More humour, who'd've thunk?

A diverting little piece on international humour. The basic theory is if you want to learn about a particular culture the quickest way is to learn the humour. The author is a Middle East correspondent:

People in the Arab world have to be careful about telling such jokes, and also about laughing at them. You need to make sure the joker is not in fact an agent provocateur for the secret service. But people joke anyway, and this resilience is a great thing to watch, whether the joke is good or bad.

I have always felt that the foreign pages of a good newspaper should feature a jokes section from all over the world as a humanising counterweight to all the reports that stress the differences between there and here. Jokes make you realise: of course, these are people like me. They have to survive in very different circumstances, but they are people all the same. A reporter friend who works in Afghanistan tells me that underneath their burqas Afghan women trade very cruel jokes about the size of the male reproductive organ of the Taliban...

That is perhaps the most striking thing about humour in the Middle East. Most of the time the joke is not on the enemy. As far as I could tell, Palestinians rarely make fun of Jewish settlers, nor the other way around. Instead, people seem to prefer irony...

There's then a list of correspondents and their favourite local jokes. They're not offensive, although some are pointed. For example, from Pakistan:

Robber: "Give me all your money."

Zardari: "Do you know who I am?"

Robber: "No."

Zardari: "I am Asif Ali Zardari, president of Pakistan."

Robber: "OK, give me all my money."

The theory seems quite sound. Human beings are the intellectual species. The subject of our enquiry is pretty much the gap between theory and practice, between our perceptions and ideas and reality. This is also the basis of comedy, see above, the President of the Republic has less honour than a common thief. The local variety of humour shines a light on the local way of thinking, understanding, closing the gap between theory and practice.