: Variation in humor among ethnic/cultural groups Back when Bill Clinton was President of the United States, Al Franken (formerly a Saturday Night Live comedian, now a US Senator) gave him lessons

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Humor is notoriously difficult to translate. To take an extreme case, I saw an interview once with an American woman who had written a humor book. The publisher decided to produce a British edition, but they found that the book was filled with American cultural references and words that are different between the two countries, and so they added footnotes in the back of the book (okay, endnotes if you want to get technical) to explain all these references. For example, one of her jokes made a reference to a "cloverleaf", and so they dutifully footnoted this and explained it as, "an interchange on a motorway in the shape of a cloverleaf". And the writer commented, "By the time someone has read one of my jokes, and then finished flipping back and forth to the back of the book to look up all the references, I'm sure they're just going to say, 'Oh, I wonder why someone would do that.'" I say that's an extreme case because we're talking about the cultural barrier between two English-speaking countries.

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As I understand it, "funny" depends upon the unexpected. Jokes get told different ways, and the object of the joke changes (self-deprecating, racist, blonde, yo' mama, etc.), but the unexpected is what always gives the punch line its punch. The unexpected can be unexpected for various reasons: time, space, juxtaposition/comparison of two very different things, etc.

Ex 1: "Yo' mama is so fat, she weighs 800 pounds." That's not funny. You expected an exaggeration of your mother's weight, and that's all you got. So the joke is stupid. It is the kind of joke that a 5-year-old or a Vulcan might come up with.

Ex 2: "Yo' mama is so fat, she has her own climate." That's funny because you didn't expect the fat woman to be compared to an entire continent. Your mind tries to picture a woman that fat, and it can't because there are too many ridiculous things about it, and that makes it funny. (However, a 5-year-old would not find this funny, because he doesn't know about climates and continents.)

My point is that foreign/alien humor would work the same way, but it would operate under a different set of expectations. Unless you understand the culture and/or language and/or history, you won't get the jokes.

Your foreign/alien characters can still MAKE jokes, though. You will just have to explain them to your readers, at first. Make the explanations funny. "Suggesting Princess Suzie might enjoy rock moss was Gryznak's idea of a joke. (I found this out later. There's a hideously ugly creature in the Plains of Gxyap that eats rock moss.)"

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Do you enjoy the story you are writing? If your readers like the same story as you then they will most likely like the same humour as you do. If the readers don't like the joke then they may imagine the character as someone with a bad sense of humour. Is having a character with a bad sense of humour really going to destroy the rest of the story?

Most quips are spur of the moment and relate to the current surroundings or recent events. The reader of your book is the one that has to like the humour and should bear more influence than characters origin.

As long as the jokes don't have a strong violent, racial or hateful twist that would be considered in bad taste or vulgar by many you should be fine.

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The two thoughts that come to mind are ask someone of that ethnic background if it exists, and for fictional backgrounds think about how the back story affects humor. A great example is where Teal'c tells a joke on Stargate SG-1. Tea'lc coming from a very alien background appears to have no sense of humor prior to his attempt to tell his joke, and only he laughs. You also might look at Reader Digest's contest to find the world funniest joke. It is a great short survey of jokes of the world.

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