In my talk I will compare oral joke performances with written joke texts. The joke is – or at least was originally – a spoken form par excellence. Today with vast amounts of humor on the internet, jokes e-mailed back and forth, joke books, joke-a-day calendars and so on, written jokes are becoming ever more frequent, and perhaps our ways of perceiving, reacting to and judging jokes are evolving as well. I will identify typically spoken humor strategies versus typically written strategies and show that the medium does make a difference. Reading joke texts and comprehending performed jokes differ radically, and genre-specific conventions of joke-telling play a special role in the production and comprehension of jokes. Finally, we will explore characteristic features of the stand-up comedy performance.

A small scale investigation was carried out to explore how Italian audiences perceive Verbally Expressed Humour (veh) when it is translated for the screen and how far translation might have an impact on individual Humour Responses (HR); i.e. the physiological responses to humorous stimuli in terms of laughter and smiling (McGhee 1979). 22 British informants watched seven video-clips containing examples of veh in their original language (English) and recorded their hr to each clip. Similarly, 34 Italians recorded their hr to the same clips in their dubbed and/or subtitled Italian versions. A t-test for independent samples on informants’ responses revealed that the Italians’ hr was slightly lower than that of the British respondents thus implying that translational impact on HR was minimal.

The study presented here sets out to investigate the effects that different modes of audiovisual translation might have on the way the same audiovisual text is perceived by viewers. In order to do this, the author analyzed the dubbed and subtitled versions of one episode of the American TV series Six Feet Under, which depicts the lives of a family of undertakers with a peculiar mixture of dramatic elements, black humour, and surreal events. This study hypothesizes that, partly due to the different audiences targeted by the two versions, the dubbed version of the same episode results in a different product, with noticeably reduced use of swearwords and efficacy of the humorous elements, which are however present in the subtitled version. It is hypothesized that these differences between the dubbed and the subtitled versions are reflected in the way viewers perceive the show according to which version they watch. In order to support this hypothesis, excerpts from a dubbed episode of Six Feet Under were shown to a sample of Italian viewers, while a second sample watched the subtitled versions of the same excerpts. Viewers from both samples were then asked to fill out a purpose-built questionnaire aimed at assessing their appreciation of the scenes they watched. The study helped collect empirical evidence on the possible differences perceived in the two versions, with particular attention to cases in which these differences seem to be brought about by translational choices.

This study aimed at testing how far the humour in the film Good Bye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, Germany, 2003) a Rip Van Winkle parable, and at the same time satire of the communist state, was appreciated by audiences who were not necessarily familiar with former East Germany. In order to do this, three different groups of spectators were selected and asked to watch the film and respond to a purpose-built questionnaire: (a) a group of West Germans; (b) a group of Germans who had lived in East Germany before 1990 and (c) a group of Italians who were asked to watch the film in its dubbed version. Interestingly enough the study seemed to prove a wider perceptive gap between the two German audience groups, than between the German and the Italian group, thus implying that humour perception losses were less related to translation and cultural gaps than to an emotive distance from the facts narrated in the film. Interesting considerations also emerged from comparing the perception of the three audience groups of sad or tragic keynote scenes. Last but not least, the three groups of spectators displayed significant dissimilarities in the perception of item typical of East German everyday life such as clothes, means of transportation and food, thus suggesting that differences in humour perception may often be based on very volatile cultural subtleties. This study begs the question of to what extent differences in humour perception of the same product in the original and dubbed version are simply a matter of linguistic humour-export solutions and to what extent it is a matter of spectator knowledge of the world, perception and attitude towards the product and the facts narrated in the film.

On November 7, 2000, Americans cast their votes to elect the 43rd President of the United States of America. Many people in Europe stayed awake during the night to follow the race between the Republican candidate George W. Busch and the Democratic candidate Al Gore. At 7.21 am (British time) the waiting seemed to be over. CBS announced that Bush had won. This, however, was only the beginning of what the British tabloid The Mirror called madness. About 20 minutes later Gore rang Bush to concede defeat, but half an hour after that he rang again and told Bush that he was no longer conceding. As is now generally known, it took the Americans more than a month to confirm Bush as President elect. No wonder that after one week of waiting Time columnist Lance Morrow asked the question chosen as the title of the paper.
The USA, as will be shortly discussed, had faced very tight decisions before, but the situation in the year 2000 was different. The media, the traditional and the new ones, made efforts to represent news and developments in a way that potential readers and viewers in America and the world did not miss important details and, above all, that they were kept interested. A battle was going on to catch the wittiest remarks of politicians, celebrities and ordinary people. Media representation had an enormous impact on the reception of events and contributed to the fact that the time of waiting for decisions became a time of joking.

