Last year, I wrote about Jean-Claude Sergeant's view of the English language ("Paradoxes of the imagination"; "Another over-earnest comedy of fact checking"). Sergeant, then "professeur de civilisation britannique" at the University of Paris III, informed us solemnly that
In its present configuration, current English is characterized first by an extreme concern for coherence and for explicitness approaching redundancy. The core constituents of the phrase -- subject, verb, complement -- cannot be as easily separated as in French, and the order in which they occur in the phrase is less susceptible of modification.
Now Stewart Lee ("Lost in Translation", Guardian 5/23/2006) tells us that
The German language provides fully functional clarity. English humour thrives on confusion.
It's hard to keep track of the intricate graph of European ethnic stereotyping, involving relative degrees of rationality, punctuality, diligence, food-preparation skills, and so on, though certain north-to-south and west-to-east trends are obvious. But I'm beginning to get the idea that at least one of these relations of mutual prejudice is symmetrical: speakers of language X always think that language Y is less flexible than X, for any values of X and Y.
Lee's conclusions about the German language are based on what must have been a very curious experience:
In December 2004 I accompanied Richard Thomas, the composer of the popular stage hit Jerry Springer The Opera, to Hanover, where he had gained a commission to develop an opera about a night in a British stand-up comedy club. We wrote the words in English and Richard then collaborated on a translation with a talented German comedy writer called Hermann Bräuer.
Throw in a machine-translation researcher, and you've got the premise of a Richard Powers novel.
Anyhow, it turns out that translating the jokes in this opera libretto was hard. You might think that this is because it's hard to translate songs, and hard to translate jokes, and doubly hard to translate sung jokes. However, Lee concluded that blame should be assigned to "the rigours of the German language's far less flexible sentence structures". Specifically, "German will not always allow you to shunt the key word to the end of the sentence to achieve [the] failsafe laugh" associated with "the endless succession of 'pull back and reveals' that constitute much English language humour".
He gives an interesting, quasi-formal analysis of "pull back and reveal" humor (more fodder for that Richard Powers novel):
At a rough estimate, half of what we find amusing involves using little linguistic tricks to conceal the subject of our sentences until the last possible moment, so that it appears we are talking about something else. For example, it is possible to imagine any number of British stand-ups concluding a bit with something structurally similar to the following, "I was sitting there, minding my own business, naked, smeared with salad dressing and lowing like an ox ... and then I got off the bus." We laugh, hopefully, because the behaviour described would be inappropriate on a bus, but we had assumed it was taking place either in private or perhaps at some kind of sex club, because the word "bus" was withheld from us. Other suitable punchlines for this set-up would be, "And that was just the teachers", "I was 28-years-old" and "That's the last time I attempt to find work as a research chemist in Paraguay."
At the risk of being accused of spoiling a good story with a mutant American version of Teutonic over-rationality, I have to point out that this makes absolutely no effing sense at all. I don't mean that Lee's example needs work (although it does -- if you try telling his joke, in English, with any of the proposed punch lines, you're more likely to get puzzled stares than laughs). Let's imagine substituting a better joke, and go on. The "pull back and reveal" joke structure, as Lee describes and exemplifies it, consists of a sequence of clauses: A, B, C ... and then D. Is there any language on earth in which you can't tell a story that way? My knowledge of German barely reaches the ability to read with the help of a dictionary, but that's enough to make me sure that if any language is so bizarrely crippled, it's not German.
[In the particular case of "I got off the bus" as a punch line, German might prescribe "... dem Bus aus" instead of "... off the bus" -- but can that possibly spoil the associated joke, if any? And what if the joke involved "off" rather than "bus" -- "and then I got OFF the bus" -- then German would allegedly have the advantage, right?]
To this incoherent theory about the alleged role of sentence structure in the cross-linguistic rhetoric of alleged humor, Lee adds some equally incoherent stuff about the effect of German noun compounds:
In English there are many words that have double or even triple meanings, and whole sitcom plot structures have been built on the confusion that arises from deploying these words at choice moments. Once again, German denies us this easy option. There is less room for doubt in German because of the language's infinitely extendable compound words. In English we surround a noun with adjectives to try to clarify it. In German, they merely bolt more words on to an existing word. Thus a federal constitutional court, which in English exists as three weak fragments, becomes Bundesverfassungsgericht, a vast impregnable structure that is difficult to penetrate linguistically, like that Nazi castle in Where Eagles Dare.
Penetrating this fortress of balderdash is left as an exercise for the reader. I'll supply one clue, namely a German joke that depends on a pun wrapped in a noun compound:
Aus welchem stahl macht man Autos in Polen? Diebstahl.
Literal translation: "From what steel do they make cars in Poland? Theft." Linguistic background: stahl means "steel"; stehlen means "to abstract, appropriate, steal", preterite form stahl etc.; dieb mean "thief", and the compound diebstahl means "larceny". Cultural background: Poland is apparently a notorious destination for cars stolen in Germany.
Can you translate that joke? No, not really. Is it because {English|German} is {more|less} ambiguous or linguistically penetrable than {German|English}? The answer is left to you.
Finally, Lee offers a third "explanation" for why German is allegedly a bad language for jokes. According to him, in German
... [t]here seemed to be no nuanced, nudge-nudge no-man's land, where English comic sensibilities and German logic could meet on Christmas Day and kick around a few dirty jokes in a cheeky, Carry On-style way. A German theatre director explained that this was because the Germans did not find the human body smutty or funny, due to all attending mixed saunas from an early age.
