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PUNCH LINES
Hardy-har-herr
BY CHRIS WRIGHT

What’s the shortest book in the world?

The Anthology of German Humor.

Funny? Maybe not. It may not even be true. A recent British study, for instance, reveals that Germans may be the most easily amused people on earth. The online study (www.laughlab.co.uk) posted 10,000 jokes from 70 countries, to be rated by visitors according to their chuckle-factor. While German respondents described 35 percent of the jokes as being "very funny" (the highest percentage of any nationality to do so), they had two favorites, including this:

Q: Why is television called a medium?

A: It is neither rare nor well-done.

Okay, so it’s not exactly a howler. Even so, says Christoph Eykman, who teaches German at Boston College, this fact should not lead us to any hasty conclusions. "I think there is a good deal of humor in Germany," Eykman says. He does, however, allow that Germans are not widely known for their killer wit. "It does say something about a seriousness, that whole thing about being efficient and work-oriented," he says. "But I don’t think one can say in general that [Germans] don’t have a sense of humor."

While the study did not attempt to demonstrate that some nations are funnier than others, it did seem to reveal that certain types of humor appeal to different nationalities. The top British joke, for example, involved a man who goes to the doctor with a piece of lettuce sticking out of his backside ("I’m sorry, but this is just the tip of the iceberg"), substantiating the idea that Brits have a scatological bent. And the French, famed for their cynical sense of humor, picked this:

"You’re a high-priced lawyer. If I give you $500, will you answer two questions for me?"

"Absolutely! What’s the second question?"

Ethan Corbin, who works at the French Library and Cultural Center in Boston, believes there is a specifically French sense of humor. "There’s definitely a twisted element to it," he says. And yet, Corbin continues, the French are not generally big joke-tellers. "That’s an Anglo-Saxon thing," he says, "not a French thing at all."

Penny Holroyde, a Cambridge-based English expat and self-confessed "joke nut," agrees. "I don’t know any English person who doesn’t like sitting down for a good joke-telling session," she says. "It’s expected of you to be able to tell a joke in England."

And yet, says Joe Boskin — who teaches a course at Boston University on humor in American culture — no one enjoys a good joke as much as the Yanks. "Clearly jokes play a very important role in America," Boskin says. "The great American joke reveals the gap between the ideal and the real, between expectations and what exists. If we had a dollar for every joke that gets told here, we’d settle the national debt."

Boskin is quick to point out, though, that while Americans might think of themselves as the wittiest people around, so do the Bulgarians, the Russians, and, for that matter, the Germans. But not everyone shares such a relativistic view. "I think it’s fair to say that some senses of humor are more developed than others," says Holroyde. "The Germans take themselves too seriously to be funny."

"I don’t even know what German humor would be," says Corbin.

So what about the expert — what does Boskin think? "I’m sure the Germans are very funny," he says, "... to themselves."

Issue Date: January 31 - February 7, 2002
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