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Screen & Spleen's avatar

Ironically, the last genuinely funny comedy came out in 2006 and it was Idiocracy. It also became reality, which,at this point, it's not even funny.

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James Kirchner's avatar

I wouldn't be so sure about the validity of German humor studies for English speakers. Due to German sentence structure, jokes have to be structured differently and this affects the humor. I can't remember the name of it, but a popular British stage play about standup comics had to be completely overhauled in German because the jokes didn't work. With the verb in English coming right after the subject, the predicate of the sentence can resolve the joke, but in German you already know everything before the verb comes at the end.

Thus, they studied it and found that a lot of German humor is a type of progressively absurd storytelling. The story starts out plausible, and people are buying it, but as the story gets incrementally more absurd, people gradually start laughing, until the level of absurdity and laughing reach their peak near the end of the story. My German family immigrated to the US in 1851, but they retained this style of humor unto the fourth generation. It caused problems for me when I was dating a girl from a not-very-German background, because as the story got absurd, instead of laughing, she'd get a look of humiliation on her face out of embarrassment that she'd bought into the early part of the story. She wasn't the only one whose feelings were hurt by that kind of joke.

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