A good joke can be the hardest thing to understand when studying a foreign language. As a recent article in The Guardian newspaper noted, “There’s more to understanding a joke in a foreign language than understanding vocabulary and grammar.”
Being able to understand local jokes is often seen as an unbelievable ice-breaker for a language learner eager to form friendships with native speakers. “I always felt that humor was a ceiling that I could never break through,” Hannah Ashley, a public relations account manager in London, who once studied Spanish in Madrid, told The Guardian, “I could never speak to people on the same level as I would speak to a native English speaker. I almost came across as quite a boring person because all I could talk about was facts.”
In fact, most of the time, jokes are only funny for people who share a cultural background or understand humor in the same way. Chinese-American comedian Joe Wong found this out first-hand. He had achieved huge success in the US, but when he returned to China in 2008 for his first live show in Beijing, he discovered that people didn’t think his. Chinese jokes were as funny as his English ones.
In Australia, meanwhile many foreigners find understanding jokes about sports to be the biggest headache. “The hardest jokes are related to rugby because I know nothing about rugby,” said Melody Cao, who was once a student in Australia. “When I heard jokes I didn’t get, I just laughed along.”
In the other two major English-speaking countries, the sense of humor is also different. British comedian Simon Pegg believes that while British people use irony — basically, saying something they don’t mean to make a joke—every day, people in the US don’t see the point of using it so often. “British jokes tend to be more subtle and dark, while American jokes are more obvious with their meanings, a bit like Americans themselves,” he wrote in The Guardian.
【小题1】What can we guess about Hannah Ashley?| A．She thinks that Spanish people generally do not have much of a sense of humor. |
| B．She believes that one had better rely on facts when speaking a foreign language. |
| C．She found that humor was a barrier to her getting along well with Spanish people. |
| D．She had a better command of the Spanish language than of the English language. |
| A．suggest that there are cultural differences in humor |
| B．show that it’s hard to put jokes into another language |
| C．prove that local people have different taste in humor |
| D．show that expressing ability affects the sense of humor |
| A．jokes about sports are difficult for foreigners to understand |
| B．Americans are generally more humorous than British people |
| C．not all English native speakers can understand English jokes easily |
| D．British people’s dark jokes often make people uncomfortable |
