Something that I’ve often wondered is if other countries share the same humor at our brands of comedy. Specifically, animated shows (which is the most popular genre of animated show in the US, it seems).
I know that other countries air US shows, and I’m sure they probably even get some of the same channels via satellite TV. But do they consider the stuff funny? I would assume some do, otherwise there would be no point to airing some of this stuff in that country. For example, do other countries find the content of the Simpsons funny?
With shows like the Simpsons, I think the main selling point is whether or not the person gets the joke. The challenge of a foreigner enjoying a show like the Simpsons is that it is a big satire of a lot of American pop culture- so there may be a lot of references to stuff that someone from another country wouldn’t be familiar with. Family Guy seems to do this even more- in fact even I don’t get a lot of the refereneces/jokes right away (for example, when Peter and Lois invite Margo Kidder of Superman fame to dinner, and she goes crazy and trashes the dining room. Only recently I found out they were making fun of the fact that she suffered from paranoia/anxiety).
I do believe some forms of comedy are a little more universal. There is an anime called FLCL (pronounced fooley-cooley or furi-kuri) which is very wild and zany. I’m sure the show was made with Japanese audiences in mind, however I find the brand of comedy absolutely hysterical. In the show, they actually do a parody of South Park, with a whole scene done in the ‘cutout’ style. One character later even does the whole ‘Kenny pulling on his hoodstrings in fear and giving a muffled yelp’. Seeing this made me thing- Do Japanese find South Park funny? That actually surprised me. I’d figure a show like South Park might seem too offensive, but who knows. I know when my friends and I went to Japantown, we saw DVDs for the Japanese version of South Park, which suggests that it is aired in Japan, with dubbed voices (the best part is that they even try to match Cartman’s voice- think about someone speaking Japanese in Cartman’s voice )
I tend to think that physical humor is the most universal: everyone falls down, everyone is clumsy, everyone looks stupid sometimes. Verbal humor, comedies of manners, pop-culture humor, etc. is pretty culturally-specific, I think.
I had a friend who, during college, spent a semester in Scotland. One night she and her Scottish friends rented Raising Arizona, a classic comedy. She was rolling on the floor with laughter (“Son, you got a panty on your head” – hee hee!), but her Scottish friends were staring stony-faced at the television. Not only didn’t they find it funny – they couldn’t even tell where the jokes were supposed to be. (“Och, aye, of course he has a panty on his head, any fool can see that!”) Apparently deadpan absurdism isn’t universal.
I tend to find that many Americans do not get the Britsh sense of sarcastic and cynical humour. Many UK’ers also enjoy black comedy (and some of it is dark- any UK’ers see “Jam” on C4? Now that was disturbingly funny).
I used to find Cheers amusing - but not hilarious, Friends I could stomach - then I lost interest, Frasier I like. I love The Simpsons as do many Uk’ers - and I think this is because the humour is in so many forms (in-jokes, slapstick etc).
I have found that the ability to do a prat-fall and come up smiling is funny anywhere. It’s a good skill to have if you like travelling and meating the ‘natives’.
I saw a play when I was in London (I’m an American) that I found pretty funny. The wierd thing was that although I found it amusing, I wasn’t laughing in the same places or nearly as much as the rest of the audience (presumably mostly British).
The person I went with, who was an American but had lived there about as long as I’ve been alive, laughed right along with everyone else. After the show we were talking about it and in one way or another it came up that most of the audience laughed at stuff that I didn’t. The show was about three old friends and some trials and tribulations their friendship goes through. We figured out that a lot of what the audience found funny but baffled me was the way in which these friends acted so English. They were very formal throughout the play despite being old friends and dealing with a serious crisis in their relationship.
In this case I think it’s not so much the class of humor but the cultural awareness that allows you to see the humor.
I think puns and similar wordplay are considered to be funny (but not always very funny!) in most cultures…the downside being that these jokes usually cannot be translated.
If you read Aristophanes, there are plenty of penis jokes. This includes size jokes and trying-to-conceal-erection jokes. I think the dick joke may be very nearly universal, although there are probably a few cultures either so open or so repressed that such jokes would fail.
But as others have said, I think the safest bet is broad slapstick comedy.
Lamia is right about slapstick. Mr. Bean has always done well with international audiences because it dispenses with hard-to-translate verbal humor altogether.
