Words and Wordplay

The first test of the stereotype is the humblest one: do Germans tell jokes? They do, in great number, and the everyday joke tradition has recognisable genres, favourite targets and a love of wordplay that the language invites. This chapter looks at the pun and the "flat joke", at the comedy of long compound words (and what Mark Twain made of them), at words that have become famous abroad, and at the regional and group jokes that Germans tell about one another. Jokes are described by type here, not copied from collections. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Everyday Joke

The Pun and the Flat Joke

• Why the pun works. German has many words that sound alike and many words built from smaller words, so double meanings are easy to find. A pun can turn on a prefix, a compound or a case ending, which makes them hard to translate (check).
• The groan as reward. As with the English pun, the groan is part of the pleasure, and the teller expects it.
• Shop names. Hairdressers' shops are famous for punning names, such as plays on "Haar" (hair) in the name of the salon. The habit is common enough to have been collected in books and photographs (check).

Long Words and Mark Twain

• Compound nouns. German builds long words by joining shorter ones, so a famous example such as Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (captain of a Danube steamship company) exists mostly as a game (check the word and its use). In practice such words are rarely used in full.
• Words as comedy. Collections of strange or long words, and of words with no English equivalent, are a standard type of popular book and internet list (check).
• Examples abroad. The word Schadenfreude has entered English, and lists often add words such as Backpfeifengesicht (a face that needs a slap) or Kummerspeck ("grief bacon", weight gained from emotional eating). These are real, playful words, though some are more used in lists than in speech (check).
• The verb at the end. A famous trick of German comedy and public speaking is to delay the verb of a long sentence to the very end, so that the meaning is held back until the last word.

Jokes About Regions and Groups

Jokes about groups raise a question that the course returns to in Chapter 9: who may tell them and about whom. Jokes of this type usually say more about the teller's idea of the group than about the group, and some are felt as insulting.

Understatement and Irony in Speech

• "Nicht schlecht." The phrase "not bad" can mean "very good", and "Da kann man nicht meckern" ("you can't complain") is a typical way to praise something, a habit that matches British understatement (check).
• Irony in speech. German speakers also use irony, and tone and context signal it. Outsiders who miss the signals may think the speaker is serious, which feeds the stereotype.
• Dry and wry. Dry humour is not an English monopoly. The question is how far a culture signals it and how readers recognise it (check).

What the Joke Tradition Shows

• There is a rich everyday joke culture, with genres, formulas, targets and collections.
• Much of it is built on the language, which makes it hard to translate and easy for outsiders to miss.
• Some of it is unkind, as joke traditions everywhere are, and it follows the same patterns as in Britain.
• It does not settle the question, because a joke habit is not the same as a comic tradition in art, but it removes the simplest form of the stereotype.

Exercises