German Humor

           I was enthused to see an article about British humor because I have a British professor this semester. When I got to reading the article, it was about Germans and their sense of humor. Perfect! One of my best friends is from Germany. She was an exchange student and will be coming back to the states at the end of February. Immediately all kinds of thoughts ran through my head. At times I will write things to her, not thinking that she won’t get my sarcasm and then I get a reply back asking what in the world I was talking about. I wish I could think of the sarcasm I used, but I’m sure more will come up when she comes back over, so I can save those for another journal entry.

            I recently heard The German Child joke and didn’t even know that was what it was called. Thinking back I can’t even remember where I read it, but it was just last week and I thought I guess there really is no sense saying anything if you don’t have anything to complain about. We, as Americans, are good at complaining, so that is probably why we have so much to say.

            The article related that one of the ways that we relate humor is by talking about a certain subject and then changing that subject at the very end. So we go about making people think about one thing, and then boom change to something else. This is called “pull back and reveals” and the Germans don’t often have that in their language, so that it why they don’t understand it in ours, thus most of our jokes wouldn’t seem like jokes at all in their language.

            Another aspect is that English is confusing and we use other words to modify nouns and verbs that can be used in more than one form. The Germans, on another hand, don’t use separate words, but push them altogether, so it’s less confusing. A third thing I learned was that Germans don’t find jokes about our bodies comical. If you make a comment about a girl’s breasts in a eighth grade boys’ classroom, they will laugh their tails off. As well, older married guys always seem to be getting smutty text messages about girls or pictures of girls. For some reason Americans like this type of humor, where the Germans seem more serious to me.

            The end of the article talked about the geographical advantage of jokes. We by chance got born in America and have grown up accustomed to the humor we have heard here all of our lives. If we would have grown up in Germany, then their sense of humor would seem right to us. It definitely is by chance of what type of humor you develop. There is no right or wrong humor; it just depends on your location. As we become aware of the different countries and languages that surround us, I think we will become more accepting of the processes they go through.
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