r/Showerthoughts • u/ikantolol ‎ • 6d ago

Casual Thought We have child geniuses who can do complex math, play instruments beautifully, and play chess at an adult level, but somehow we almost never see children stand-up comedians.

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u/HarveysBackupAccount 6d ago

No offense but wow, that's all a bit much. Your ...essay... on humor makes it sound like you approach it with a pair of calipers, as if it were something to measure within an inch of its life (that's 2.54 cm, for those who need metric).

I've spent a little time living in another language and lots of time with non-native speakers with varying degrees of English fluency. It doesn't take much fluency to make people laugh.

Sure you won't have a full stand-up routine, but I had at best the fluency of a 1st grader and you can certainly find ways to tell jokes. Language based jokes take more fluency, but that's not everyone's idea of good humor. Plenty of humor is not playing badminton with a thesaurus.

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u/Vishnej 6d ago edited 6d ago

I have also attempted to tell jokes in another language. Some of them even hit.

But it's a fucking puzzle every time, even in a language quite similar to my own, even with a very receptive audience. Even your brief, well-written, mostly earnest comment has a bunch of words, concepts, and idioms that would stop a 1st grader in their tracks, derail the joke. You're bombing, get off the stage. It's hard to come back from that in casual contact or in a performance.

There's so much other stuff that comes out of a spoken comedic performance that isn't in either a thesaurus or a dictionary, it's just sort of absorbed by osmosis when you're embedded with enough speakers of that language.

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u/MulvMulv 6d ago

I think it is also impacted by dialects and culture. I'm Irish and have always found it notably easier to be humorous with other Irish, or even Brits to an extent, than Americans (in general conversation I mean, I am not a comedian).

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u/AggressiveSpatula 6d ago

My students laugh at my jokes even though I barely speak Spanish. Of course I’ll fail them if they don’t, but I like to think of that more as insurance rather than the main thing.

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u/theirishembassy 6d ago

as someone who went to school for clown, I can tell you that don’t even need language to make people laugh.