You watched FLCL, and you thought South Park might be too offensive? FLCL made an art out of obscene innuendo, and it wasn’t lacking in the gross-out factor, either. Granted, it’s not loaded with the random cussing of South Park, but the only thing that could save Martha 700ClubMatron from apoplexy while watching it would be a total lack of perception.
We laugh at things that shock or surprise us. The problem with carrying most forms of humor across cultural boundaries is that it’s more difficult to achieve the necessary level of surprise in someone with a different background. We expect the occasional oddity when dealing with people from other cultures, so an action has to be really peculiar to surprise us into laughter (FLCL manages this quite well, though). Worse, many jokes rely on cultural expectations for their shock factor. A person from a different culture doesn’t necessarily have those expectations–the entire situation may seem weird to them, not just the punchline. Consider a hypothetical cartoon showing a small building with a number of people gathered in front of a large bowl of something with two sticks standing upright in it. A man behind the counter of a busy eatery nearby is watching them and thinking, “I wish they’d leave. I’m almost out of rice.” (OK, the joke is pretty lame, as well as being rather morbid, but it’s the best joke I could think of offhand that relied on a custom unfamiliar to most Westerners.) Who gets the “shock” element of the scene?
As Daniel said, physical humor is the easiest to convey, because the surprise doesn’t depend as much on cultural context. Everyone is familiar with pratfalls, for example, the humor of which depends largely on how unexpected the fall is (running gags aside). A drunk who falls down generally isn’t very funny (at least, not without some context). A sober, business-like fellow who takes a tumble while walking down the street is funny. An Olympic gymnast who completes a brilliant routine, then trips as she walks off the mat is funnier.
Verbal jokes are harder to convey, puns are generally untranslatable, and metahumor (like the bartender asking the priest, the minister, and the rabbi who walk into his bar, “What is this, a joke?”) is completely unworkable in a culture that lacks the context.
So… right. Allow me the honor of being the first ignorant Westerner to admit that she doesn’t get this at all. Fight the good fight against my woeful ignorance of Japanese (yes? Japanese?) culture and explain this!
Hmm… I Know several Scots who loved Raising Arizona, - I also know at least one American who couldn’t see anything funny in it.
As a Brit I cannot stand Mr sodding Bean.
NaughtyMe mentioned “Jam”, loved it myself and I can’t imagine it ever being allowed to be seen in America (and certainly not some of “Brass Eye”), but a lot of Brits hated it too.
I was surprised by “Curb your enthusiam”, it seemed such an English form of humour - based on embarrassment as it is.
Not to say there aren’t big cultural differences in humour - or that it doesn’t change with time - look at old Laurel and Hardy stuff - itss sooo sloooowww compared to today’s standards, and I challenge anyone in the UK to laugh at ITMA (a 40’s style ray, er, radio comedy) today.
And as for Shakespear’s comedy… “Kenny should NOT be a bishy”
I love Shakespeare’s comedy. It’s very funny if it’s performed well, and I’m not just talking about the dick jokes (though, they, as is always the case, can be pretty smirk-inducing).
Heh. I’m an ignorant Westerner, too, which is why I couldn’t come up with anything better. The reference is actually to a custom that’s primarily Chinese, I think–a funeral offering of rice with two sticks of incense standing upright in it. I only know about it because I happened to read a page about chopstick etiquette recently. The guy is waiting for mourners to leave a funeral so that he can sell the rice they left. The U.S. equivalent would be a florist waiting at a cemetary for a funeral to end in order to steal the flower arrangements.
Yes, it’s not much of a joke, but the point is that without knowing the cultural context, you would just scratch your head and move on (or ask someone what the heck it’s about).
Ah, thanks for the explanation. In context, your hypothetical cartoon is indeed pretty shocking, yet there is no way for a foreigner to figure out what’s going on unless they are intimately aware of the country’s particular cultural norms. Good example.
The replies to the question stated in the original post seem to follow a trend of giving answers that deal with the human body itself. I’m thinking that this is probably the only sort of culturally transcendent humor, because there is such diversity of cultures in the world that the function of the human body is really almost the only thing all cultures are guaranteed to have in common. I’m not sure that puns count, because while punning is a type of joke found in many cultures, a specific pun obviously cannot be meaningfully translated from one language to another. By contrast, the same penis joke is going to have the same meaning in any language.
)