Would somebody please tell me what’s so funny?

Date: 26/10/1995

By Geoff Meade

HUMOUR, as they say, is no laughing matter, particularly for the hard-pressed folk in Directorate-General 69, who have spent the last eighteen years not coming up with a good Euro-joke.

The pressure is on because nobody is going to understand the European Union unless they can laugh about it. The problem is, as comedian Stanley Holloway once said about a British seaside place called Blackpool, there's nothing to laugh at at all.

Last year's White Paper, “The Euro-Joke: Analysis, Opportunities and Policy for the Future” took a serious look at the problem and concluded: “It seems unlikely that we will ever resolve the central issue of why the chicken crossed the road. In the absence of any conclusive answers, the Euro-joke is likely to remain an elusive goal.”

It was a damning indictment of the failure of Director-General Ivor Whopper to crack the biggest social and cultural conundrum in EU history.

Whopper tried everything. His finest hour was when he popped Alka Seltzer in the morning coffee of all his department's A-grades in a bid to prove there was one form of humour which could unite all nationalities. It wasn't funny.

Then he tried putting whoopee cushions on their chairs. It wasn't funny.

The plastic dog mess on the carpet left them unmoved, as did the stink bombs in the toilet.

Whopper's biggest disaster, though, was the questionnaire he sent round the institutions in a bid to establish the ingredients of the Euro-joke.

Question One: Have you heard, or has anyone in your family heard, the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman?

Question Two: What do you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo?

Question Three: Knock knock.

He received only one properly filled-in reply, which answered, respectively:

One: No, and I don't want to if you insist on marginalising the Welsh;

Two: You get a petition from the International Fund for Animal Welfare and quite rightly so too;

Three: Please don't bother me now, I'm very busy.

Whopper left just after the White Paper was published. He popped into Personnel to sort out his pension and they asked him his name and he said Ivor Whopper. They all fell about, they couldn't stop laughing. That's very funny they said.

But it was too late by then. Whopper was beyond seeing the humour in anything.

It wasn't really his fault, of course, because he was put in charge of the impossible. There is not, and never will be, a harmonised single market-friendly Euro-joke. One nation's rib-tickling bent banana is another's free trade catastrophe.

Whopper's big mistake was that he didn't ask the right question: if he had he would have known what he was up against.

Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Irishman, the Dutchman, the Greek, the Swede, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the German, the Portuguese, the Finn, the Austrian, the Dane, the Italian, the Luxembourger and the Belgian?

Of course you haven't, because it doesn't exist. Collapse of DG 69.

Odd thing, humour - why don't we all laugh at the same jokes and situations? Cultural differences, religious upbringings, moral codes, national personality traits all play a part: different historical perspectives make for different hysterical perspectives. It's all in the genes and that's a reference that would produce a play on words from any Englishman worth his salt and everyone else would think he was potty.

Language has a lot to do with it: the English and the French favour punning because both languages cry out for it. Italians use the language differently in humour: they make it soar, they extract pathos, they put in plenty of drama. The Spanish love irony and look anguished about it. The Danes like a good rib tickler, preferably in their cups, and the Greeks and the Germans also giggle most effectively through a mild alcoholic fog.

So is there a good Euro-joke? Probably not. Jokes just don't travel well across boundaries and removing all border controls won't make a scrap of difference.

Jokes wallow in national sovereignty, defying the Maastricht Treaty and resisting all pressure to move towards an ever-closer belly-laugh.

Even if you beat the language barrier by telling a pun-free gag, even if you appeal to the lowest common denominator, even if you go for the pratfall, the banana-skin slip-up or the good old bucket-of-cold-water-on-top-of-the-door routine, the chances are it will go down like a damp squib in one corner of Europe or another.

There is however, an exception to this general rule. Sex. Whatever else Europeans do or do not chuckle about, they get quite a giggle out of you know what. The Italians laugh at sex and politics and so do the Spanish.

The French laugh at sex and food, the Irish laugh at sex and religion and the British laugh at sex and embarrassment, usually their own. The joke is that the British aren't very good at it and that makes the nation laugh. Elsewhere of course, such as in Italy or France, it would make people cry. What kind of European humour is that?

Translation would help, but while it might convey correctly the inquiry about why the chicken crossed the road, it would do nothing to give the question the comic urgency it needs.

Who cares why the chicken crossed the road? Why shouldn't it? And imagine the stunned silence throughout the stalls in a fictional Euro-theatre when the translation tells us that the chicken crossed the road to get to the ... (long pause to heighten the comic drama) ... OTHER SIDE!

The Brits are doubled up in their seats with mirth, the Portuguese are leaving, the French are furious, the Dutch are giggling at the guffawing British and the Austrians are shaking their heads in wonderment that the law in some countries doesn't make it an offence for chickens to jay-walk.

That last bit was a joke, by the way, a classic case of how humour, like fine wine, refuses to travel.

Depending on what nationality you are, you can begin to see the problem. What we need is visual humour, something to cross the linguistic boundaries and give us a Euro-smile.

Enter to loud applause Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson's brilliant comic invention, the Marcel Marceau of modern times, an inept English nerd who travels supremely well because he says virtually nothing. In his Laurel and Hardy-style bumbling about, the only language is body language.

But even body language needs translating for some people: why waste a good custard pie, many will ask, pushing it into someone's face?

If you don't know, no-one can tell you. As Virginia Woolf observed back in 1925: “Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

To this day, Ivor Whopper has not been replaced.