What makes a thing funny? At its core, humor seems to be all about incongruity. Comic situations set up a context where something is marked or out of place. This oddness, far different to what we were led to expect or what we blithely assume is normal, is what makes things funny.
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Dad jokes play with incongruity largely through linguistics and wordplay, rather than subject matter. The much-maligned pun is a mainstay of the dad joke. Puns, bad or good, have long fascinated researchers for their playful ability to tell a micro mystery, with its red herring clues in plain sight. . . . Through a trick of linguistics, words cleverly disguised like other words because of the way they sound or their different semantic senses can lead us in the wrong direction of meaning resolution, before we “get it.”
After recently making a dad-joke ("Why does the string section have so much security? Because of all the viol[ins|ence].") I started a project to map the CMUdict phonemes [0] by Levenshtein distance in order to gather more word sets that are not precisely homophones for more jokes. The "Dubious Art" article was a top read from my literature review.
> Try it if you speak another language and read both the translated version and the original of a great work of literature and you'll see what I mean.
Agreed.
There's an even simpler way to experience this: jokes and puns. Often times, they are untranslatable because their literal meaning is nonsensical and all of its expressiveness comes from timing/context, play on words and/or a local cultural references. By the time you've explained a joke, it has already lost its effect.
There's a curious story among diplomatic translators where in a live diplomatic meeting, one of the parties blurted out a joke and the interpreter, attempting to accurately set the mood, translated it as "X just blurted out an untranslatable joke, please laugh heartily"!
It's weird and a little tone deaf but a common older brand of humor. The speakers (in general, I only skimmed a few of the videos) don't seem to share it.
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