No One Is Laughing At You (A post about jokes)

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
–A. Whitney Brown

As anyone who has learned a second language can attest, one of the biggest hurdles you come across is humor. Plays on words require a linguistic understanding that is hard to achieve from just listening to your Pimsleur CD’s, and different cultures have different ideas of what is funny.

Cursing usually is the same as humor…

You end up learning them over time, just like you learn idioms and manners.
(Cursing usually is the same as humor in terms of being something that has to be learned–what’s vulgar in one language may not be in another.
Richard Francis Burton, who spoke twenty-nine languages, claimed that he always leaned a language’s curses and obscenities first, so to best understand its nuances.)

I ran into the Humor Problem a few months into my stay in Changchun.

In the office this joke (in Chinese) just killed:

“Scientists put a live penguin and a live pig in a refrigerator. When they opened the freezer up several days later they’d found that the penguin had died and the pig had survived. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“The pig doesn’t know either.”
(Wild laughter at the expense of the person who answered “no.”)

For almost a week after hearing the joke we foreigners were constantly mystified about why it was funny.
At first we thought there was a play on words we were missing out on. No, No, we were told, The pig is just a pig. And it doesn’t know either! Ha, ha, ha!

It eventually became something of an obsession, trying to figure the damn joke out. Eventually the “joke” got us so confused that after a while we weren’t even sure if we were telling it right during discussions about its comic value. (“I think you told it wrong; that time it was sort-of funny,” Charles said one day at lunch.)

So what was so funny about it?
Well, the person who says “No” is as stupid as the pig was!

Yeah, I never really have laughed at it either.

I never understood the humor in, say, the same way I understand why “Who’s on first?” is funny. But I did figure out how to make a joke that would get a rise out of my co-workers.
“Hey Amy, do you know where the stapler is?”
“No.”
“The pig doesn’t know either!”

As the office laughed Amy gave me a look and said, “I wish we hadn’t taught you that joke.”