Your national sense of humour

Not German but Swiss; I remember seeing a film called Die Schweizermacher (The Swissmakers) which was, in fact, very funny indeed. It seemed a very self-depreciating style of humour.

[drat: pagetopper!]

edited 15th Mar '13 4:16:08 PM by Bluesqueak

This might just be my friend circle, but we tend to make fun of English regional accents. So, if you're a Northener making fun of a Southerner, you'll emphasise it by being really posh and saying "barth"/"barf" for "bath" and "scowne" for "scone".

Also, there are stereotypes associated with accents, eg: Cockney: racist and mistaken for Australian by Americans, Manc (Manchestoh, innit): ah, I don't want to say this, but criminal, always expecting rain, West Country: pirate (or Hagrid), Brummie: stupid.

Um... jokes... 'A man from Staffordshire walks into a clothes shop. The assistant asks if he'd like a kipper tie. The man says "Yes, milk and one sugar, please"'.

'A Glaswegian woman goes into a bakers where there is only one delicacy left. She says to the baker "Is that a cake or a meringue?" The baker replies "naw, you're right enough, it's a cake"'.

Oh, and the weather and how the forecast is frequently wrong. Just a couple of weeks ago, I looked at the current forecast for Manchester and it said 'storm'. I looked out of the window and it was just overcast.

edited 31st Jul '14 1:52:03 PM by thebrokenlightbulb

So, Portuguese humor:

If you're talking actual comedians, I'd suggest, for example a group called Gato Fedorento ("Stinky Cat"). They have 4 or 5 seasons (each named after a different Portuguese surname) under their belt and they're really good.

If you're talking humor made by the common folks, it's mostly based around sex euphemisms and puns (the lame ones, obviously), usually correlated with food, the occasional stereotypical/racist jokes (usually directed towards East Asians), constant mockery of politicians, and the usual regional jokes directed towards other regions of the country (e.g. the people from Alentejo are lazy).

Brazilian humor is pretty similar to most. I've seen quite a few jokes I know here in other languages and in different nationalities. The Argentinian is egocentric, you can't understand the Chilean, the Bolivian's a drug dealer, the Paraguayan sells contraband things like clothing and electronics, the Portuguese's a moron and the Uruguyan doesn't speak. Also, Mothers-In-Law are often the butt of the joke.

There are no common characters in jokes, though.

The Mexican touched on El Chavo del Ocho, called Chavez here in Brazil - which is just bad translation to a word that doesn't even exist - it's pretty loved around here.

However, most of our jokes focus on corruption, most of it our own corruption: [i]"Public money stealing, overabuse of taxes, illicit operations, fraud... Are you asking me to create a gang with you?" "No, make a Party."

An Argentinian and a Brazilian find a lamp with a genie in it. They rub it, and a genie comes out, offering each of them two wishes. The Argentinian asks for an extremely tall wall separating Argentina from the rest of SA, and he wishes to be teleported to his house in Buenos Aires. The Brazilian asks for a beer, and then asks the genie: "Is this wall really freaking high? Like, nothing gets in, nothing gets out?" Yes, affirms the genie. "Flood it with just enough water that it won't fall over to here."[/i]

Minnesota humor tends to make fun of our simplicity, or our tolerance to cold, or other groups of people in an endearing way.

And We make fun of our accent a lot.

There's a huge rivalry with border-states like Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Also a rivalry between the big religious groups: Lutherans and Catholics. Lots of jokes in those areas, but none of them off the top of my head.

There's a series of jokes about Ole, Lena, and Sven, these rural farmer-types.

And we like to compare ourselves to other places.

edited 14th Aug '14 1:12:52 AM by AwSamWeston

(Sorry for double-posting. This one doesn't fit with my last one, though.)

After seeing this video about a possible Internet Dialect, I'd guess a large part of "internet humor" is memetic, fandom-based, or bizarre and random Pythonesque stuff.

It's interesting that you have jokes about stupid Swedes. (Those names are obviously Swedish.) Presumably they came with immigrants from countries that had similar jokes about Swedish people. Finland, of course, is one such country; I must've mentioned our jokes about the Swedes at some point in this thread. (I'll have a look.)

EDIT: Here's one.

edited 14th Aug '14 6:28:20 AM by BestOf

That one is also told about Finns:

Hah, the Siberians bit made me laugh.

This is one example of Korean internet humor.

"How to prevent your girlfriend from cheating? Well, first you need to do a simple, but very important step. Get a girlfriend. Hey, why are your eyes sweating?"

@Best Of: Actually, the "Sven and Ole jokes" are about Swedish and Norwegian immigrant stereotypes, respectively. I was going to mention that, but the "stereotype" part isn't really significant anymore since we all get along pretty well. Homogenization!

