One thing everybody does online, yea, two, are an abomination before the Lord and everybody else.

One happens whenever anybody asks, 'Can you name this bird?' and all the terribly 'witty' people reply, 'That's George.' No matter how many people have just made the same 'funny'. At first, I thought it was just h2g2 and wondered where we'd gone wrong. But Carl Bovis, Somerset's gift to bird photography, gets this all day and all night on Twitter, so the disease is more widespread than I thought. It has obviously been going on for years.

Just so you know, that stopped being funny sometime in the Palaeolithic Era. It's such a dumb joke even the Sumerians didn't bother to put it on a cuneiform tablet. And their bad jokes are legendary, even on the internet.

The other abomination involves puns.

Now, I'm not saying you should never make puns. Some of my favourite joke moments have involved puns. Those puns, however, involved two or more languages, the knowledge of ancient texts, etc. Those puns were witty. A pun that merely announces, 'I know exactly what you said, but I'm going to pretend I don't so as to derail the conversation and get all the attention back on ME, where it should be,' is not remotely entertaining. In face-to-face meetings it will actually cause me to leave the room in disgust.

Letting everyone know that you are aware that the English language contains homophones is not likely to elicit the admiring oohs and aahs that you imagine it will. Worse, it can be perceived as an unpleasant form of microaggression. You may deplore the term 'microaggression': deplore all you like. People are onto you now, Bubba. In the immortal words of Mark Twain when arguing with the French hotelkeeper about the cost of soap, 'Ne pouvez-vous pas pull that dodge on me again.'

It's worse when you try to commit these 'puns' in text form. It frequently occurs in my correspondence – which, you will recall, is multinational – that certain h2g2ers write me perplexing sentences such as this one:

You don't want any more of those fungus pictures? Too bad! I'd have more of them but I didn't have mushroom in my camera.

My confused inquiry as to whether he needed an antifungal for the device was met with, 'Oh, that's an old pun.' Could have fooled me.

Do you know why these 'puns' don't work? You write, but you forget that other people don't talk like you do.

Here is a pun.

Homer: Did you know the Three Wise Men were firemen?

Jethro: How do you figger that?

Homer: It says right there in the Bible: 'they come from a-far.'

If you were from the Southern Appalachians that would be a pun: 'afar=a fire'. My mother yelled at my dad for telling that joke in North Carolina.

'These people don't have a sense of humor, Claude,' she warned him. 'They will think you're making fun of them.'

I felt sorry for him: he'd finally memorised a joke, and he couldn't tell it.

I know a pun that worked, once upon a time.

Mary at the church youth group: Hey, John, what kind of car did the apostles drive?

John: I dunno, what kind?

Mary: A Honda.

John: How do you know?

Mary: It says, 'And they were all with one Accord in one place.'

Of course, THIS pun, while it isn't accent-dependent, requires that you 1. Know car brands and 2. Have once again internalised the Authorised, or King James Version of the Bible. These jokes aren't even told in churches anymore: everybody reads different versions (they read until they find one that says what they want it to say).

I once read an entire book full of mostly-naughty puns in German. These puns were also politically dangerous and could have landed you in jail. The book was published in Prague and mocked the Nazis. I hope the authors got out before the Nazis marched in. One of them involved the SA, the Reichstag fire, and venereal disease. Those were desperate times for humorists.

I know a wonderful joke in Rhenish dialect. I will not tell it here. It laid the philologists in the aisles at the University of Bonn. To understand it you need to have lived in the area and have a thorough comprehension of Grimm's Law.

So what kind of jokes should you tell?

Jokes that include rather than exclude. Jokes that have universal application. Jokes that rely on human nature rather than local quirks. These jokes may not work on Vogons, but among humans they will go far.

Back in the early 80s, we lived in a large apartment house in Cologne. Our neighbours were students. The Turks, the Greeks, and the Persians were our closest friends. We shared a telephone with some of the Persians. They recorded the answering machine message, which led to consternation among my commercial clients. They tended to make phone calls to Teheran at about 4 am – the cadence was rare and wonderful. The Greeks had the best recipes, but the Turks had the best jokes.

Here is a joke told by a Turkish resident of Germany, translated into English.

A Turkish man was walking down the street. On a balcony above, a German man and his wife were having an argument. The man got so mad that he shoved his wife too hard. The woman fell over the balcony railing and landed headfirst in an open wheelie bin.

The Turkish man looked down at the woman, her legs kicking in the air. Her shouts echoed from the wheelie bin. He looked up at the balcony and called up,

'Why you throw away? Is still good!'

Why this is funny: The Germans accused the Turks of being 'cheap' when, of course, they were simply poorer than the Germans. The Turks accused the Germans of being wasteful and fostering a 'throw-away society'. Also, my friend, who told me this joke, was Turkish and spoke fluent German – yet, when he quoted the Turkish man in the joke, he used the same 'me Tarzan, you Jane' accent that the Germans often used to denote immigrant speech. This would be the same as if one of my Pittsburgh friends did a funny Italian or Polish accent when quoting their grandparents.

So can it with the bad puns, y'all. Broaden your humour horizons. As much as the rest of us may listen to those Youtubes curiously to find out which items of our shared vocabulary you pronounce in some wholly unpredictable way¹, we're not going to be prepared for all this code-switching. The same goes for the complicated anecdote that is howlingly funny in your own language, but which your conversational companion is not going to get without a slide show and a thesaurus. We're a Guide for the planet, humankind: let's try for laughs for the planet, too, rather than lamenting the fact that others are too dim to get our brilliant wordplay.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

06.11.23 Front Page

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