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Jokes go international: 2-1-00 It seems that if you can
understand a joke told in another language, it automatically becomes ten
times funnier than it would have been in your own language. I guess it's
the thrill of actually understanding WHY the joke is funny, no matter
how lame it might be. Like today, in class, we
were doing an exercise that had questions labled A through E. When we
got to E, the teacher said, "Next, is E." And some kid promptly
replied, "E desu ne..." which is a rather poor pun that I found
completely hilarious. He was literally saying, "It's E, isn't it..."
but it sounded like "ii desu ne," which means, "Isn't that
nice." Hm. Not that funny, you say? Like I stated above, jokes are
always funnier if you can understand them in another language. The teacher
pointed out that nobody laughed except for me... aww! Poor kid! I had
a serious case of the giggles for a couple minutes afterwards, though. Another Japanese word-play that some other gaijin and I found hilarious, while the Japanese people surrounding us apparently did not appreciate, has to do with a train station called Heta. The kanji reading for the name indicated that the word meant some sort of field, but heta is also the word for unskilled, poor. So another couple of AETs and I were cracking up laughing at the idea that everyone who lived in that area must be really unskilled at everything... idiotic in general, tripping over themselves all the time, etc. We thought this was a riot, especially when the train announcement proclaimed, "Mamonaku... Heta desu," which means, "We will soon stop at Heta," but to our silly gaijin ears, could also imply, "We will soon be unskilled." We thought that was great, but nobody else seemed amused. After about half an hour more of our boisterous talking and laughing, we noticed that our car of the train was completely empty, except for us. Coincidence? I'm thinking no... Heheheh. We gaijin certainly know how to get a train car to ourselves, that's for sure. Oh well, we're not always that bad... hey, it was a two hour train ride, we were bored. :) |