Illustrated by Arnold RothSo next time you're planning a trip abroad, better leave the rubber chickens and dictator-joke books at home. For without deciphering and accepting a country's humor DNA, you can't fully understand its culture. Poor Samantha Brown. She may be known to American television viewers as the smiling, perktastic host of Great Weekends on the Travel Channel, but to one particular Chinese film crew, she was simply the flustered Westerner trying to explain her way out of a joke that went over as flat as a mu shu pancake. Wherever she goes, she tries to warm up to her freelance crew with a little humor. After all, laughter is the great unifier, right? “I said to them, ‘Whenever kids in the U.S. dig a hole in their backyard, their mothers ask if they’re digging to China. So what did your mothers ask you?’ ” she recalls. “They just stared at me. So I was, like, ‘You know, digging …,’ pretending to shovel the ground, trying to explain it—and well, once you have to explain a joke …”
That kind of DOA joke is a hazard that travelers rarely prepare for—even as they pack portable hotel burglar alarms and water-purification pills. “American humor does not export well. It’s wordplay, or too juvenile, or topical humor that just gets a blank stare in response,” says Roger Axtell, who wrote the book Do’s and Taboos of Humor Around the World. Even our closest allies, the British, are more than an ocean apart from us on what strikes them as funny. Unlike Three Stooges–obsessed Americans, Brits go for deadpan delivery, probably because they assume the world sees them as a bunch of insufferable prigs, so why not flaunt it? says Jessica Milner Davis of the Australasian Humour Studies Network.
No comics kept that stiff upper lip stiffer than Monty Python. Their “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch features four urbane gentlemen, sitting around a resort’s terrace, reminiscing about how poor they were growing up, telling about their families’ increasingly (and competitively) squalid and outlandish accommodations: “There were 150 of us living in a shoe box in the middle of the road,” one says.
“Cardboard box? You were lucky,” says the next. “We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank.”
Never once do these men’s faces betray them (replay it yourself on You Tube). Like their forebears, they are pure pomposity and pride. “As long ago as the 18th century,” says Milner Davis, “Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, ‘I heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile but never heard to laugh. How low and unbecoming a thing is laughter! Not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face it occasions.’ ”
Germans, too, tend to be reserved in public. Ambush them with humor and risk the cold shoulder—as Joe Sharkey, a travel writer, witnessed in the food court of Berlin’s megastore KaDeWe.
“My friend Chris and I were on a ‘sausage tour’ with this officious German guy whom we called Herr Schnitzel. It was endless, and all we wanted to do was get out of there,” Sharkey recalls. At one point, just to lighten the mood, “Chris took a plate of sausages over to a table of women having tea and said, ‘Here, you might like this.’ They were not amused. ‘We have food now in Germany,’ ” they said, voices dripping with disdain.
On the other end of the humor spectrum: China. Their humor, like their country, is steeped in history, says Joe Wong, a Boston-based stand-up comedian who emigrated from Beijing in 1994. “They’re still doing Ching dynasty jokes from 1644 AD,” he says.
“In the U.S., you would never tell anyone else’s jokes. In China, they don’t care if something is outdated or they’ve heard it before,” Wong says. That’s because
Chinese audiences value technique over topicality. “Chinese comedians have to say things well, sing well, do tongue twisters. It’s almost like vaudeville.”
Sometimes humor is just the smiley-faced flip side of taboos. It’s entirely possible, after all, that America’s obsession with potty jokes and whoopee cushions stems from our worshipping at the altar of Purell and Pine-Sol. Ditto Canadian politeness, eh?
“It goes hand in hand with Canada’s comedy gene,” says Tim Long, an Ontario-bred writer (The Simpsons) living in Los Angeles. “Humor is the polite—some would say wussy—way of working out aggression. If you’re a brash, powerful nation like the U.S. and another country gets you angry, you unleash your army.
If you’re a polite and unpowerful country like Canada and another country makes you mad, you say they’re all overweight hillbillies or their money is impossible to tell apart.” (Do the diplomacy math: That’s us they’re talking about.)
If you want taboo busting, look no farther than Japan. In public, they strictly follow propriety and protocol—and avoid humiliation. “The Japanese have a special phrase, warai no ba, for appropriate ‘containers’ of time and place for laughter,” Milner Davis explains. “The train, the street, the office, even one’s own home may not be warai no ba.” But on TV: Go for it. Imagine any embarrassing contest and it’s likely that a Japanese game show producer has already convinced some poor sap to submit to it. On TV, you’ll see ordinary folks trampoline themselves into Velcro walls, distort their bodies into weird shapes for a game of human Tetris, and shinny along a wall that’s been mechanized to administer body blows.
A recent craze is binocular soccer.
The premise is just as it sounds: Players wear binoculars, resulting in an absurdly altered field of vision. Because the players can barely see the ball, they whiff instead of kick and stagger down the field.
Watch and you’ll probably laugh too. (In fact, ABC is banking on it with its comedy/reality show I Survived a Japanese Game Show.) Even with all the world’s comedic differences, there are some universally appealing gambits—and witnessing someone fall flat on his face is just one of them. Another is family.
Tim Long, the writer for The Simpsons, which is syndicated in more than 60 countries, says, “Everyone thinks their parents are sort of idiots—like Homer and Marge. And everyone is secretly convinced that they’re either too smart, like Lisa, or too cool, like Bart, for their family. Still, people are protective of their families, which is why the bonds on the show bend but never break.”
Exasperation with one’s government also has universal comedic appeal, but the right to openly mock or satirize is decidedly not universal. “Chinese politicians would never start a speech with a joke the way Americans do,” Wong explains. “And no one ever tells a joke about Chinese politicians. An innocuous cartoon of former president Deng Xiaoping made big news; the whole country was shocked.”
In the United States, Wanda Sykes can stand within feet of President Obama and crack jokes about him, but comics in other countries would be risking their lives. In 2006, Walid Hassan, star of the Iraqi television news/comedy show Caricature, was gunned down while driving in Baghdad. In Lebanon, Charbel Khalil, a comedian who performs a daily televised puppet show called Democracy, has been threatened repeatedly and fled the country until the threats abated. Last June, in the wake of a cyclone that devastated much of Myanmar, the comedian Zarganar was detained for calling attention to government inaction. He is now serving a 35-year sentence.
“Sadly, comedians are the canaries in the coal mine for society when it comes to testing freedom,” Milner Davis says.
So next time you’re planning a trip abroad, better leave the rubber chickens and dictator-joke books at home. For without deciphering and accepting a country’s humor DNA, you can’t fully understand its culture.
“Laughter and smiling can include—or exclude,” Milner Davis points out. “But when you’re finally able to join in, what a joy!”
Now, where are the binoculars and soccer ball?
(taken from: http://www.rd.com/laughs/humor-around-the-world/)
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