Minnesota has plenty of Scandinavian immigrants. Norwegians and Swedes all over, and Finns in the "Arrowhead" (northeast). Also some Italians in the northeast and Germans in the south...

... So dat's our humor, den.

One of the things that seems to be a perennial favourite around the world, in my dealings with people from all over the place, are the "Dumb <insert nationality here>" jokes and it seems that regardless of the country where they're being told, the maligned nationality and even the language itself, they're often the same jokes.

A Dutch friend of mine translated some of the "Belgian Jokes" he knew into English and they're the very same jokes I've heard told about Irish or Australians here in NZ.

Many of which are the same as jokes I've heard from Americans about Polish immigrants.

A Canadian friend told me a joke about "Newfies" that I retell featuring an Australian as the "protagonist" without having to make any further adjustment.

It's like there's a pool of jokes that get told around the world with just the nationality changed to suit the joke-teller and/or audience.

Poles for Americans, Aussies for us Kiwis (and, I presume, Kiwis for the Aussies), Irish for Brits, Newfies for Canadians, Belgians for Dutch and so it goes.

Aussies get made the butt of jokes a lot, here, due to their physical proximity and our traditional friendly rivalry.

Not only the generic Dumb <insert nationality here> jokes but ones about their coarseness (not that we kiwis can claim any moral high-ground on that score, many of us also use "cunt" as a semi-affectionate term and swear casually and freely most the time), or lack of finesse.

"Poms" (people from England - Irish, Scots and Welsh people are not "poms") are also common targets, usually associated with being soft, effete or whining (or, as we call it, "whinging" - which is a hanging offence, here).

However, we don't make political jokes here.

They're born here, we just elect them into parliament.

We don't let ourselves off the hook:

And, of course, we're also the heroes of the tale:

edited 14th Aug '14 9:58:11 PM by Wolf1066

Dumb Belgian jokes are also a French staple. There are probably a lot of common jokes, but probably a few specific ones to take advantage of puns or cultural concepts.

Russia is famous for it's Gallows Humor, political jokes which tend to be very witty and spring out in minutes in response to anything, and some surreal humour. Russian Reversal is not actually common.

An example of one of the current political joke (about ban on food import from EU): "As a true leader of a European nation, Putin too ordered sanctions against Russia"

Heh. Is common sentiment against Putin, or is that the level of mockery afforded to all Russian leaders?

Putin will probably get off light. One of my favourites is this:

Putin is actually quite popular, it's just every single political leader and every single decision will be mocked, and quickly. Seriously, one can get their news on joke sites almost as reliably as on actual news sites

About Czech humour: Definitely often language-based, and therefore often difficult to impart fully to foreigners, because some nuance is always lost in translation. Czech is a flexive language, so you can have several similar words with the same root and the same basic meaning, but many nuances including ones expressing the speaker's attitude to the subject. This means that very often, there are more layers to a joke - for example, there's a situational joke and then there's the point in the way it is told. Connected to this is the fact that in Czech film comedies (but not only in them), Czech humour is often based on idiosyncratic characters and their behaviour and speech, as the late Roger Ebert rightly observed. Especially in the films written by Zdeněk Svěrák, but also in Bohumil Hrabal's books (and the films based on them), or in the most popular (there was a poll) Czech book, Saturnin. This is done affectionately, and usually without an attempt to explain away said behaviour and speech, often bordering on the absurd. This seems to be one of the points where Czech and English/British humour often intersect and tend to be difficult to grasp for some foreigners.

It's often not so much laugh-out-loud funny, but rather creating an underlying sense of amusement that adds to the enjoyment of the actual laugh-out-loud jokes.

Self-deprecation. Observe. If you can comprehend rally-English.

http://www.hs.fi/blogi/narrienlaiva/a1305944213082

@Wolf: (I know this comment is 9 months old). Here in Canada we have that same "God creates the world" joke, we just substitute "Americans" for "Australians."

I think brits probably have the best sense of humor. From what I've seen, anyways.

Similarly to what the OP said, we do have an expression about "British humour" here in Israel — specifically, a "British joke" is a dry, somewhat pointless sort of joke nobody finds funny.
To answer the question in the title, it's hard to say there's an Israeli sense of humour, because Israel is about as uniform as any other bunch of of immigrants is.

Man I wish my country had humor. All jokes here are pretty lame.

Sort of like "So there was ths one duck. And he said: "I am going over there". BUT THEN HE WENT THE OPPOSITE WAY!" "HAW HAW HAW"

THE JOKE IS THAT WE DO NOT HAVE DUCKS IN OUR LAND BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT NATIVE. FUCKING HILARIOUS.

edited 11th May '15 8:56:29 AM by Aszur

I didn't know you were German, Aszur

....Germany doesn't have ducks? That makes no sense

Stop being silly, you. There are ducks in Germany!