Japanese silliness (again)
By Dyske July 16th, 2007
Sense of humor is one of the most subjective things; I would say even more so than music, because it’s all or nothing. If something is not funny, there is no value in it at all for that particular audience. With music, we can at least measure the level of craftsmanship or technical competence. It took me years before I started appreciating American jokes. Even today, after living here for over 20 years, there are still some jokes that completely go over my head.
I only miss a few things about Japan, and one of them is this type of sense of humor. I don’t see it in the US. Here, the kids in a playground are wondering what this guy is doing on the ground. It turns out that he is trying to imitate what happens to a straw wrapper when you put water on it. It’s completely pointless and meaningless, and somehow the degree to which it is pointless makes it funny for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ob0hfiMpb4
Steve says:
July 17th, 2007 at 11:27 amReminds of a Red Skelton (American comedian of the 20th century) and an act he did in which he imitated a piece of bacon frying on a frying pan.
Justin says:
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:47 amHave you ever come across any writings or anything that attempts to explain Japanese humor in a way that might make sense to Americans? If so, I’d love to see it. Despite my undergraduate degree in Japanese and subsequent 3 years in Japan I still can’t figure out even half of what’s funny about Downtown’s jokes…
Dyske says:
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:32 amWhen I first came to the US, I wished there was a book that explained in detail all the jokes and nuances of every line in a comedic movie or TV show. It’s not an easy book to write. Ideally, it should be a collaboration between two people, a native English speaker who speaks Japanese and a native Japanese speaker who speaks English. In fact, this team can write books for both English-speaking audience trying to understand Japanese humor and Japanese-speaking audience trying to understand American humor. If it’s just one person, it’s quite possible to miss a lot of things. For instance, as an American, you might get all the American jokes, but you might not understand what exactly needs to be explained to the Japanese audience, and how. This is actually true about translating anything between two languages, but comedy is particularly interesting in that if you keep explaining it, at some point, the audience reaches a break-through point where they “get it.” It’s almost black and white. In translation of other styles of literature, there is usually no discrete point at which the audience understands something; it’s more of a matter of degree.
Mary Whitsell says:
August 6th, 2007 at 5:40 amThe problem with that break-through point is that by the time you’ve reached it, often most of the humor has drained away.
I remember reading a paragraph from Kawabata’s ‘Snow Country.’ In it, the male protaganist refers to his romantic interest as an ‘ii onna.’ This term has completely different connotations from its direction translation in English. No native English reader would find “You’re a good woman” even remotely insulting. Sometimes the translator has to stray a distance from the original translation and add a little extra — or the reader comes away with the wrong idea entirely.
When the movie ‘Love at First Bite’ first came out, I saw it in Manhattan. There is a funny scene where the Jewish psychiatrist flashes a star of David at a vampire, and it brought the house down. I happened to see this movie six months later, when it came out in Tokyo, and the only people in the audience who laughed were a very few Americans, most likely from the East Coast. Culture has so much to do with language, and humor.