Comedy is International

They say one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead (a rule I’m planning to violate frequently as the whole Bush cabal dies off, which can’t happen soon enough) so, with regard to Fred Phelps’ passing away I will only say: Good, he’s dead.

On a lighter note, this was sort of a cute video.  The concept was to test whether jokes came across when  told in another language, e.g. English.  From the text of the article, I got the feeling the  writer(s) thought that it didn’t, but I disagree.  I thought the jokes were pretty funny, actually, especially the  one about the two grapes.

Humor Transcends All Barriers

Essentially, anything that’s not a pun will work.  Sure, there are some other exceptional cases; jokes about a given  countries politicians, or that make local cultural references, won’t travel, but that’s not a language issue.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the same jokes exist in most languages.  Or some variant thereof.

It’s inevitable.  We are all human beings.  We all eat.  We all sleep.  We all fall in love, have disagreements, get hangovers when we drink too much.  We all die, and we’re all afraid of it.  Well, maybe some people aren’t, but most are.  These are the things we think about, so these are the things we laugh about.

Jokes about sex are probably just about the most common jokes of all (my favorite is the one about Superman, Wonder Woman and The Invisible Man), because the only thing people like more than talking about sex is actually having sex.  Of course, if everybody was having sex as much as they wanted, there would be a lot less time to make up jokes about it.  In fact, if everybody was getting it as much as they wanted, the streets would be empty, nobody would ever show up to work, and society would collapse.

The other thing I got from the video was further confirmation of my view that with the advent of the internet, we can now research things easily which would have taken great effort before, and you don’t even need to be a real scientist, so studies like this get done.  I reckon it’s a good thing.  At the very worst, harmless.