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Grand Fromage posted:Seriously. Set aside 17 hours for a variety show from Japan or Korea and see how many of the jokes land (I am presuming you are not Japanese or Korean here) and how much of it is just people laughing at stuff that makes zero sense to you. It's a good example of how culturally linked humor is.
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Apr 11, 2023 04:26
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cowboy
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His point is that tv shows in different countries are going to have a poo poo ton of jokes with nuances that only the locals are going to really get and Im not entirely sure why people are having a hard time getting this. I'm from Los Angeles and live in Arizona, I make jokes and references all the time that people do not get because they do not have the same upbringing or cultural background as me, despite being in a state that borders mine. This disconnect is going to increase with distance and time, and while certain things are likely to carry over I'm not going to get everything 100%. Yes, if they explained the joke to you you would likely get it, or at least understand why it would be funny. But a comedy tv show isn't likely to face the audience and explain the humor because if you are watching the local comedy show or whatever they expect you to know. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Apr 11, 2023 04:31
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I think the nuance here is 'mostly mystifying' doesn't seem to hold true if the show has decent subtitles. Like the Samurai Gourmet show that I watched on Netflix a while back was a loving riot, even if I am sure there were nuances to the gimmick I wasn't getting.
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Apr 11, 2023 04:46
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Grand Fromage posted:Seriously. Set aside 17 hours for a variety show from Japan or Korea and see how many of the jokes land (I am presuming you are not Japanese or Korean here) and how much of it is just people laughing at stuff that makes zero sense to you. It's a good example of how culturally linked humor is. 17 hours is quite a big ask
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Apr 11, 2023 04:55
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I sincerely apologize for picking something I was personally familiar with for my example of humor being culturally linked.
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Apr 11, 2023 04:56
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kramer swimming in the east river might be funny on its own, but what made it hilarious was the common knowledge of just how hosed that river is
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Apr 11, 2023 04:56
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Nessus posted:I think the nuance here is 'mostly mystifying' doesn't seem to hold true if the show has decent subtitles. Like the Samurai Gourmet show that I watched on Netflix a while back was a loving riot, even if I am sure there were nuances to the gimmick I wasn't getting. Some (Many?) languages use puns and other wordplay and depending on the level of effort the translator goes through or the notes they add in the jokes might not translate through. So if you directly translate, you lose the pun. But you can attempt to translate the meaning and joke across language lines, which you can definitely do, but you are arguably not really translating exactly what was said, and instead are transmuting it into a joke that you, the foreigner, are going to get. This is pretty common in Manga translations. Subtitles aren't really going to help with jokes that have to do with shared experiences either. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Apr 11, 2023 04:57
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Ukranian cat I used to know told me a joke. Something about a Bear, a Rabbit and a Donkey. Bear was mad someone was eating his honey or some poo poo, and was gonna eat them. He was looking for a creature whose ears were sticking up, comes up on the Hare and rear end and tells 'em to get ready to for judgement when the Bunny slicks back it's ears and says some Bugs poo poo. Let's the Donkey get got when it was the one who got the honey. The point being it made no loving sense, and furthermore wasn't funny.
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Apr 11, 2023 05:04
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Edit: nvm
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Apr 11, 2023 05:14
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So, in summary, translation is difficult, but possible.
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Apr 11, 2023 05:21
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If you've been on the internet and never run into a joke that you just didn't get, I don't know what to tell you. Pat yourself on the back and go poop on some seashells.
