Rir and Loathing in as Pages

Here are a few thoughts about the jokes in this popular joke book, and a few things I have learned from reading it. I won’t trot out every new word, of course, but I noticed a few patterns and formats that came up again and again, and I thought it was worth noting them down. Being able to tell a good joke in another language is real jedi-level language skill, so I think it’s useful to know what the “rules” are.

Piadas Secas and “Dry Humour”

First of all, “Piadas Secas” doesn’t seem to be the same as what we would call “Dry Humour” (jokes told with a straight face, often with a slightly dark theme), it seems more to be “stale jokes” or perhaps just “old jokes”. Not quite Christmas-cracker level but close. If you’ve ever read a rag mag you’ll know the sort of thing. However, whereas university students tend to be very careful to avoid offence (even in the late eighties when I was at UEA) these are really in Bernard Manning territory, full of fat girl jokes, leper jokes, dumb blonde jokes, knob gags, and a little light racism. I’m not the sort of person who hurls a book across the room for that sort of thing but like… dude, it’s 2018.

Anyway, let’s look at a few examples of the jokes (don’t worry, I’ll stick to the less icky ones because the icky ones are less interesting from a language perspective):

Playground Classics

There were a lot of jokes that were so similar to old chestnuts from my youth that I’d be pretty sure they were translated from english rather than having sprung up independently

-Sabes qual é a diferença entre um rolo de papel higiénico e um cortinado de banheira?

-Não, diz

-Ah, então foste tu, javardo!

-Quantos Psicólogos são precisos para mudar uma lâmpada

-Uma, mas a lâmpada tem de querer mudar

And here’s one that’s basically a recycled “Yo mamma so fat” joke,

Era uma vez uma mulher tão gorda, mas tão gorda que um dia que um dia vestiu-se numa camisola com um “H” e um helicóptero aterrou-lhe em cima

Note the “Era uma vez” at the start, which is equivalent to “There was…”. You can also use “Havia…” to start the joke and introduce your characters. And the “tão gorda, mas tão gorda” (or “tão preguiçoso” or “tão pequeno” or whatever it might be) seems to be a pretty common stand-by in this kind of joke too. Here’s another. Same format but with “Havia” at the front and a different adjective

Havia um homem tão pequeno, tão pequeno que não andava de metro. Andava de centímetro

OK, I’m getting away from playground standards a little bit here, so let’s try some spicy foreign stuff.

Portuguese Wordplay

For me, the most interesting ones were the ones that relied on a specific portuguese puns that required me to work out how the joke worked. I assume these are old chestnuts too, in their own country.

– Boa tarde, tenho uma consulta Duarte Matos

– Ai, você deve ser mesmo altruísta vir aqui doar tomates

I think “Cal-cu-tá” = “Qual cu ‘tá” (“which bum is it?”). This seems to be a reasonably common joke format: describe a person or a film, or something and then ask the person to guess what it is. Here’s another

Um homem entra num bar, pede uma imperial e leva-a para casa. Qual é o filme?

– Roub-ó-copo

Then there’s:

Vira-se o computador grande para o pequeno:

– Olha para ti, tao pequeno e já computas

The next one relies on you being able to turn the phonetic sounds of numbers into words.

Quem 60 ao teu lado e 70 por ti, vai certamente rezar 1/3 para arranjar 1/2 de te levar para 1/4 e te dizer

-20 comer

Era uma vez uma mulher que partiu a perna ao filho
Não tinha canela para pôr no bolo.

is another I needed iTalki’s help for. I knew “canela” means “cinnamon” but I didn’t know it was also the equivalent of the english word “shin” – a colloquial name for the tibia.

And this one:

-Artur, estás tão diferente!

-Eu não sou Artur

Qual é o cúmulo de preguica

Casar-se com uma mulher grávida de outro

The Cream of the Crop