Jan 17 2009
Hahaha
I’m sitting here watching Mexican comedians on TV. They’re actually pretty funny. I’m not quite understanding absolutely all of it but what I do get is good. I’m here in Los Alamos while my Jeep is getting a tire patched and I figured I would write up a quick post.
People have been telling me a lot of jokes recently. Mexican jokes. Some of them are pretty good. This one, for example.
A guy is driving down the road and another guy pulls him over and says, “Look, dude. You’ve got a flat tire!” The guy gets out of his car, looks and the tire, shrugs and says, “Yeah, but it’s only flat on the bottom.”
I’ve heard maybe four variations of this over the last few days.
Some of the jokes are…well, I’m not sure. Here.
Q: Why does a dog wag his tail?
A: Because the tail can’t wag the dog.
A thirteen year old told me that one. Maybe that explains it.
We tried to translate an English joke over. It went like this:
There was a captain of a pirate ship who had a weird idiosyncrasy. Before every battle he would have his first mate bring him a pair of red pants and he would put them on and go into battle. When one of the other pirates asked him why he did that he explained that it was so that if he got shot and was bleeding, his men wouldn’t be able to see the blood and they would keep fighting because they wouldn’t be afraid that their captain was dying. They all agreed this was very noble. Then one day the pirate ship came up against the English armada. The pirate captain looked at his first mate and said, “Bring me my brown pants.”
Obviously, some words such as ‘idiosyncrasy’ and ‘armada’ weren’t used in the translation. That joke fell kinda flat.
Then there was the joke I translated about the duck who went into a hardware store and asked for peanuts. That joke fell completely flat.
The best reaction I ever got to a joke was from a group of teenage boys and they laughed about it for days and days. They still bring it up, it went that well.
A guy had a girlfriend and would go to her house absolutely every single day. The girl’s dad was getting sick of the guy hanging around because he really was a good-for-nothing. So one afternoon he goes up to the kid and says, “Look. I’m kinda sick of you hanging around my house so I’m going to make a new rule. You can only come over on days that start with D.” (In Spanish that would be Sunday, ‘Domingo’.) That was Jueves (Thursday). The kid comes back the next day and the dad, exasperated says, “Look! I told you that you could only come over on days that start with ‘D’!!” The kid looks at him and says, “Oh. I thought it was Diernes. (Friday)”
Obviously, it works better in Spanish. The loved it! Laughed and laughed and laughed. Personally, I was only amused.
My absolute favorite Spanish joke is this one, told to me by the same group of guys who loved the ‘Diernes’ joke.
In Africa they invented a device that would detect thieves. When they put the device into place in China they caught 5,000 thieves in fifteen minutes. When they put the device into place in Canada they caught 8,000 thieves in fifteen minutes. When they put the device into place in Mexico within four minutes it had been stolen.
Once again, it looses a little bit in translation but that’s basically the gist. lol.
