What’s so funny?
Clown with sunflower/Grimaldi/flickr
As they say, there’s nowt so queer as folk. And particularly when it comes to the subject of humour. There seems to be no logic as to what one person finds funny, and what leaves another person completely cold. Take stand-up comedy for example; I am one of those people who would never go to a comedy club because I just know I’d never laugh at any of the jokes. I’d be the one sitting there stony faced while everyone else is laughing in the aisles.
Then there are jokes; I’m always impressed by people who manage to remember all the jokes they’ve ever heard, and can recount them wittily at dinner parties, holding everyone’s attention and then snappily delivering the punch line with perfect timing. I’ve learned the art of politely chuckling along with everyone, and then I usually forget the joke as soon as it’s told, because a) I didn’t really find it funny anyway and b) I’m useless at telling jokes even when I do manage to remember them.
I find the question of humour crossing cultures particularly fascinating. I’ve never been to Albania, and know nothing about the Albanian sense of humour, assuming it can be characterised in a particular way. But why the English comedian Norman Wisdom went down so well there was fascinating to me (he was even made an honorary citizen of Tirana). Apparently his ‘little man’ characters appealed to the Communist doctrine of a member of the proletariat scoring points against the aristocracy. I still don’t understand why Mr Bean goes down so well in France, though – are the French particularly fond of slapstick? Dinner for One is still shown every year on New Year’s Eve in Germany, on several of their television channels: what on earth about this fairly simple sketch has captured a nation’s delight so completely? A mystery.
Few British comedies or sitcoms have managed to cross the pond successfully: Dad’s Army and Fawlty Towers were both lost in translation in the US. An old friend tells the story of how he watched Monty Python in New York with a collection of, he thought, like-minded folks. All until he realised halfway through that they were indeed laughing – but at none of the intended funny bits. The Thick of It flopped – was it that the watered-down version, purged of foul language for the more prurient US ear, meant that it sunk without a trace, or do Americans simply not find the workings of the civil service funny? Perhaps it was only the previous success of Yes Minister in Britain that paved the way for it it here in the first place… The attached cartoon had a friend of mine completely baffled – he hasn’t lived long in the UK and is not familiar with our quaint legal system – no wonder he had no idea what the joke was. 
You may be wondering just what this dame does find funny – anything? Of course I do, she replied, testily. My sense of humour is usually stirred either by silly word play, by ‘fish out of water’ jokes, or unlikely pairings. Mostly for me, the more bizarre the situation, the funnier it is. This is probably why I can often be spotted sitting on the tube chortling away at the latest copy of Private Eye, to the bemusement of my fellow passengers. To me, the confusion of a Russian at the sight of a worm in a wig was just as funny as the cartoon itself.
Childhood humour has its own particular stamp. I still remember being reduced to helpless hysteria during a French ‘A’ Level lesson with one of the other dames. A piece of work was returned to me with various unreadable comments written on it by the teacher, as was the norm. We spent a merry five minutes at the back of the classroom, trying to decipher her hieroglyphics on the pages, and hazarding guesses to each other as to what they might mean. As might be imagined, we came up with increasingly silly interpretations until we suddenly noticed that the classroom had gone very quiet, and that Mme B was staring at us with a face like thunder. The grins fell from our faces as she icily ordered us to leave the room forthwith.
Now that was funny.
I know just what you mean! I remember sitting through Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in disappointed silence while all around people were just about rolling in the aisles. My favourite cartoon: two hippos wallowing in a sunbaked waterhole; one turns to the other and says, ‘Do you know, I keep thinking it’s Tuesday.’