A Good Joke

Tweet This morning I pulled 《幽默漢語》( Chinese Humorous Stories) off the shelf and opened it for the first time ever. I really need to better understand Chinese humor, and I figure this is as good a starting point as any. I was drawn in by "不安" (Uneasiness), a joke about a thief. It goes like this:

法官：你在偷人家珠寶時，不感到心裡不安嗎？
小偷：先生，老實說我當時心裡是很不安，因為我擔心偷倒的是假貨。

Brilliant right? The book is actually quite good. It has a bunch of vocabulary I've never seen before, and each "lesson" is only a few lines. Heading to breakfast I started tossing around the idea of memorizing a bunch of these jokes. You know, add a few icebreakers to my "routine"... anything to help get me past the "Your Chinese is great! How long have you been living in Taiwan" part of meeting people. But then, I thought, when was the last time I heard anyone tell a joke? It's been longer than I could remember.

The gods must have heard my plea. The minute I finished eating, the breakfast shops owner walked over and asked me if I wanted to hear a "冷笑話" (cold joke). The joke went a little something like this.

There were two ants, a mother and her son. One day as they were looking for food and found a nice pile of shit to feast on. As they were eating the son looked up to his mom and asked, "Mom, why do we always have to eat shit." The mother looked up from her meal with scorn as said, "child, you know you're not suppose to talk about that sort of thing during dinner!"

WOW! 超冷. Now it was my turn. I cleared my throat, and began to tell the story of the thief and his uneasiness. In my excitement I forgot the fact that the thief was talking to a judge. I forgot the the whole "珠寶" part, and totally butchered the tones on “假貨." Basically, my joke sucked hard. After I corrected the tones and added the whole "talking to the judge" thing, my audience got it, and even laughed (I think they were giving me face), but I felt like a fool.

And then it dawned on me, telling a good joke is no easy task. The delivery has to be perfect, you can't mince words, and you certainly can't mess up the punch line.

I think learning to speak a language at a near-native level is very similar to telling a good joke. There is a difference between being able to simply say what you want and talking around what you want. There is a difference between hearing "I know what you mean, but we usually say it like this," and simply saying it how a native speaker says something. And there is certainly a difference between "not sounding like a foreigner," and "sounding like a native."

As I learn Mandarin, it is nice to be reminded of what it takes to tell a good joke. I might be able to talk about a thief feeling uneasy about something being fake... in front of a judge (almost forgot that part)...

But that is still a long way from delivering a perfect punch line.