ve remained on good terms and we co-parent our daughter. That’s the important thing.” There is no bitterness in the way he speaks about it. If anything, the experience seems only to have reinforced the emotional honesty that makes his writing distinctive.
That authenticity was something Falconer guarded carefully throughout the writing process, even while wondering whether Penguin might eventually ask him to tone things down.
“I kept thinking they’d tell me to clean up the language or make it more structured,” he says. “But they actually encouraged me to speak in my own voice. It made the entire process all the more cathartic and enjoyable.” The editor who first contacted him after discovering his Instagram account wanted precisely the chaotic, stream-of-consciousness storytelling voice that now defines the finished book.
“I sent them sample chapters thinking: ‘Well, this is the end of this.’ But they loved it.” Now, with the memoir complete, Falconer is already planning the next phase: live stand-up comedy performances in Germany, Ireland and beyond.
“I’ve never actually done stand-up before,” he says, grinning. “So we’ll see how that goes.” It feels oddly fitting that even now, after acting, flying, social media success and becoming a published author, he still sounds slightly bemused by his own life.
“What are the chances?” he says at one point. “It’s absolutely mental.”
Then again, improbability is what makes Top of the Morgen! work so well. Falconer understands that comedy and sincerity are not opposites but companions. A bit like the Irish and the Germans. His stories are absurd because life is absurd. But they matter because underneath the jokes sits something recognisable: a man trying to figure out where he belongs.
And somewhere between Dublin pubs and German mountains, he seems to have found at least part of the answer.
- ‘Top of the Morgen!:The Misadventures of an Irishman in Germany’ by Laurence Falconer (@irish_man_in_germany), published by Michael Joseph, is out now
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