The aim of the paper is to investigate forms of humour that could be found in the representation of events by the American and the British media. Special emphasis will be put on the invention of new words, the playing with existing words, and the use of metaphors. Besides, it will be shown how verbal language and visuals can be interrelated to create additional humour and wit.

¹ Quote taken from Lance Morrow (2000): “Anyone around here seen a president? http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/10/morrow.tm/index.html [25.04.2007]

Karikaturen russischer Karikaturisten finden sich zunehmend in Lehrmaterialien zum Russischunterricht. Daher ist es durchaus legitim, nach Potenzen von Karikaturen für die Realisierung der Bildungs- und Erziehungsaufgaben des Faches Russisch zu fragen und die Funktion von Karikaturen im Russischunterricht zu klären. Im zweiten Teil des Diskussionsbeitrages wird eine Verfahrensfolge vorgestellt, die geeignet ist, eine lernerorientierte und weitgehend selbständige Arbeit mit Karikaturen im Russischunterricht zu gewährleisten.

After referring to some fundamental preconditions for using humour in foreign language teaching (such as recognition of language and a shared cultural knowledge) and providing some basic background to the (non-) relevance of humour in the German EFL-context, I am going to present and briefly evaluate some standard cases of British humour (Monty Python, Fawlty Towers) that are frequently dealt with by teachers, but will also refer to the comedy series ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ as a comic example of British multiculturalism. At the end I would like to suggest situational humour and nonsense as basic methodological concepts to overcome the artificiality and sterility in the EFL-classroom.

Gogol schrieb 1836 eine Verwechslungskomödie über das Leben in der russischen Provinz. Sie fiel beim russischen Publikum durch, weil die Zuschauer die einzige ehrenhafte Person in diesem Stück nicht bemerkt hatten, nämlich das Lachen. Der Schriftsteller entwickelte eine ganze Philosophie des Lachens, so das Lachen, das durch lichte Eindrücke hervorgerufen wird, das Lachen, das die ganze Gesellschaft bewegt und das elektrische, belehrende Lachen . . . Die Komödie Der Revisor bietet in seiner Handlungsstruktur, seiner Sprache und dem Nebentext des Dichters eine Fülle von Ansätzen, das Phänomen der Komödie und des Lachens zu entdecken und zu rekonstruieren. Dem Beitrag liegt eine analytische Diskussion zugrunde, die auch das Problem des Transfers von einer Sprache in eine andere berücksichtigt und die Differenz von einem künstlerischen und einem theatralischen Text einschließt.

The image of the unhumorous Indian is a white construct which since the so-called discovery of America has often developed in close connection with the stereotypes of the noble and ignoble savage. Most white observers of native life were blind to the fact that humour was an essential ingredient in First Nations communities, as the many surviving trickster narratives and works by the modern aboriginal writers Basil Johnston, Drew Hayden Taylor, and Thomas King demonstrate.

In the second half of the 19th century, texts written in a distinctive style designed to represent the characteristic way in which speakers of English with a German background spoke the language of their adopted country enjoyed a remarkable popularity. Generally characterized as examples of a particular kind of dialect humor these texts appeared as short narratives, speeches, and poems in daily newspapers, in prestigious literary magazines, in pamphlet collections, and between book covers. This paper places the rich tradition of German-American dialect writing within its proper cultural context and attempts to show that the unconventional syntax, the mixed metaphors, and the thought-dissociations were not produced to denigrate the speakers of this unconventional idiom. They were, in fact, "ingenious inventions of literary artists" (G.P. Krapp). The flexibility of their imaginative linguistic forms offered alternatives to the sounds, the rhythms, and the logic of the conventional language. In this way they opened paths for new and different kinds of aesthetic experiences and created a challenge for the predominance of standard English as a vehicle of literary expression.

Mark Twain practically never discussed his theories about humor. His fullest exposition of them in fact appear in his interviews with journalists, particularly during his world lecture tour in 1895-1896. For example, he once told an interviewer that humor is created by contrasts and illustrated the point at length. He also repeatedly discussed in his interviews the culturally determined differences among American, English, French, German, and Scotch brands of humor, though he insisted that while humor may differ by nation, the quality or trait of humor is universal.