INTERNATIONAL HUMOR
A world-wide telephone survey was conducted and the only question asked was:
"Would you please give your honest opinion about possible solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?”
The survey failed because:
In Eastern Europe there was no agreement on what "honest" meant.
In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant.
In some places in Africa they didn’t know what "food" meant.
In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant.
In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant.
In South America they questioned what "please" meant.
In the USA they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant.
And in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain . . . everyone hung up when they heard the foreign accent.
Country-specific way of thinking and social customs have a major influence in the difference of humor from country to country.
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According to embodied cognition philosophy,human beings, based on their embodied experience of surroundings, act and behave, but people from different countries live in shared cultural community and entrenched social cuscoms respectively, and thus make different cognitive construals on the same thing accordingly.
On the one hand, gradually, under the influence of the world multimedia, in the majority of countries, humor gets global-village, universal features. On the other hand, every country has its own cultural background, stereotypes, scapegoats of mockery (rednecks, police officers etc).The situational and historic context means a lot too (war in Ukraine and the Middle East). So the national humor is influenced by a smorgasbord of world and local factors.
Oleg:
I agree. Humor differs greatly from country to country, but there are also important similarities. That allows both for common ground, and for sometimes-unexpected differences.
Hello Don,
Would you please explain why people reacted differently to the same Question as was stated above?
Different cognitive domains result in different reactions to the same thing! A cognitive domain is the creation of multi-faceted processes, physical, emotional, social, etc; the same as humour, and everything else.
In Ghaza, there is war taking the lives of inncent people. How do you look at it? Just a rhetorical question!
Warm regards.
Mahdi: For two years (from 1969-1971) I taught English language courses at Kabul University. Afghanistan is a Muslim country, and a theocracy, so the humor in Afghanistan was not accepted by the Afghan government. Furthermore, Afghan humor is not considered humor outside of Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is a theocracy, Afghan humor tends to target the Shaw, the Ayatollah, and the Mullahs, all of which are problems for the ordinary people. Here is an example of an Afghan joke, which is not a joke outside of Afghanistan:
An Aflghan farmer saw Mullah Nasrudin in his watermelon patch, and the farmer confronted the Mullah: "Why are you stealing my watermelons." Mullah Nasrudin replied, "I'lm not stealing your watermellons. I'm only putting them in this bag so that the wind won't blow them away."
I'm attaching two PowerPoints which are about what Americans see when they live for two years in Afghanistan. Many of these pictures are humorous to us, but not humorous to the Afghans.
Hi Don,
Thank you for sharing your ppt and the "survey-joke"! You raise an interesting question, and I would like to share some of my thoughts.
I did some research on humor theories and (German) literature as part of my undergraduate thesis, and came up with a cognitive poetic definition that was based on the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). In the context of my thesis, I defined humor as competence of a reader to discover an incongruence between two scripts in a verbal text, to resolve it and thereby understand the incongruence.
Regarding your joke, it works on different levels or scripts: First, there is the incongruence between the expectation that follows the joke's introduction ("A world-wide telephone survey was conducted...") and the incongruence or first punch line that there are no results ("The survey failed").
Second, the single reasons given for the failure have the effect of a punch line. E.g., the beginning of the statement "In Western Europe..." raises the expectation that there were "scientific problems" that you would expect from a telephone survey such as not enough participants or unclear results. However, the reason "they didn't know what 'shortage' meant" makes us laugh because it runs against our expectations, and because we as readers have some contextual knowledge about the high standards of living in Western Europe.
Similarly, the answer "In the USA they didn't know what 'the rest of the world' meant." makes us only laugh when we know the stereotype of US citizens who can name every state in the US, but never have been outside of their country or have no idea about other countries or geography.
So, if there is such a thing as "global humor," I would argue that it involves readers' knowledge about global contexts or stereotypes (e.g., US citizens are bad at geography, Eastern Europeans are unhonest etc.). If a reader lacks this knowledge, they would probably not understand the joke's incongruency, and would not be amused by the joke.
To test my argument, one would probably need to test this survey with people from different origins or countries, and ask them to try to explain the joke. What do you think about this?
I also really liked your photos on humorous architecture or art in the public sphere - here it would be interesting to discuss, if they work similarly (i.e., they use different scripts), and if you need country-specific knowledge to understand them.
Best,
Achim
Achim: Excellent insights. I'm recommending your post to other humor scholars.