As so many folks in Switzerland end up in some psychiatric care sooner or later I've been told a lovely joke yesterday.

This person is about to get released from psychiatric care and is contemplating it all looking out the window.

"I know now that I'm not a bone
but I wonder whether the dog out there knows that too."

I think it is great not to expect humor, since then one gets so nicely surprised..

This made me laugh..

Actually I would second that advice, as it is about behaviour in business meetings. When making jokes about Switzerland in that kind of setting, you should know the country at least a little better than just the ususal stereotypes, as:

• Jokes about holey cheese: Yawn. Mainly show that you have no clue about swiss cheese.
• Jokes about being called Heidi: Not funny, probably someones Grandma is also called Heidi, it is just a name.
• Jokes about banks, chocolate, watches: Yawn, never heard that one before, yawn, nice british sense of humor yawn.

There is this one blogger who illustrated this quite well: She wrote about good swiss humor, or lack thereof and illustrated this with the following picture, commenting that it is about making fun of dark skinned foreigners:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ov5KIzVzQw...h/IMG_9053.JPG

Now, the cartoon was titled: "Charity-hearts" and it was about how some swiss people give money to charities for africa while having problems with africans living in Switzerland (hypocrites). Basically, the supposedly selfless act of donating money is actually selfish, as it is about keeping the africans out the country. IMHO this cartoon is quite clever, but the blogger did not understand it properly as she lacked knowledge about its background and probaly does (did) not understand german very well.

That kind of humour only became mainstream in Germany in the mid to late 90's. Whilst the Germans were always famous for their political satire, I personally found - I lived in Swabia for 10 years - the Swabians to be a dreadfully ignorant and self-obsessive people uncapable of understanding any form of humour at all and latching onto self-depreciation in others as if it were the truth.

Yeah, on the one hand you already have an underdevelopped sense of humour, and then we have mildly ignorant foreigners who don't understand our irony, jokes because of language and cultural context. Apparently there are even some who actually didn't get that my above joke was highly ironic.
But trying to understand Swiss-German humour without speaking Swiss-German is as futile as trying to understand British humour by having it translated to German...

i think humour translates over language...infact the most laughs i've had are with trying to get over the language barrier with the swiss....
eg. a good fahrt joke never fails to deliver...;-)

but then again i don't understand anything you've written since i am a mildly ignorant foreigner...

Swiss don't have x (x can be sense of humour, food, fashion sense, anything that an ex-pat randomly perceives) thread # 8234.

Yawn.

Again, I must be in my own little pocket of Switzerland, because the Swiss guys I work with are genuinely funny, and do understand English-style humour.. they even watch UK/US comedy... and im sure I do not work in the only place in the whole of Switzerland where this happens. Maybe if some ex-pats spent more time trying to integrate and understand that just because something is different to where they come from doesn't mean it's automatically crap, rather than sitting there moaning ad nauseum, some headway would be made.

so true rich, i thought i thought this all seemed too familiar

they-say-swiss-don-t-have-sense-humour

The German version of The Life of Brian is hilarious in my opinion.

Absolutely. And I personally find "Hogan's Heroes" far better in German than in English.

I find this post funnier than Hogans Heroes

Not so sure about German humour. One Christmas I was with a group of Germans and one middle aged, educated guy asked my husband (his best friend) 'So, what do you want for Christmas - a bigger pxxis??!!' Cue five minutes of side-splitting, belly laughter from the rest of them.

When I responded with 'Well I am wishing that he doesn't get a bigger pxxis ...' they didn't get the joke!

O.K. and most German or Swiss german jokes are not understood by the Brits ... what's wrong here? Standard German? I never tried but I think I would not laugh at fawlty towers in högdeutsch

Maybe it wasn't funny anymore for the boys, as it could have been the whole truth and not a joke....

Humour is universal and found in every culture. The best way is to see humour like a foreign language. Every culture has its own language and you understand it or you don't. Once you have the cultural codes and keys, you can then detect and understand german/swiss/french/... humour.

Maybe some of you remember this University research project LaughLab which was looking for the world funniest joke based on internet user ratings. They made also some analysis regarding cultural discrepancies. Very interesting how it can be so different even within the english speaking countries. Enjoy reading it.

I don't understand why humour is only associated with telling jokes, making silly faces & gestures, taking the piss and all that.
Hardly ever do I find this truly amusing or even humorous. Its simply stupid most of the time and unbearable to listen to.

I don't know to me humour is plenty of other things too.
Like the way someone's choosing their words for telling an adventure while travelling ...

or watching someone assemble a piece of furniture ...
or a ritual for going to bed ...
or welcoming visitors in the company ...
or what some animals do is totally hilarious and funny ...

I've had that experience as well - a riposte to a joke isn't taken all that well

Isn't that a Swidish joke? Högsvenska...

I am a borring humourless person, but why would you think that there are no differences between individuals' way of joking in any given country? I find Monty Python embarassing but enjoy Black Adder... go figure what UK is about... I don't, so don't do it with other countries either, just enjoy what you happen to enjoy.

so true...my life would be so boring if i only knew humour from my home country (as it happens i have moved around most of my life)
i also grew up in international schools, so humour to me was not linked to one's nationality.
regarding the language, it does help but is not always necessary. If you've already made up your mind that the swiss don't have a sense of humour, then you will never notice it...(but go to appenzell and i guarantee you a laugh...)

Isn't this sentence redundant?

Maybe it should be, "We are perfect, so there is nothing to laugh about."



Or are there levels that go beyond perfect...

BTW, speaking of humor, here is a German joke from Jeremy Clarkson,

I have told this to some German speaking friends of mine and they almost had trouble standing up. I will admit that I still snicker every time I think of this joke.