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Apr 11, 2023 05:24
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Bongo Bill posted:So, in summary, translation is difficult, but possible. Maybe? If the joke is someone said shut the door, but the words for door and mouth are very close and the humor is that it sounded like they told someone to shut up how are you going to translate that through without either a kludgey explanation or substituting another similar, but still different joke in. Or another example, suppose that on july 4th, 1982 all the condoms in bumfuck, anycountry were at like 500% of their normal price. It was in the local news and everything. And the joke is that so and so told their buddy that they had purchased condoms on that day so they could go have sex, to which the person shot back that they must have been desperate/hope it was worth it/etc. How are you going to get that joke if you don't know the extremely minor historical fact that on that day condoms were stupid expensive. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Apr 11, 2023 05:25
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I do feel like there's a difference between "puns are language specific" and "styles of humor are culture-specific" like in-jokes are impenetrable to outsiders and sometimes the in-group is a whole society, but that's different from the original claim, I think not really trying to take a side in this, but I do think people are talking about two completely different ideas as if they're the same
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Apr 11, 2023 05:34
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cheetah7071 posted:I do feel like there's a difference between "puns are language specific" and "styles of humor are culture-specific" Eh it depends. I've been discussing puns and language use/choice because one of the main examples was Japanese variety shows and from my understanding a main component of Japanese humor is wordplay, so language is a big part of getting the joke.
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Apr 11, 2023 05:52
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cheetah7071 posted:I do feel like there's a difference between "puns are language specific" and "styles of humor are culture-specific"
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Apr 11, 2023 05:59
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Telsa Cola posted:Maybe? If the joke is someone said shut the door, but the words for door and mouth are very close and the humor is that it sounded like they told someone to shut up how are you going to translate that through without either a kludgey explanation or substituting another similar, but still different joke in.
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Apr 11, 2023 07:26
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Gaius Marius posted:The point being it made no loving sense, and furthermore wasn't funny. It is if you're the Bunny.
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Apr 11, 2023 07:36
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Part of the issue with humor is also that a lot of it is transgressive, and things that are transgressive are extremely culturally specific. For example, going back to everyone's favorite joke about Sumerian brides farting in their husbands' laps: you can easily construct a hypothetical where part of the humor comes from farting on another person being some kind of huge insult or show of disrespect, and the joke being in how it's also just a normal part of married life. Or it could just be the surface level of haha farts are stinky. I mean, there are entire genres of dumb, old, racist jokes that have the punchline as"and when they met the boyfriend he was black!" or some similar poo poo. Total loving knee slapper if you're a racist in 1950s Alabama, offensive if you're not a racist in 2023, but the joke itself doesn't explain any of those reactions to a hypothetical alien archeologist finding a fragmentary scrap of it in some rubble 10,000 years from now.
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Apr 11, 2023 14:15
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"Humour doesn't always translate" shouldn't be a controversial statement, no matter how you feel about Japanese variety shows. I once had a Chinese student give a presentation on a certain kind Chinese humour to an English-speaking class and the entire thing was based on spoken statements that were wordplay in written forms. I also have a mostly clear memory of a radio interview that I listened to 20 years ago with a Czech comedian who was describing a kind of absurdist deadpan humour that he claimed only works in Czech and which has nothing to do with word play from what I could tell. They had clips of him slaying audiences and then the translation would be something like "I got up in the morning and I was going to make eggs, but there were no eggs. [audience explodes.]" Anyway, if you've ever read anything by translators about the process of literary translation, it's pretty much given that "humour" is listed as the most difficult thing to tackle for all of the reasons here and more. A phrase I've heard repeated is that some ideas simply only work in certain languages. Another one (which I remember from the same radio international show as the Czech comedian but a different day) was an artist who grew up bilingual in East Germany could only express some nuances in German and others in English. And for an example at hand, the newspaper comics thread has several posters who translate comics from Finnish, Japanese, and Korean (and probably others that I'm forgetting). Sometimes the translations are funny and sometimes they're gibberish that nobody can explain but which the speakers of those languages vouch for as being funny. Even if you take a look at yourself, I guarantee that there are things that at one time in your life that you found funny and which you now don't, I'm looking at you the entire Something Awful community 
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Apr 11, 2023 14:18
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When Legs says "I'm seeing double here - four Krustys!" it's a reference to a thousand other TV shows where someone looking at identical people said "I'm seeing double" . If you haven't seen those thousand other shows it's not as funny. The Sumerian fart joke could be something like that for all we know.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:23
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They did eat a lot of legumes in Sumeria.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:42
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CommonShore posted:"I got up in the morning and I was going to make eggs, but there were no eggs." 
