: Re: 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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