There are jokes that are not funny when translated. If you’ve ever made friends from another culture, it may have happened to you. That silence, that face of incomprehension, you may even hear a fake laugh, forced to not make you feel bad. And the worst thing is when you try to explain the joke. We enter into an even more denigrating situation, since the answer to the explanation will still be the same confusion or the same forced smile.

Sometimes jokes cannot be translated because there is an implicit play on words that makes it untranslatable and other times it is because prior knowledge of the culture is required to understand the joke. However, in my opinion the most challenging jokes are those in which the change of cultural context makes the joke inappropriate.

Since I was a child I have been a fan of Elvira Lindo’s Manolito Gafotas. They were the first books that I enjoyed reading, that made me laugh out loud and that made me feel identified with the main character. I knew paragraphs practically by heart and was able to read a whole book in an afternoon. Every reader has had a book saga that has made them fall in love with literature and in my case it was Manolito.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Manolito is not so funny in other languages. For a university paper I wanted to research the translation of Elvira Linda’s work for the Anglo-Saxon market and I was very frustrated to realize that many of the best jokes had been suppressed or changed in such a way that they were practically unrecognizable.

The most prominent example, which I think represents what I want to express today, is the part where Manolito describes his mother’s smacks on the back of his head. Manolito, as a good Spanish boy of the 90’s, is used to receiving smacks on the back of his head from his mother as punishment. Manolito has catalogued the different types of smacks (I will never forget the ones with delayed effect) and the threat of a smack falling on his neck is what often saves him from getting into a hairy situation… or not. However, in the Anglo-Saxon culture, hitting children is a taboo and in the official translation of the books into English, the smacks were replaced by lectures.

I was even more disappointed to read some online comments on the books in which outraged Anglo-Saxon mothers found insulting the fact that a child was cruelly named Four-eyes and another Big Ears. I had a hard time understanding that humor sometimes is difficult to translate and that, even when translated successfully, it is not funny.

In Spain, children (and adults) have nicknames, often insulting, which, when established as nicknames, cease to be insults. As Manolito expresses in the first chapter: since he is Manolito Four-eyes, he doesn’t care if he is called Four-eyes. However, this is difficult to understand in other cultures, as expressed in this video by Joanna Hausmann:

This is not to say that there are not universal jokes or, rather, jokes that make people laugh all over the world, but you have to be careful when making jokes or telling jokes to people from other cultures, since sometimes we can be offending or even insulting without realizing it. It is safer to make jokes about yourself or your culture, especially if you are just starting to get to know someone and you still don’t have enough familiarity.

Cover illustration by Emilio Urberuaga.