There is much truth to the claim that different nations and cultures have different ideas about what they find funny. Of course there is also diversity within a nation. Personally I find most American humour as exhibited by its most popular ‘family’ sitcoms to be rather corny and piss-weak; at the same time my favourite kind of humour is the darker, smart arsed, self-conscious type exhibited by New York Jews and personified by, say, Seinfeld and Woody Allen, which probably has in turn some basis in Yiddish culture and all those stories that Rabbis supposedly like to tell.
Australian humour is again very different. I sometimes find it too camp and crude but the part of it which most appeals to me is the ever present sense of irony, stoicism and dark moods underlying it – Australians like to joke about tragedies as a way of coping with them in a way that, for instance, the more sentimental Americans would find rather inappropriate. I attribute the Australian sense of humour to the higher concentration of people of Irish descent, and in particular, Irish Catholics, amongst its population.
Then there are the French who claim to have wit rather than humour.
What is worth noting is the many Australians, who despite their genuine fondness for their American cousins, regard those ‘Yanks’ as rather irony deficient. Now it turns out we must extend this designation to the more recent US immigrants as well. A famous Australian comedian and satirist, Barry Humphries is apparently being asked to apologise for the allegedly racist remarks he made when writing as his screen persona, Dame Edna Everage, for Vanity Fair.
In this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, which has Latina Salma Hayek on the front cover, Dame Edna pens a “Ask Dame Edna” column and a reader asks her which foreign language should she/he learn? The reader says that everyone around me is saying “learn Spanish” and notes that even President Bush speaks Spanish. The reader then concludes his question with “Are we all going to have to speak Spanish?”
Dame Edna responds with: “Forget Spanish. There’s nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named Garcia Lorca, but I’d leave him on the intellectual back burner, if I were you. As for everyone’s speaking it, what twaddle! Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.”
Now the supreme irony of all of this is that Dame Edna was a character created by Humphries to take the piss out of his parents’ generation i.e. she is a satirical character meant to represent the sort of snooty, insular old lady hostess found in certain posh suburbs in Australia – what we call the ‘bluerinse’ set or what Americans might call ‘little old ladies in tennis shoes’. So when will the sorts of people being lampooned by the Dame Edna character start asking for apologies from Vanity Fair too? This is really a bit like asking Archie Bunker to apologise for his racist remarks. A little sense of humour (and irony) please, amigos!
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