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Apr 11, 2023 15:42
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I remember something about a tablet dated to the bronze age collapse where the ruler of a city described everything going to poo poo including someone going around killing kids and he needed more soldiers to search the city for them, I think it got referenced as possibly the oldest reference to a serial killer. anybody have any idea if this was real or if the diet soda is making me schizo
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Apr 11, 2023 15:51
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Probably check Letters to the king of Mari
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Apr 11, 2023 16:00
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You don't even need different languages to have humour incompatibility - just different cultures. A prominent example is the Office TV show - the UK one was seasons of successful humour. When they ported it to the US, the first season flopped because characters and situations that were funny to UK audiences just didn't land for US ones.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:00
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Tunicate posted:Probably check Letters to the king of Mari The Mari royal archive is about 600 years before the Bronze Age collapse, the document in question is more likely from Ugarit, which is where most of the texts about things going to poo poo during the Bronze Age collapse come from.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:41
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Agean90 posted:I remember something about a tablet dated to the bronze age collapse where the ruler of a city described everything going to poo poo including someone going around killing kids and he needed more soldiers to search the city for them, I think it got referenced as possibly the oldest reference to a serial killer. anybody have any idea if this was real or if the diet soda is making me schizo I remember reading about that too, I think it was referenced in Georges Roux's book on Ancient Iraq, but my memory alas is a little fuzzy.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:52
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CrypticFox posted:The Mari royal archive is about 600 years before the Bronze Age collapse, the document in question is more likely from Ugarit, which is where most of the texts about things going to poo poo during the Bronze Age collapse come from. The serial killer thing is from there, though.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:55
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It's kind of odd to think about some of the truly horrible poo poo that must have flown under the radar before you had states developed enough to really notice and pursue poo poo like serial killers. If someone didn't get caught in the act and murdered by the relatives of the victims they could probably keep it going quite a while, doubly so if they had a job that moved them around the countryside. It also makes a lot of the various folk lore and fairy tales about weird strangers/witches/etc in the woods who will eat you make a bit more sense. E.g. Hansel and Gretel.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:56
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The earliest confirmed case of what we would call serial killing is de Rais right? Or do we have evidence of earlier ones?
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Apr 11, 2023 16:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:If you've been on the internet and never run into a joke that you just didn't get, I don't know what to tell you. Pat yourself on the back and go poop on some seashells. The real damming thing about trying to claim humor is universal is that it requires defending the Babylon Bee. Cyrano4747 posted:It's kind of odd to think about some of the truly horrible poo poo that must have flown under the radar before you had states developed enough to really notice and pursue poo poo like serial killers. If someone didn't get caught in the act and murdered by the relatives of the victims they could probably keep it going quite a while, doubly so if they had a job that moved them around the countryside. Well and its not just like, sheer development. Secret police tend to develop well before investigative police, for the extremely obvious reason that one of those is threats to the state, and the other is threats to the public. Let the state take of the state and the public take care of the public. States need not just the capacity/organization to make investigative police, they also need incentive to bother with it. But yeah its a tricky thing, there's definitely weird trad people who think that the lack of evidence of serial killers in the past means that it didn't happen, which I think it has much more to do with not just difficulty catching people but also how things were recorded and who got to make records.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:08
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In modern times, at one serial killer stopped for several years since he was employed as a repo man, and tormenting people that way scratched the same itch. I can very well imagine someone with the same proclivities going on viking raids or whatever and not bothering to kill people secretly as well.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:14
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Yeah you could go for a soldier or a Viking or hell, just go be a bandit.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:24
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Podcast likers:
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Apr 11, 2023 18:02
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Tunicate posted:In modern times, at one serial killer stopped for several years since he was employed as a repo man, and tormenting people that way scratched the same itch. Are there many serial killers who'd gotten kicked out of the military or police or whatever?
