Humor seems the most difficult. Once I taught a guy from Sweden English. One day he read an article in the newspaper to me and could tell me what it meant—no problem.
When we got to the comics page… the humor didn’t translate at all.
I still don’t know why the difference was so marked.
It’s because a key component of humor is someone’s status being lowered, and someone just learning the culture won’t be fluent in the status signals yet.
… sometimes. This seems like a vastly overly broad requirement for humor. First off, there are puns. Some people don’t find them to be humor, but I don’t have to look far to find a non-pun exception—I fail to see a status lowering in today’s Square Root of Minus Garfield, for instance, and even if it’s not a masterpiece, it’s somewhat funny.
I could find many other examples which only incidentally involved social status changes—Today’s xkcd is a put-down, but the relevant status (dominance of chemical elements over Greek elements) is so drastic that no appreciable further change is going to occur. Furthermore, the same joke was made much better in Order of the Stick while eliminating the put-down element.
So it seems to me that saying it’s ‘a key component’ had better not be along the lines of ‘a key ingredient’, but rather more along the lines of ‘a principal component’.
Humor seems the most difficult. Once I taught a guy from Sweden English. One day he read an article in the newspaper to me and could tell me what it meant—no problem. When we got to the comics page… the humor didn’t translate at all. I still don’t know why the difference was so marked.
In fairness, newpaper comics rarely have humor to translate.
Humor probably has a higher culture per word weight. (I made up this term.)
It’s because a key component of humor is someone’s status being lowered, and someone just learning the culture won’t be fluent in the status signals yet.
… sometimes. This seems like a vastly overly broad requirement for humor. First off, there are puns. Some people don’t find them to be humor, but I don’t have to look far to find a non-pun exception—I fail to see a status lowering in today’s Square Root of Minus Garfield, for instance, and even if it’s not a masterpiece, it’s somewhat funny.
I could find many other examples which only incidentally involved social status changes—Today’s xkcd is a put-down, but the relevant status (dominance of chemical elements over Greek elements) is so drastic that no appreciable further change is going to occur. Furthermore, the same joke was made much better in Order of the Stick while eliminating the put-down element.
So it seems to me that saying it’s ‘a key component’ had better not be along the lines of ‘a key ingredient’, but rather more along the lines of ‘a principal component’.
Yes, and a heavier reliance on nuances and multiple-meanings of language that come with much greater familiarity.