This Wednesday,
Alan and I tried a change of pace, abandoned the library, and met in Market Square instead. I was
optimistic, hoping that a change of setting would help the flow of
conversation. I was surprised when he
had two of his friends along. After
introductions, I learned that one of his friends was originally from Taiwan,
and the other was also from China. Though
the shy side of me was quaking in fear just a bit, I decided to make the best
of the situation.
The main topic
that I wanted to discuss was how humor in China is different from humor
here. To this end, we spent a lot of our
time exchanging jokes. Most of Alan and
his Chinese friend’s jokes were actually riddles. The first one they told, which I’m pretty
sure I’ve heard sometime before, went like this:
“Nathan’s
father has three sons.
The first is
named Son One
The second is
named Son Two
What is the
third son’s name?”
Of course, the
answer is Nathan. Most of their
joke-riddles were like this, requiring an answer from the person hearing the
joke. I’m definitely not used to
that. To me, jokes are fairly
simple. They may be clever, but they are
usually told by one person to another. I've
always tended to put riddles in a separate but related category.
The most
surprising thing that happened, by far, was when I asked, “Why did the chicken
cross the road?” and neither Alan nor his friends knew the answer. Before this, I had thought the joke was
completely universal, and had never met anyone aside from small children who
had never heard it before. I must admit,
my shock made me a bit slow in getting around to telling the punchline, but
when I told them, they all laughed fairly hard, and I was astounded once more. I don’t even remember the last time I got a
laugh out of that joke, because it is so overused here that it is really just a
springboard for variations.
This experience
actually made me think a bit more about the joke. The punchline is so obvious that it makes the
listener feel silly for whatever guesses they had been making. I suppose that this is an example of a downward
cognitive shift. I’m still trying to
come to terms with people thinking of this joke as genuinely funny. I wonder if Alan has told any of his other
international friends this joke, and if so, whether they had heard it before. I hope that he has been able to get a couple
chuckles out of it, at least.
Why did the
chicken cross the road?
To get to the
other side.
No comments:
Post a Comment