Beni Weber

Munich, 1974: law, briefly

Benedikt Weber was born in Munich on 18 January 1974. He started a law degree and abandoned it once a presenting job came through — the sort of swerve that usually ends badly and in his case did not. He later filled the gap in his training with a weekend course in media marketing at the Bavarian academy for advertising and marketing, which is as close as his CV gets to a formal qualification in the thing he has done for thirty-two years.

His first screen credit was Disney Club on Das Erste in 1994, when he was twenty. The Disney association that the current tour publicity still trades on — it calls him a Disney veteran — dates from that job and never really broke.

Twelve years of toilet-roll sculpture

Art Attack ran with Weber in front of it from 1995 to 2007, first on Super RTL and later on Disney Channel: twelve years of making things out of cardboard tubes, paper and white craft glue, at a rate of production that left a permanent mark on anyone who was eight at the time. Across the same stretch he fronted Pumuckl TV on Das Erste, and from 2000 to 2006 he presented Cool oder Crash for Das Erste and KiKA.

He moved behind the camera too. On Beni Querbeet, which ran on Disney Channel from 2004 to 2007, he directed and produced as well as presented, and in May 2008 he set up his own production company, Produktion34. From July 2011 he began publishing children's books, and he has narrated a long list of audiobooks and audio dramas since.

The last of the big presenting jobs in that first phase was Woozle Goozle, the science-and-curiosity magazine he launched on Super RTL in 2013 and fronted until 2016. Simón Albers took it over from 2019 and it is still running without Weber: in October 2026 it won the German children's media prize Der Weiße Elefant for an episode on how the Bundestag works. Weber built the format and then watched somebody else collect for it, which is an ordinary fate in children's television and rarely said out loud.

551 parts, and the Human Torch twice

The other half of the career is dubbing, and by volume it is the larger half. The German dubbing registry lists 551 speaking roles against his name, running from the mid-1990s to productions dated 2026. He has been the German voice of Stan Marsh in South Park since 1999, which means roughly a quarter-century of delivering Trey Parker's lines in Bavarian-accented German to an audience that mostly has no idea the same man taught them papier-mâché.

The film work is broader than the children's catalogue suggests. He voiced Chris Evans as Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four in 2005 and in Rise of the Silver Surfer in 2007, then returned to the same character for Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024 — a seventeen-year gap between sessions on one part. He dubbed Ryan Reynolds in Party Animals in 2002 and Wild X-mas in 2005, and has credits in L.A. Crash in 2004, Twilight and Gran Torino in 2008, World War Z in 2013 and The Lego Movie in 2014. The tour's press material leans on the Reynolds line specifically, which tells something about who the publicity thinks is buying.

Seven series of stunts, then a stop

Die Beni Challenge began on Disney Channel on 21 April 2018 and became the defining work of his middle period: one physical problem per episode, attempted on camera, usually at his own expense. Whether a person can run a hundred metres barefoot across water. Whether sausages can be grilled underwater. Seven series and 116 episodes, plus specials and two spin-offs, with the last batch of episodes broadcast between 19 and 22 October 2024. The back catalogue sits on Disney+, in the waiputhek and on YouTube.

The record-breaking was part of the same instinct. He held the fastest time for drinking a bottle of ketchup, 32.37 seconds, from 2012 until 2024, and set a mark of sixty double high-fives in thirty seconds in April 2018, since beaten. None of this is comedy in the club sense, but it establishes something relevant to the new show: a man with twenty-eight years of practice at being the only person on camera, improvising around a thing that is going wrong in real time.

Live Hacks: the nostalgia bet

Live Hacks, announced for 2026, is his first solo stage show. The pitch written by his own promoters is unusually blunt about what it is selling: he explained to a whole generation how to build artworks out of toilet-roll tubes, and now he is coming live, this time without the craft glue. The evening is aimed at the people who sat in front of those programmes as children and, in the publicity's phrasing, still do not know how life actually works. Weber claims he does. The press release concedes immediately that this is a claim.

The billed register is interactive and self-deprecating rather than observational or political, which fits a performer whose entire training is in talking to a room that answers back. There is no indication anywhere in the material that he intends to perform in character or lean on the television formats; the craft glue is explicitly the thing being left behind.

The merchandise runs the other way. His shop sells Beni's ultimate craft-glue box at €29.90 and a three-pack of white-craft-glue-scented air fresheners at €9.99, both currently out of stock. The joke the show says it is retiring is the joke the audience is paying for, and both parties appear to know it.

The run, and what nobody can report yet

The opening night is Cologne on 3 November 2026 at the Wohnzimmer, doors at 19.00 and curtain at 20.00, programmed inside the Cologne Comedy Festival — a sensible place to put a debut, because the festival brings its own audience and forgives an untested name. The ticketing listings carry club dates in Berlin and Hamburg later in November. The run then closes in his home city on 15 December 2026 in the Silbersaal at the Deutsches Theater München, 20.00 with doors half an hour earlier, tickets at €31, performed in German and timed at two hours including a thirty-minute interval. The tour is promoted by Florida Touring Co. GmbH, with HIGHlive entertainment GmbH presenting the Cologne night.

What does not exist yet is a review. The first performance has not happened, no support act is listed on any of the venue pages, and no setlist or structure beyond the interval has been published. The rooms are small — a theatre side hall and a handful of clubs rather than the arenas German comedy routinely fills — which is the correct scale for a first show and makes the two-hour running time the most interesting number in the announcement. Two hours with an interval is a full evening, not a tryout set, from someone who has never done this before.