Most of my friends would describe me as at least mildly witty. As a public speaker, I always had the reputation of drawing laughs. A quick reply with humor has always served me well in the most trying of circumstances. But humor doesn´t always translate well and one of the challenges of living in a different country is that it is difficult to use the old tools to charm as readily as they were once implemented. And it goes both ways; I am also widely oblivious to the humor shared with me by others.
So for this, I celebrate a bit of a moment of pure joy. I laughed at a Spanish television show. There are no end of comedy shows on television here. There are sitcoms, but more commonly there are satiric programs and sketch comedy shows. The sketch shows tend to be over the top and silly, and very rapidly spoken with broad characters often doing accents or funny voices. I try to watch the shows to immerse myself in the language and the culture and finally, I laughed. I won´t bother trying to explain the joke, it was actually really silly. If I described it you would wonder less about my skill with humor and more about my level of intelligence. But the point is, I found it funny. And I laughed for about 10 minutes.
Why this even matters is that it felt like a breakthrough of sorts. My language skills have improved to the point where I now understand silly jokes.
Humor between different cultures has even been studied. Different countries find different kind of humor to be the best. For example:
Americans and Canadians much preferred gags where there was a sense of superiority – either because a person looked stupid, or was made to look stupid by another person, such as:
Texan: “Where are you from?”
Harvard grad: “I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”
Texan: “Okay – where are you from, jackass?”
Take a look at what this writer found to be the funniest joke across all cultures, and send me some of your “funny” stories while living abroad.
