Marc-Uwe Kling, the comedian who convinced Germany that a communist kangaroo is a reasonable flatmate

Marc-Uwe Kling

Photo: Leonhard Lenz / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 17, 1982 Stuttgart, Germany
Occupation	Author, Comedian, Filmmaker
Known for	The Kangaroo Chronicles
Awards	German National Poetry Slam Champion · Deutscher Radiopreis · Deutscher Kleinkunstpreis · Deutscher Hörbuchpreis · Deutscher Science-Fiction-Preis · Jonathan-Swift-Preis · Kasseler Literaturpreis für grotesken Humor

The kangaroo is a communist. Not metaphorically, not ironically — in Marc-Uwe Kling’s version of Berlin, his flatmate is literally a marsupial who reads Marxist theory, attends meetings of the local communist party, and considers the refrigerator a contested space. By rights, this should have been a cult thing: a small, prickly Kabarett act for people who already agreed with the politics. It became, instead, one of the bestselling German book series of the twenty-first century, a franchise of five volumes, two films, a weekly radio podcast, and a plush toy you can buy at the airport. That gap — between what Kabarett is supposed to be and what the kangaroo became — is the most interesting thing about Kling’s career.

He was born in Stuttgart in September 1982, the youngest of four children whose parents worked in freight forwarding — his father a hobby musician, his mother without artistic credentials. He moved to Berlin at twenty, the city absorbing him quickly into its poetry slam and literary Kabarett circuit. He studied philosophy and theater studies at the Free University without completing either degree, and began performing in 2003, the year that mattered. He won the German national poetry slam championship in 2006 and again in 2007, and for several years was known primarily as a performer: quick, political, not entirely comfortable with authority in any of its forms.

The kangaroo began as a radio comedy. Kling was doing a weekly slot for Fritz, the Berlin public radio station, called Neues vom Känguru — dispatches from the kangaroo, who was apparently his actual flatmate. The joke was durably simple: the narrator is a slightly hapless Berlin comedian; the kangaroo is ideologically committed, physically shameless, and consistently right about the big picture while being completely impractical about the details. The podcast ran for years before a book publisher recognised what was there. Die Känguru-Chroniken came out in 2009 and immediately became a bestseller. Two years later, Das Känguru-Manifest. In 2014, Die Känguru-Offenbarung. In 2018, Die Känguru-Apokryphen. Millions of readers. A plush kangaroo with a hammer and sickle. Kling had built a franchise.

He also wrote something else. QualityLand, published in 2017, is a different kind of book — a full-length dystopian novel set in a near-future Germany run by an algorithm. Every citizen has been assigned a rating. A delivery drone drops off a product you never ordered because the system has calculated you want it. The novel’s protagonist, a machine therapist for other machines, tries to opt out. It is sharper and more structurally ambitious than the Känguru collections, and it announced that Kling could do something beyond comic vignettes. QualityLand won the Deutscher Science-Fiction-Preis in 2018 and has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Japanese, where it was published as クオリティランド, and Russian, where it appeared as Страна Качества. A planned HBO series adaptation, announced with Mike Judge attached as director, has so far remained an announcement.

The Känguru films moved the franchise into a different register. The first, Die Känguru-Chroniken, came out in 2020 — directed by Dani Levy from Kling’s screenplay, with Kling voicing the kangaroo. It was among Germany’s top-grossing domestic films of that year. The sequel, Die Känguru-Verschwörung in 2022, marked Kling’s directorial debut — at forty. Both films carried the central joke of the books into a visual medium with varying success, the kangaroo rendered in CGI, the left-wing humour filtered for theatrical distribution. The question the films raised without quite answering was whether the material’s warmth could survive the industrial requirements of a mainstream comedy film.

That question applies to the whole project. Kabarett — the German tradition of political cabaret — is defined by its relationship with discomfort. It is supposed to irritate, to be unwelcome at parties, to make the wrong people laugh by accident. The Känguru books are genuinely left-wing: the kangaroo is explicitly a communist, the targets are real. But they are also warm, digressive, and deeply satisfying to finish. They have been assigned in schools. Children receive them as birthday presents. When the franchise generates plush toys, the question of whether radical content can survive commercial success becomes more than theoretical. Kling’s defenders point to the reach: millions of readers have been exposed to a Marxist flatmate as the most reasonable character in the room. His critics — and they exist, mostly within the German literary and political left — suggest that comfort is its own kind of co-optation.

He has twin daughters, with whom he co-authored the children’s adventure novel Der Spurenfinder in 2023 — their names kept private under pseudonyms — and its sequel, Die Spurenfinder und das Drachenzepter, in 2025. Since 2015, he has collaborated with Michael Krebs and Julius Fischer as Arbeitsgruppe Zukunft, a political performance collective. He co-founded the Lesedüne reading series in 2005 and has hosted the Schreiben und Schreddern podcast since December 2023. In December 2025, he co-founded Digital Independence Day with Linus Neumann of the Chaos Computer Club, a campaign promoting decentralised alternatives to major tech platforms — the kangaroo, in a sense, operating offline.

The fifth Känguru book, Die Känguru-Rebellion, arrived in March 2026. The kangaroo, fed up with the state of global politics, decides to launch a revolution from the kitchen table — thirty new stories, the same format, the same characters, arriving at a moment when the satire felt rather current. Kling received the Kasseler Literaturpreis für grotesken Humor days before the book’s publication, reading from it at the ceremony in Kassel. He is forty-three and working, and the kangaroo is still restless.

Tags: actors, satire, Die Känguru-Chroniken, Die Känguru-Rebellion, German authors, Kabarett