Two Jews walk into a bar, and one says to the other “Hey, did you hear the one about us?”
Is that an example?
Not sure what kind of humor this is, but the other week I was in the laundry room of my building. A woman was in there trying to get her laundry card to work, but the dryer kept getting an error. I got her to let me try it, and I got it on the second try. I said “I used to have the same problem with my card when I kept it on my dresser. But now that I keep it in my back pocket all the time, it always works. I think it just likes being next to my butt.”
I didn’t think it was that funny, but she sure laughed. Like, a lot.
Perhaps it’s a bad indicator for the success of this thread, but I always thought John Ritter was one of the least funny humans of all time. Unless you mean funny strange rather than funny ha ha,
I would actually say that is an excellent indicator for the success of this thread! Humor is subjective. Even among people with the same cultural experiences. How funny something is, or whether it’s funny at all, varies greatly from person to person. Our disagreement regarding John Ritter gets to the heart of the matter.
That reminds me of something I read by Umberto Eco.
He said that comedy and tragedy are essentially the same thing. They are about the breaking of society’s rules. It could be something very mild, such as using the wrong fork for your salad, or something extreme, like cannibalism. Some things are considered taboo pretty much universally, while others are unique to a particular culture. If it’s unique to a culture, then the “rules” of why it’s taboo can be spelled out in advance in a tragedy. For instance in a tragic play the author can establish that incest is a huge social crime, and then the protagonist ends up killing his father and marrying his mother. Any audience in any culture is going to get why that’s sad.
But comedy doesn’t work if the joke is explained before it’s been told. You can’t start a joke by saying “So incest is bad, right? So anyway there was this guy named Oedipus…” They audience has to already know that a certain taboo is in place. And since different cultures have different taboos, comedy usually doesn’t translate very well.