Oliver Kalkofe

In January 2017, Kalkofe wrote and produced an English-language episode dealing with American and international politics, of his Kalkofes Mattscheibe show under the English title Kalkofe's Media Meltdown exclusively for and released by Deutsche Welle.

In 2013, Kalkofe and fellow comedian Peter Rütten created and began hosting the still-running show SchleFaZ Die schlechtesten Filme aller Zeiten ("The worst movies of all time") on Tele 5, which is loosely based on the MST3K format. In it, Kalkofe and Rütten present trash films, introduce them with various background information, after every commercial break comment on the plot so far, and in the end summarize upon it, all within a retro-styled studio decorated in reference to the current film they're commenting on. The show has become an instant surprise hit for Tele 5, being the channel's leading show in ratings (with Kalkofe's other show Kalkofes Mattscheibe Rekalked being second), and during broadcasts of the show on Friday nights, the hashtag #schlefaz regularly enters the German Twitter top ten charts, which has prompted German TV Guides and even Tele 5 themselves to adopt the Twitter hashtag as a semi-official name for the show, also used by show hosts Kalkofe and Rütten themselves. Rütten and Kalkofe made an ironic cameo appearance in the 2015 trash movie Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!.

His biggest commercial success are the movies Der WiXXer (2004) and Neues vom Wixxer (2007), a parody of the German Edgar Wallace screen adaptations from the 1960s. The movies were based on a Frühstyxradio sketch series and the scripts written together with comedian Bastian Pastewka as Chief Inspector Even Longer. For years, Kalkofe has announced being in pre-production on a third installment to be entitled Triple WIXX (the title being an obvious nod to the 2002 film XXX, pronounced as "Triple X"), but so far, this project has never come out of the development stages, and especially the death of co-star Joachim Fuchsberger in 2014 has cast doubts upon its eventual materialization.

He gained popularity on a national level with the TV show Kalkofes Mattscheibe on German pay TV network Premiere, which he had adapted for television in 1994 from his Frühstyxradio series of the same name. The show's title is a pun based upon the fact that the German word Mattscheibe can mean "television screen" as well as a "mental blackout". In it, he shows clips from German TV and humorously comments on them or parodies them. In 1996 he was awarded the Adolf-Grimme-Preis for the show. After changing channels several times over the years, the show's current incarnation (entitled Kalkofes Mattscheibe Rekalked) is broadcast on Tele 5.

In 1990 he joined the Frühstyxradio, a comedy show on commercial radio station ffn. Broadcast on Sunday mornings, the shows had a theme and were presented by fictional hosts, with episodes of various ongoing series and stand-alone sketches more or less dealing with that theme. Kalkofe developed and voiced a variety of characters and series for the show.

Kalkofe was born in Hanover. He grew up in Engelbostel and Peine. After passing the Abitur in 1984, he finished his training as a foreign language correspondent clerk and interpreter in English and French before enrolling at the University of Münster to major in media and communication studies.

Oliver Lars Fred Kalkofe (born 12 September 1965) is a German satirist, columnist, book author, actor, voice actor, writer and audiobook narrator.