For all your horizontal Sundays, I recommend using babelfish1 to translate sentences from English into Russian, and back to English again.
I was looking for sofa-thrills, kicks with my feet up, but instead of being dim for an afternoon I was accidentally bright. Yes, I think I've cracked the humour code behind Anchor Man.
Lets take my first example:
Lets take my first example:
“The human torch was denied a bank loan.”
At face value, this line seems funny simply because it's bizarre.
Yet the (translated) Russian version - equally, if not more ludicrous - (“It refused the bank loan to human torch”) is just a write-off, it's not funny.
Why is this so?
Well, after probing around in the linguistic never-never lands, I say that the original line is amusing because it creates a site of friction: it masquerades as a plausible sentence - grammatically sound, fluid, it rolls from the tongue to the teeth and out – whilst truly being garbage, nonsense. There is a tension between the structure and the content of the line that we register subconsciously; we recognise the patterns and the word order (subject, verb, object) and we approve wholeheartedly (“Yes” says our grammatical competence, “here is a well-formed sentence” ), and then we realised we've been tricked.
Inversely, the Russian equivalent is humourless because it already sounds like junk, even before we take the words and link them up with meanings. We immediately discard it because it's not dynamic.
Hence:
“The arsonist had oddly shaped feet”
(raucous laugher)
“Incendiary strangely formed feet.”
(tumble-weed).
1 http://babelfish.altavista.com/
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