I have a history of the last days of WWII (told largely from the German viewpoint).
There is a prison in Germany where political prisoners are being held. Two of them are hoping that the advancing Allies will liberate them, and there are signs that troops are not far away. They are called before a sergeant of the guard, who informs them jovially:
“Tomorrow, you will be shot. Tonight, you make kitchen clean.”
It doesn’t sound all that hilarious, but apparently the guard thought it was quite humorous.
This thread resurrection resulted in a Twilight Zone experience for me. I was reading along, thinking “I know I’ve heard that toilet paper joke before. In fact, I think I read it on here. Maybe it’s a famous German joke. Do I know any German jokes? Well, there’s that one my friend’s German boyfriend told about the Nazi asking for directions…” AND THEN I SAW MY OWN POST TELLING THAT JOKE!
Does a funny German computer game count? I’ve always found Wagenschenke, a game in which you try to keep a drunk upright as he staggers home with his bottle, to be pretty funny. It’s the link called “Home Run 2004”, I believe.
i learned that as a texas aggie joke about 35 years ago from one of the company engineers … who was a texan but not an aggie… who was teasing one of our salesmen who was a texas aggie, but using Deep in the Heart of Texas
County Kerry apparently is the Irish equivalent of Ost Friesland. I wonder if they are also their national versions of “where the men are men and the sheep are scared?” In England, I have heard, it is Cumbria and here in America it is usually Wyoming (usually). Though “Wyoming jokes” are not a category the way Polish jokes are (though I think that was largely a 70’s thing, and I lived in Chicago then so I thought it was a Chicago thing too though probably not).
Guy goes into a cafe and orders a dinner roll. Biting into it, he finds a corse hair. He complains. The owner take the guy to the commercial bakery in the back.
A guy with one arm is in front of a conveyor belt. He is wearing an armless t-shirt. As a lump of dough comes buy the guy grabs the dough and shoves it into his armpit with his remaining arm. Plop! a perfect dinner roll.
Manager explains, “He has a family to support so we can’t really fire him.”
Customer says, “But that is disgusting!”
Manager, “You should come by on Sundays, that’s when he makes donuts!”
There was a version of that in Larry Wilde’s 1970’s Italian/Polish joke book (Italian section). There it begins with a pizza chef flattening the pie against his bare chest. There was a bit of dialectal humor included, something like: “you-a should a-come a-Sunday when he-a makes the donuts!”
Someone here once posted a link to a German worker safety video that was just too hilarious not to be parody. I mean… If the Germans are humorless, how could this not be intended as humor?!
There was a black-humour expression that was a common grafitto in Berlin near the end of WWII that went something like: “Enjoy every day of this war, for the peace will be far worse.”
Well, as long as this zombie’s still shambling, here’s Knorkator singing about inventing the 31st letter for the German alphabet, the fart sound, and its many uses. Clad in what appears to be mutated welcome mats.
My father is German, so I get the toilet paper joke (though I don’t laugh out loud at it). Dad likes to wax nostalgic about a standup comedian he remembers from the 50s or 60s – a bald man who in the middle of his act would take a comb from his pocket and, deadpan, slowly run it through his non-existent hair. Broke 'em up every time, apparently.
As for the urinal joke, above, one of Dad’s favorite sayings is “You don’t buy beer, you only rent it.”
BTW one German humorist whose best work was in the 1950s and 1960s but who is still considered one of the greatest (along with Loriot, probably) is Heinz Erhard. His talent was mainly in delivery, so the period context doesn’t matter much.