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> A pedant was looking for his book for many days but could not find it. By chance as he was eating lettuce and turned a certain corner he saw the book lying th
by johnfn 4y ago
> A pedant was looking for his book for many days but could not find it. By chance as he was eating lettuce and turned a certain corner he saw the book lying there. Later meeting a friend who was lamenting the loss of his girdle, he said, “Do not worry but buy some lettuces and eat them at the corner, when you turn it and go a little ways you fill find it.”
This is interesting: it's the sort of quip that, if said extemporaneously in conversation, would probably get someone to laugh. The funny thing would specifically be referencing back to a conversation/event that happened a few days ago. The thing that makes it less funny in the compressed form is that you don't have to put the 2 and 2 together of "oh yeah, that's an event that happened a few days ago which is related to this situation" because the compressed joke has spoon-fed you the context.
Maybe jokes were such a novel form at the time that even the compressed form was still funny back then?
- cecilpl2 4y agoOne of my favorite Norm MacDonald jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oseqh7SMIvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oseqh7SMIvo
- nigerian1981 4y agoCurrently searching for dog houses on Amazon
- davidw 4y agoThat was worse than getting rick-rolled.
- thesuitonym 4y agoThe shaggy dog story is a time honoured form of anti-humour.
- dieselgate 4y agoThe funniest part of that for me was the “friend lamenting the loss of his girdle”
- prometheus76 4y agoA girdle in that time would now be called a belt.
- dieselgate 4y agoIndeed, didn’t know that. The last time I used a girdle was for holding hip padding in high school football.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoAlso, there's something about translated jokes. Not just in the sense of language, but also in the sense of culture. If somebody right now tried to translate a modern English joke to Thai, but only knew about the language through reading the works of Shakespeare, a King James bible and the US legal code, it doesn't seem that the result would be very funny to somebody from Thailand.
- ordu 4y agoI don't know about this joke, but I can imagine how the punchline was lost in a translation with exactly these results. Probably English just lack some words like a verb with meaning "to find something by looking around a corner while eating lettuce at the same time", and without such word this joke is untranslatable. You can translate the idea of a joke, but it wouldn't be a joke. Or it may be that the verb "to eat lettuce" sounded just like "to find something around a corner". Jokes tends to exploit peculiar facts of the language, which are mostly specific to the language and cannot be translated.