Language and humour

Thanks to Percy Balemans’ blog, I found an interesting article in the Guardian. I have some foreign friends, and we sometimes speak about which image the particular nations have. So the “prejudice” of humourless Germans comes across my path from time to time; and I never can really understand why Germans are seen like that. At least now, I have an explanation for the English speakers. Here some excerpts:

Lost in translation

The Brits often assume that Germans have no sense of humour. In truth, writes comedian Stewart Lee, it’s a language problem. The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on.

A commonly held contemporary British view is that the Germans have no sense of humour. But can this be possible? Can there genuinely be a nation incapable of laughter, or is it just that the German language of laughter differs so greatly from our own, that it appears non-existent?

The idea of stand-up is somewhat alien to the Germans. They have a cabaret tradition of sophisticated satire, cross-dressing and mildly amusing songs, and there are also recognisable mainstream, low-brow comedy tropes in the form of vulgar popular entertainers. But the idea of the conversational, casual, middle-ground of English speaking stand-up comedy is unknown to the Germans.

The flexibility of the English language allows us to imagine that we are an inherently witty nation, when in fact we just have a vocabulary and a grammar that allow for endlessly amusing confusions of meanings. At a rough estimate, half of what we find amusing involves using little linguistic tricks to conceal the subject of our sentences until the last possible moment, so that it appears we are talking about something else.

After spending weeks struggling with the rigours of the German language’s far less flexible sentence structures to achieve the endless succession of “pull back and reveals” that constitute much English language humour, the idea of our comedic superiority soon begins to fade. It is a mansion built on sand.

The German language provides fully functional clarity. English humour thrives on confusion.

You can read the complete article on the Guardian’s website.