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Apr 11, 2023 19:03
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Fuschia tude posted:Are there many serial killers who'd gotten kicked out of the military or police or whatever? eg. dahmer
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Apr 11, 2023 19:33
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To some extent the ancient analogue to the modern serial killer is definitely the bandit—the amoral creeps everyone knows are out there somewhere, who will get you if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Romans associated this kind of thing as much with the countryside as the city—think of the guy who needed the Good Samaritan to help him after he fell in with robbers (in the Vulgate “incidit in latrones”). They also used the same word (latro) for a hired thug, a mercenary, or interestingly enough a chess piece. In general, the use and multiple meanings of the word suggest the motive of such behavior was assumed to be desire for money, rather than the kind of sexual/moral perversity moderns tend to assume in their serial killers. So if you wanted to be a psycho and jump people, you didn’t need to be all furtive and make a whole secret out of it, you just needed to find the “right” employment first. And if one did it in an honorable way, it could even be considered respectable from a safe distance; Cassius Dio, a courtier with an axe to grind against past governments, has a particular fondness for stories about Robin Hood types who stood up to the man. At the extreme, anybody who threatened the state monopoly of force could be dismissed as a bandit—one of the word Latin authors use for revolt against the authorities, ranging all the way from guerilla warfare to unauthorized church councils, is “latrocinium”. There’s a more specific word for a guy who stabs people (sicarius), which doesn’t imply any particular motive or amount of crimes and can just as well mean an assassin. Also a surprising variety of words for various sorts of murderers and rapists. But I can’t think when I’ve ever seen a word for a Jack the Ripper type. Not to say they didn’t have either the word or the type, of course, but maybe the comparison is illustrative—if someone had gone around repeatedly assaulting and murdering prostitutes in ancient Rome, how would we know? Would anyone have cared enough to formally investigate or write about it, let alone turn it into a media sensation?
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Apr 11, 2023 19:57
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skasion posted:But I can’t think when I’ve ever seen a word for a Jack the Ripper type. ˈɛmpəɹə
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Apr 11, 2023 20:26
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Grand Fromage posted:Seriously. Set aside 17 hours for a variety show from Japan or Korea and see how many of the jokes land (I am presuming you are not Japanese or Korean here) and how much of it is just people laughing at stuff that makes zero sense to you. It's a good example of how culturally linked humor is. I'm reminded of how in Babylon 5, apparently Earth's most popular cultural export is The Three Stooges. Honestly I think the humour thing is just something that a bit of thinking should be able to figure out the idea of, especially comparing to genres of humour that are familiar to us. Anti-humour and subversion of expectations all relies on tone and build-up that's lost when told second-hand without the original tone and timing. And on the other hand, while Who's On First obviously would be nonsense translated directly, it's not hard to imagine every spoken language has its equivalent of what's an entire genre of jokes. (Heck, My Little Pony had a Who's On First routine based on their gimmicky toy names) And on the other hand, like I said with the Sumerian fox, sometimes if you look the right way you suddenly see familiar archetypes jump right out at you from thousands of years ago or miles away. Like say, the wildly egotistical idiot with boundless confidence right up until something looks like it might be hard. Fuschia tude posted:Are there many serial killers who'd gotten kicked out of the military or police or whatever? There's a lot who haven't. Also with serial killers you have to think of the social context of these things. Like the whole modern archetype is just based on people who prey on the 'less dead' that are ignored and go uninvestigated; prostitutes, minorities, the elderly, etc. Whoever they can get away with.
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Apr 12, 2023 08:00
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm reminded of how in Babylon 5, apparently Earth's most popular cultural export is The Three Stooges.
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Apr 12, 2023 09:35
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