Are Germans funny?

There's a great piece in the Guardian with a theory about why English-language comedy doesn't translate to German. To paraphrase briefly, it's largely a matter of sentence structure. The strict structure of German, and it's rigorous specificity, make it difficult to give sentences and language double-meanings and "reveals." The author describes how, when translating a show about standup comedy into German, his German partners wanted to transpose it into a theatrical, caberet context:

...this instinct to formalise a genre of comedy we accept as inherently informal is not indivisible from the limitations the German language imposes on conventional British comedy structures. The flexibility of the English language allows us to imagine that we are an inherently witty nation, when in fact we just have a vocabulary and a grammar that allow for endlessly amusing confusions of meanings.

There are also some great German jokes, like this one:

Tabea Rudolph, 26, Stuttgart

There are problems in the woods. The animals of the forest are always drunk, so the fox decides to ban alcohol. The following day, the fox spies a rabbit hanging out of a tree, clearly wasted. The fox ticks him off, and carries on his way. But the next day he sees the rabbit drunk again, and gives him a final warning. The next day, the fox does his rounds and there's no sign of the rabbit, but he notices a straw sticking out of a stream. Wondering what it is, the fox scoops it out, only to find a very drunk rabbit on the other end of it. "How many times do I have to tell you that animals of the forest aren't allowed alcohol?" says the Fox. "We fishes don't give a toss what the animals of the forest aren't allowed to do," says the rabbit.

Link

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