The Laughter of the Gods: Jokes and Joy
What is considered a joke in the south, can be an insult in the north. The simple and almost easy truth is this: Humour is culturally dependent. Even inside the same culture, regional differences exist.
I am German born and bred, I grew up in the north of Germany and moved to the south for studying literature, culture, politics and philosophy.
In the course of my life I learned not only English on native speaker level but also Persian (‘Farsi’) fluent and without accent. One of the first things you learn in another language when you listen to people talking, is their curses.
The next thing are: Jokes.
Most significant is the fact too, that it is often impossible to translate jokes 1:1 into another language. So often they are based on cultural specifics; on puns, a play on words, that wouldn’t work in the other language. Or they are based on customs and rules you need to know about to grasp the point of the joke, at all.
A rabbi one day walking along a street passed by a butcher’s shop. He looked inside and saw a fine, cured ham in the shop window. His mouth watered. He entered the shop and when asked, told the shop assistant: “I’d like half a pound of that fish in the window there.” — “That’s not a fish,” said the shop assistant “that’s a ham.” Standing up very straight the rabbi looked at him and with a strict face answered: “Did I ask you for the name of the fish?”
A rabbi, as many of my readers will know, is a religious leader and ‘priest’ in the Jewish tradition. In Judaism eating the meat of pigs is forbidden. If you do not know about this, you would not get what can be considered at least a fine point for a good smile. Fine-pointed reasoning too is part of the tradition of reading the old religious texts and interpreting them in that culture.
So, next time, someone jokes about something in your presence and you wonder what the fun actually could be about — or even might feel insulted — pause for a moment. There may be no insult intended after all.
Even the Gods laugh. Now and again. 😀
