Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pluma 2880 days ago
As a fellow German: I don't think puns are very popular in German (except for intentionally cheesy dad jokes).

The closest equivalent I can think of are sentences where the joke lies in using a different word at the end than the (likely, extremely crass) one the audience expects. These tend to work better in German than in English because of the sentence structure, I think.

EDIT: Example of a dad joke pun: "Was sagt ein Sachse auf dem Weihnachtsmarkt in New York? Ä Tännschen, please." -- "What does a man from Saxony say at the Christmas market in New York? A fir, please."

The joke is that "ein Tännchen", "a (small) fir", when pronounced with a Saxony accent, sounds a bit like the English word "attention". The joke works because most Germans know the phrase "attention, please" from movies, vacations and/or multilingual announcements. I believe this particular joke was invented some time in the 60s or 70s and ceased being funny about two seconds after, but that wouldn't stop "your dad" from using it.

1 comments

I think this is pretty universal between languages that puns and double meanings are hard or impossible to translate.