This video will be a bit different than usual: we will talk about the sense of humor in the Italian language. Obviously, humor is a human ability that is independent from the spoken language, but today I want to talk about how humor works in Italian: I'll tell you some jokes and we'll see if you can understand them before reading the explanation.

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Sense of Humor in Italian: how does it work?



The Treccani encyclopaedia defines humour as follows: "the faculty, the ability and the fact itself of perceiving, expressing and representing the most curious, incongruous and in any case funny aspects of reality that can arouse laughter and smile, with human participation, understanding and sympathy". In short, if you have even an ounce of sense of humor, you know very well what we are talking about.



Understanding humor in a foreign language is particularly difficult, because it requires implicit knowledge, i.e. not expressed by the speaker, that sometimes only a native speaker can have. For this reason, if you are studying a foreign language, you already know that understanding a joke in your target language is often very difficult: sometimes it is necessary to explain the joke in order to understand it; and we all know that if a joke is explained, it is not so funny anymore... Well, in short, today I will try to tell you some short jokes and I will explain them to you, so you can check if you have understood them well. And maybe in the meantime, we can have some fun!



First type: "Cosa fa...?"



The first joke I want to tell you belongs to the category “Cosa fa…?”. This kind of joke always begins this way: “Cosa fa…?” or “Cosa fanno…?”; there's a lot of them, but my favorite is this one:

“Cosa fanno due sassi uguali?” - “Sassomigliano!”

Literally translated: "What do two identical stones do?" - "They look like alike!"

Did you get it? Well, let me explain it: the irony lies in the answer, i.e. "si assomigliano" (="they look alike"), which, with the elision of the vowel "i", becomes "s'assomigliano", practically creating the word "sasso" (="stone"), which echoes the subject of the question. At the auditory level, that is, at the level of what we hear, we immediately notice the similarity between the words.



The second joke belongs to the same type:

“Cosa fa un pasticciere quando gli muore la moglie?” - “La crema”

Literally translated: "What does a pastry chef do when his wife dies?" - "The cream"/"He cremates her"

In this case the humor is linked to the whole answer, which can have two meanings: the first is given by a noun, "cream", preceded by a definite article. So, according to logic, "the pastry chef makes the cream". The second meaning, on the other hand, is obtained if we consider the answer differently: "la" becomes an object pronoun referring to his wife, while "crema" is the third singular person of the verb "cremare" (="to cremate"), that is "to reduce a corpse to ashes". So, according to this meaning, "the pastry chef cremates the wife (who is dead)".



Second type: "Perché...?"



The third joke belongs to another type, that begins with “Perché…?”; let's see if you get it:

“Perché il pomodoro non riesce a dormire?” - “Perché l’insalata russa!”

Literally translated: "Why does the tomato have trouble sleeping?" - "Because the salad snores!"/"Because the Russian salad!"

In this case the irony is based on the double meaning of the answer, and in particular on the polysemy of the word "russa": in one case, "russa" may be the third singular person of the verb "russare" (="to snore"), which gives us the reason why the tomato cannot sleep. In the other case, "russa" can be a singular feminine adjective referring to the word "insalata": "insalata russa"(="Russian salad"), in fact, is a very common dish in Italy, made with potatoes, carrots, pickles and peas boiled and then mixed with mayonnaise.

... Keep reading Italian jokes on our website: https://learnamo.com/en/sense-humor-i...

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