That’s right!
My German teacher liked this one:
What’s better than Bonnie and Clyde?
Bonnie ohne Kleide!
I remember reading a Spanish joke along these lines that involved a man and a woman (sitting a different tables, as they don’t know each other) ordering breakfast on a train, and the server mixed up their orders. When the man & woman realize the mistake, the man offers to trade, and his wording apparently makes it very funny and risque in Spanish, but the joke is completely lost in English because of the gender words, which don’t translate properly.
One of those masculine nouns might well have been vagina–le vagin. I’ve always found that unintentionally funny.
This is fascinating stuff! I can’t wait to hear more!
Messing around with grammar often results in nonsense, but it’s interesting to note that it means something–or subtly changes the meaning–whenever possible, so to speak. Grammatical gender appears to be an area particularly rife with possibilities.
From a comedy perspective, I almost regret that English doesn’t have it, but there are tremendous advantages to not having to worry about adjective endings and determiners that agree with the nouns: we can swap out words (Mad Libs-style) or make spoonerisms with great ease, and I suspect English is high in the ranks of languages suited to punning.
It is pretty cute, yeah. I grew up with a lot of Filipino friends and Tagalog speakers learning English will often say “he” across the board, for every sex. “Where’s Ella going?” “Oh, he had to go put his makeup on”.
It’s not enough to take you out of the sentence or to be super confusing, enough to sound silly and be cute.
I am honestly trying to think of some jokes. I’m not really a big fan of Hindi humor, but I’m sure I will. All I can think of is a pun:
Q. What do you call a lonely banana?
A. Akela.
“Kela” meaning banana, and “akela” meaning lonely…get it? Get it? HAHAHAH…not.
ETA: Hindi is my first language and I still fuck up gender sometimes. What gender is a computer? A TV? A car? You have to know all these!
There are a lot of Filipina nurses in this area. Mrs. Cliffy and I found it incredibly frustrating that none of them could remember our daughter’s gender. Which wouldn’t seem like a big deal, except the hospital had lost her at one point, so anything that suggested confusion about which one was ours after that made me crazy.
I don’t know if Germans make jokes about the word for girl (das Madchen) being of neuter gender, but I can assure you that American junior-high school German students certainly do.
–Cliffy
Nitpick: The second “der” is genitive plural, so it’s “the leader of the ladders”.
Flashback to 11th grade, circa 1968: Hewlett-Packard gave our high school a desktop computer, the high tech thingy of the day. This was the fore-runner of today’s programmable pocket-sized calculators. A certain math teacher, who also taught a Spanish math class and was an incurable punster, was careful to refer to the device as La calculatadora, NEVER as La computadora.
After all, the “com” of computadora sounds much like “con” (“with”), and who knows who puta Dora might be!
For the Spanish-impaired:puta means bitch, typically also meaning whore.
Talking about jokes, I just remembered one.
“Qué es una vaca loca?”
R:“Un toro con cartera”
“What is a mad cow?”
R:“A bull with a purse”
*Loco/a is mad or crazy, and also loca, as said before, means a flamboyant man.
Probably outside the scope of this thread, but I wonder when and how gender changes occur in languages.
Nitpick FAIL. The article der is both genitive singular for feminine nouns, and genitive plural. However, the plural for Leiter (f) is Leitern across the four cases, so ‘of the ladders’ is ‘der Leitern’, whereas ‘of the ladder’ is ‘der Leiter’. The genitive plural for Leiter (m) is der Leiter, though, so “der Leiter der Leiter” can mean both the leader of the leader and the leader of the ladder.
Not quite what the OP is looking for, but: In the short story “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question” by Dorothy L. Sayers (one of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries), our hero nabs the bad guy due to a gender mistake he makes in French. The title of the story is itself an English pun referencing that. (And now I’ve given away too much.)
Aha! This is interesting, because I found the same thing in Jamaica. When talking to some locals (who speak English in the Jamaican way and also a hasty version of it that is their regional patois), they kept referring to a dog as “he” even though it was clearly female. Confused, I asked, “But Humphrey is a female, right?”
“Oh yah, he’s a female.”
Nitpick FAIL fail (well, only a small one): the leader of the leader would be der Leiter des Leiters. It only works with the masculine plural: the leader of the leaders.
It’s not that we joke about it, but it does make sentences a bit awkward at times. Like with das Kind (child), you have to use es instead of er or sie to make the grammatical genders agree which even to me sounds weird sometimes. Also der Hund and die Katze (dog and cat) are male and female respectively by default, so you have to specify when you mean a bitch or a tomcat. Come to think of it, funny how those words exist also in English, but not their gender counterparts (or do they - is there a word for male dog or female cat?).
A female cat is a ‘molly’ or a ‘queen’. I don’t think there is a special term for a male dog - I mean, it’s a sire if he’s made pups, but outside of that? Looking here, the third definition for dog is “the male of such an animal”.
Calculadora, no ta.
And in English, a female cat is also a puss or pussy. My Jamaican landlady referred to her female cat as a puss in a perfectly normal tone of voice but to her own parts as a catty, looking both sides first and making this “I’m being so naughty!” face.
In Euskal Herria and nearby areas, using the wrong gender on adjectives is jokingly called “Biscay-style matching”: many words flip gender between Basque and Spanish, so people whose first language is Basque will often make that mistake. The whole line is concordancia vizcaína: pollo gorda, gallina flaco (Biscay-style gender matching: she-fat chicken, he-thin hen).
I heard this in music school; I don’t remember from which Spanish-speaking country the guy was who told it to me:
El toca el violín, y ella la viola.
He plays the violin, and she the viola.
He plays the violin, and rapes her.
(“La” is feminine article as well as third-person feminine pronoun; viola is the singular verb for “violar,” rape, as well as of course the noun for viola.) A very music school male joke.