At this point, I'm beginning to think that "Stewart Lee" is the invention of a team of writers from the Onion. There are no doubt some cultural differences in deploying sexual allusions in humor, but are saunas really a ubiquitous fixture of modern German family life, or has "Lee" carelessly displaced this practice a country or two southwards? And aren't there any metaphors for English-German translation that don't involve WWI or WWII?
I don't have any sort of broad empirical basis for evaluating Lee's conclusion:
The geographical accident of Germany has denied Germans the fun we have with language, and it seemed to me that their sense of humour was built on blunt, seemingly serious statements, which became funny simply because of their context.
But my experiences with German friends, and what I little know of German literature and German humor -- Freud's discussions of humor will do for a start here -- leaves me very skeptical of the notion that Germans are "denied the fun we have with language" and that "their sense of humour [is] built on blunt, serious statements".
I guess it's inappropriate to expect coherence in an opinion piece by a comedian, even if its veneer of rationality suggests that its description of the English and German languages is meant to be meaningful. And there's some good stuff in the article. Lee mixes his little spurts of ethnic prejudice and his incoherent linguistic analyses into a slurry of interesting anecdotes and jokes -- leading with a pretty good version of the traditional essentialist joke about the ethnically-German child raised by English parents -- which many will enjoy.
Far be it from me to suggest that the Guardian needs theory checkers. And it's obviously impractical to imagine that people in general, and comedians in particular, will ever give up basing their opinions on unsupported and unexamined national stereotypes. But I can hope that someday, people in a position to write for outlets like the Guardian will have gotten some elementary linguistic analysis skills somewhere along the way.
[Hat tip to reader Ben Hadley.]
[Update -- John Cowan writes:
You write:
> At the risk of being accused of spoiling a good story with a mutant
> American version of Teutonic over-rationality, I have to point out that
> this makes absolutely no effing sense at all. I don't mean that Lee's
> example needs work (although it does -- if you try telling his joke,
> in English, with any of the proposed punch lines, you're more likely
> to get puzzled stares than laughs).
That's because "English humor" doesn't mean "humor expressed in the English language", it means "what those peculiar people in the south-eastern part of Ysl Prydain think is funny." And from the English point of view, we Americans are nothing but a lot of anglophone Germans. We can't even get the local-politics jokes in Monty Python episodes. (Seriously, Edward Hall does rate American culture as only slightly less low-context than German culture, and far more so than English, French, or New World Spanish culture. High-context cultures like the English have no problem with finding jokes like that funny.)
That's this Edward Hall, and John is usually sensible and well informed, but is that joke about getting off the bus actually perceived as funny (as opposed to silly) by UK residents? Even those from the London area? ]
[Update #2 -- Karen Davis writes:
You quote Stewart Lee as saying:
At a rough estimate, half of what we find amusing involves using little linguistic tricks to conceal the subject of our sentences until the last possible moment, so that it appears we are talking about something else. For example, it is possible to imagine any number of British stand-ups concluding a bit with something structurally similar to the following, "I was sitting there, minding my own business, naked, smeared with salad dressing and lowing like an ox ... and then I got off the bus."
I find it difficult to think of "and then I got off the bus" as the subject of the rest of it.
Perhaps he meant "the topic of our jokes"? But then, why say "the subject of our sentences" - and why believe that German can't tell that story, with an entire sentence (then I got off the bus) last? And why oh why doesn't he see that in none of his sample sentences was the subject concealed? "I" is right up at the front!
Indeed. The equivocation "subject of the sentences" vs. "topic of the joke" was one of the first things that I noticed about Lee's article. I wound up leaving it out in favor of other confusions, but maybe that was a mistake. Anyhow, there are a lot of interesting fragments of ideas floating around in what Lee has to say. The problem is that no one seems to have taken any trouble to try to clarify what they mean, how they go together, and whether they're true. That's reasonable practice for a stand-up routine, I guess, but it strikes me as out of place in an essay published in what claims to be the "best daily newspaper on the world wide web". ]
[Update #3 -- Margaret Marks of Transblawg writes:
I picked up the Guardian article on German humour too, because Trevor pointed it out. He didn't think it was as ridiculous as I did! Anyway, thanks for the detail.
That getting off the bus joke is just silly to me (from the London area!)
And Germans have several ways of expressing that:
dann bin ich aus dem Bus ausgestiegen
dann stieg ich aus dem Bus aus
dann verließ ich den Bus (this does have a snappier and more amusing quality)And they don't have to use a subclause - they can just string a sentence on
Ich stieg dann aus dem Bus aus
Ich bin dann aus dem Bus ausgestiegen
This Stewart Lee appears to exist, but it is amazing people can write such rubbish.
Anyway, the Germans laugh at my jokes. Should I be worried? (Actually, when I first spent a year here, I got on much better in the six months in Berlin than the six in Franconia, from the witticism point of view. Germany is very varied, and Berlin humour is not the same as Bavarian).
]
[See Abiola Lapite's post at Foreign Dispatches " Nice Theory, Shame about the Facts" (5/25/2006) for a congruent point of view with some excellent examples and clear-headed reasoning about them. I especially liked his closing point:
Usually, when people are looking for foreign languages to construct elaborate Sapir-Whorfian theses of difference around, they're prudent enough to opt for something so exotic and alien that no one is likely to call them on their claims: quite why Mr. Lee chose to use a language so similar to his own for such a purpose - and therefore so easy to check his claims against - is mystifying to me.
Perhaps it's that comedians are not used to being fact-checked. (But then how do we explain science journalists?) ]
Posted by Mark Liberman at May 24, 2006 09:18 AM