TRAVEL MEMOIR

Do jokes work as well in Farsi as in French? LUKE SLATTERY pulls up a bar stool and delivers the punchline.

Do jokes work as well in Farsi as in French?

Ionce travelled with a chap who wore just the one pair of shoes. And one coat. He’d crammed all his possessions into a seven-kilogram carry-on. I favour a bigger suitcase – three pairs of shoes – but for the past few years I’ve travelled the world with just the one joke.

In a sense the joke isn’t really the joke; the funny part is the translation.

It’s the simplest gag: “Horse walks into a bar. Barman says, ‘Why the long face?’”

It’s so simple, I’ve had no trouble relaying it in French and Italian. Will it work as easily in Farsi, Inuit, or Bahasa? Only time and altitude miles will tell.

My aim to travel the world on just the one gag may seem like a frivolous exercise, but its real purpose is to winkle out answers to some deeper questions. Is humour culture-specific? Or is there some comic archetype hard-wired into us all? What, in any event, is a joke?

A few months ago I found myself in a bar in a town in central Italy, conversing in my halting Italian over a carafe of local red with a couple of patrons. After a while I pluck up the courage. “Un cavallo entra in un bar...”

After I deliver the punchline, the chap closest to me leans forward with a slightly troubled expression. He splays his palms, as if holding them out for inspection. He looks to the companion to his left, then to his right, then returns his gaze to me, raises an eyebrow and says, “E ancora?” (And then?)

I shrug and reply, “Questo è tutto.” (That’s it.)

He shrugs in return. The chap on the left starts jabbing his phone. Is he bored, I wonder, or speed-dialling security? Finally, the man in the middle leans back with a satisfied grin and says, “Ahhhh. Gioco di parole.” (Word game.) They nod and smile. But nobody really laughs.

Soon the chap on the right drags his chair forward with a scrape. “I’ve got one too,” he says with a big grin that wipes away decades. The 60-year-old is suddenly a boy of 10. We all turn to him.

“Un cavallo entra in un bar,” he begins. The horse orders a drink, and another, then turns and announces to the crowd that he has a great joke to tell. But the guy closest to him booms, “Don’t pay any attention to him – he’s a drunkard!” All three chaps double over laughing. I lean forward in my chair, splay my palms, and say, “E ancora?”

The origins of my universal-joke idea lie in an encounter with a group of international journalists. We were drinking late into the night, and each of us shouted a round and offered a joke. My contribution was the long-faced horse. Then, as now, the reaction was more bemusement than amusement. “Ahhh,” said a Russian. “This is typical English joke.” Confessed an Egyptian, “We really only have jokes about nuns and gays.”

An Italian in the group said her countrymen don’t really joke so much as take digs at people from the next town or region. “We don’t really have this kind of humour,” she said of the horse gag.

But I’m not so sure. A few nights later I tell my horse joke, in English, to an Italian and an Australian. The Italian erupts into laughter. She wipes away tears. The Australian is nonplussed.

The Italian leans forward. “Don’t you get it?” she asks. “It’s a horse and…” She makes a long flowing gesture, suggestive of a muzzle. The Australian shakes her head. “Oh, forget it,” says the Italian.

I’m still travelling on the horse joke. If it keeps bombing, I have another in reserve. Guy goes to his doctor with a chip up his nose and a herring in his ear. “I’m not feeling great, doc,” he complains, “but I don’t know why.” Doctor says, “I can tell by one look at you – you’re not eating properly.”

Luke Slattery’s latest book is Mrs M: An Imagined History (Fourth Estate, $29.99). He appears at the Sydney

Writers’ Festival on 2-3 May, swf.org.au