Humor me, please!
Jede Kultur hat ihren eigenen Humor – und der der New Yorker erschließt sich oft nicht auf den ersten Blick. Unsere Kolumnistin jedenfalls braucht nicht getröstet zu werden, wenn sie sich selbst schlecht macht.
The English writer J. B. Priestley once said that “comedy is society protecting itself with a smile.” According to Groucho Marx, “Humor is reason gone mad.” And Molière wrote that “The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”
Many great minds have said many great things about humor, but most of them agree with Winston Churchill that “A joke is a very serious thing.”
Scientists and psychologists have found that humor across cultures is different in content and in the degree to which it plays a role in daily life. In the East, for example, people don’t really use humor to cope with problems the way we do in the West. But there are differences across cultures in the West, too.
I grew up in New York City as the daughter of a comedy writer, which is a double whammy in terms of humor. If ever there was a birthplace of stand-up comedy, where individuals try to cope with daily life by making light of it, NYC must be it. We also have another specialty, which I’ll type in capitals so you won’t forget it: SELF-DEPRECATING HUMOR.
In my experience, this kind of humor isn’t something that many in the German-speaking world are well acquainted with, and it often gets lost in cultural translation. I’ve used self-deprecating humor — as New York as Woody Allen eating a hot dog on the street outside The Met (Opera or Museum; it doesn’t matter) — many a time, only to see it fall flat with my German audience because they took it seriously.
Here’s one of many examples I could give. On Facebook, I recommended Martin Scorsese’s documentary Pretend It’s a City, which is about my home city as seen through the eyes of New York writer and humorist Fran Lebowitz. I wrote:
“OK, in case anyone reading this is interested in why I am the way I am — and you’d have to be really bored to be interested in that because I’m not even interested in it — watch Pretend It’s a City. It’s more interesting than I am.”
I should have known. My Anglo friends found this funny, but not five minutes passed without various German friends texting and posting that I should have better self-esteem, that movies can’t be more interesting than people, etc. Sigh.
It was a joke! A joke! That’s all it was. Ask my partner, my Anglo friends, my mother, ask anyone at Spotlight — there’s nothing wrong with my self-esteem, except, maybe, that it’s inflated. I’m OK, really. This is just our humor.
So, while many of my readers may understand the English language, that is, the grammar and the vocabulary, some of them still need to work on understanding Anglo culture. The next time you see a Yank give himself a facepalm and hear him say, “Jeez, I’m such an idiot!”, or a Brit says, “Crikey, I’m such a prat!” — they mean the same thing — please know this: We don’t really mean it. It’s a joke. Don’t comfort us.
Self-deprecating humor isn’t weakness, it’s strength. And using it feels good. Give it a try!
FASCINATING FACTS
...about the history of chimney sweeps:
⋅
In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, ⋅ small boys worked as chimney sweeps. Six was the usual age to start, but some ⋅ were only four or five years old.
The boys had to climb up the chimney with a brush. It was a very dirty and ⋅ dangerous job.
The space was very narrow — some⋅ times, only about 25 centimetres wide. The chimney was often hot and the master sometimes put a fire under the ⋅ boy to make him climb faster.
Many of the boys had terrible health ⋅ problems or died in accidents.
The first industrial cancer was found ⋅ in young chimney sweeps.
The practice of using children as chimney sweeps was finally stopped in England in 1875.