大象传媒

I wish I had known about the joke competition at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I might have submitted the one I heard last week in Amsterdam.

There was this man who was standing in the street looking into the window of an art shop. He kept being attracted to one particular painting and decided that he'd like to buy it. So, he goes into the shop and says to the attendant:
'I'd like to buy a painting in the window.'
'Which painting, sir?' asks the attendant
'The one with the flowers in it'
'Most of them have flowers, ' replies the attendant,
'Did you see the artist's name?'
'Yes,' says the man, 'it was Verkocht!'

Isn't that a great joke?
So why don't I hear anyone in the studio laughing?

The answer is that unless you know that Uitverkocht is the Dutch word for 'sold' it isn't funny at all. And when a joke has to be explained, it loses its humour like salt which has lost its savour.

'Not getting it' even happens to people who allegedly all speak the same language. Thus many Americans are puzzled when I tell them of how I once, on a very cold night, arrived in a church in Lincolnshire. I had been travelling in a train with no toilet, so the first thing I did was to go up to a group of men and say, ' Excuse me, is there a loo in here?' To which one replied, 'No, but there are three Georges.'

Because British humour relies so much on puns or on the way you say it, for native speakers, it works perfectly. But it's an arrogant presumption on our part that people who have English as a second language should automatically understand us; and if they don't. they - the Germans, the Dutch, the Japanese - must have no sense of humour.

It reminds me of a line I read years ago by the Austrian priest and educator Ivan Illich. He spoke four languages fluently, and could make this unusual comment with some authority:

'It is not so much other peoples words as their silences which we have to learn
in order to understand them.'

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