John Hadfield, an anatomy specialist at Cambridge University, England, is purported to have said that, although we know a great deal about the biology of anger, depression, sadness and aggression, our knowledge of laughter is limited. Why do we laugh at a public speaker who, at the most pathetic moment of his address, sneezes (Bergson, 1956; 93)?
Bearing in mind fate chooses who we are and the language we begin to speak at our mother's breast, we can ask in what fashion does our language shape the way we think and the jokes we laugh at? That question has been asked many times (Bloom, 1981; 1). Does the fact that English is alphabetical and Chinese is composed of characters, made up of pictograms and ideograms, have anything to do with the shaping of senses of humour? When bilingual speakers of two linguistically unrelated languages are asked whether they think differently (and employ different body language), when using each of the two languages, they usually answer 'yes'. When English speakers with considerable experience with monolingual speakers of non-Indo-European languages are asked whether it is their impression that speakers of a non-Indo-European language think differently from the way they themselves think, as a result of the language, again the person questioned usually answers 'yes'. Yet when translators of works drawn from literary traditions are asked the same question they may find it hard to suppress a smile at so 'naive' a question. In turn psychologists, in answer to the same question, are just as likely to answer 'no' (Bloom, 1981; 1 and 2). Readers who wish to pursue this subject further should perhaps start by reading 'If Triangles Were Circles...' A Study of Counterfactuals in Chinese and in English, by Cynthia Hsin-feng Wu. Although intriguing, it is not really the subject of this paper although it is related to it. In this paper it is necessary to ‘narrow the field.'
Leading on from there, perhaps because humour itself is a rather nebulous subject, there appears to have been limited study (certainly in English) of the serious business of comparing senses of humour of different nationalities. When friends heard the author was researching a paper about humour their first reaction was: 'It's not an easy subject to write about.' Although there is the odd Chinese joke-book (Giles, 1925: Preface), and Chinese jokes do appear on the Internet, the author was unable to find much material comparing Chinese and Western humour.2 As a result, he decided to research and write his own paper.