Humor is a very cultural thing, and it’s fun to analyze the things people from different countries consider amusing — jokes about the lack of education or hygiene among people in a certain region, visual or slapstick forms of humor, orifice-related jokes and so on. Often, we can’t comprehend the things that people in one culture find funny — Canadian stand-up comedians telling jokes about Nova Scotians go way over my head, for example. Then again, there are times when the cultural difference can make something all that much more hilarious, which I believe is why Monty Python and the Holy Grail is such a cult favorite in the U.S. — the gap between the two countries magnifies all the jokes, and our unfamiliarity with British understatement (“There are some who call me…Tim?”) make it a ridiculously funny film. Humor in Japan often seems to be situationally-based, putting a character in an impossibly bizarre position and drawing laughter from his embarrassment, for example. One important category of humor in Japan comes from manzai, two-person stand-up comedy that involves a dumb comedian (boke) who makes erroneous observations and his sharp-tongued partner (tsukkomi), who berates him at every turn. The interplay of R2-D2 and C-3P0 in the Star Wars films is largely a reflection of this comic tradition, of course filtered through the films of Akira Kurosawa. The old adage that if you have to explain it, it isn’t funny holds up pretty well in my experience, and back when I was a teacher I tried using American humor as teaching tool, bringing in Far Side comics or funny song lyrics for my students to discuss. I remember once trying to explain the concepts of irony, sarcasm and cynicism, all three of which are represented by the exact same word in Japanese (hiniku). It was, ahem, not my most inspired of lessons, and I think my students were more confused when I was finished.
