Humour does not translate — why different cultures laugh at different things

Humour says a great deal about people, even more than politics or history.

Only when you live between two cultures do you realise how much humour differs from country to country. What is completely normal and funny to one people can be strange or incomprehensible to another.

Balkan humour is often loud, spontaneous, emotional, full of irony, and sometimes even dark. We tell our stories through humour, we laugh at difficult things, and sometimes it is precisely through a joke that we survive what is not easy (just think of the laughter at funerals). Perhaps that is exactly why the audience at our performances reacts so strongly — it understands the nuances without any explanation.

A single sentence, a single look, or the way an actor delivers a line is enough for the whole hall to explode with laughter.

That is hard to translate — our humour is not just text. It comes from a mentality, from experience, and from shared references.

I also find it fascinating how much humour connects people in the diaspora. At our events I often see people meeting for the very first time who, only a few minutes later, are talking as if they have known each other for years. I think that is because humour tears down the distance immediately.

That is why I believe good comedies have a special value in the diaspora — not only because they make us laugh, but because they briefly return us to that feeling of closeness of ours.

— Evica