In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1974 [1905]), Freud analyzes three laughter situations: der Witz (often translated "jokes" or "joking"), "the comic," and "humor".
J.D. Considine of Entertainment Weekly gave the album a "B" rating and felt that, while many comedians are unable to translate jokes onto CD, "Yankovic's jokes are eminently listenable".
During one of his sets at Bonnaroo, he spotted an interpreter in front of the stage, charged with translating his jokes into sign language.
But the game is also excellent at translating silly jokes, with one heavy meat dish being referred to as a "portal to the Meat Dimension".
There are bus loads of older people, cool Hollywood types, groups of high school students visiting Los Angeles and Russians from the nearby Fairfax area who loudly translate the jokes, some of them crude, for one another.
Materialist appetite and social sophistication meet in the gallery's selection of inro, carved lacquer containers meant to be suspended from a man's belt, and in the ivory or wooden toggles known as netsuke, which translate folktales, jokes and historical references into precious, pocket-size sculptures.
(Smilovici translated the jokes for me).
He gives a neat example of how translator Anthea Bell uses particularly English idioms to translate a joke in an Asterix speech bubble; and some of us may fondly call to mind Captain Haddock's "Blistering barnacles!", transferring to a different letter the alliteration of the milliards de mille sabords in Hergé's text.
"The received wisdom that you can never translate a joke is worth examining a bit more closely," Bellos told me.
