4. THE INTERCULTURAL HUMOR: WHY LAUGHING IS GLOBAL

In this chapter are contained the most interesting and fascinating aspects of this study; namely the reason why humour is hardly understood among people of different cultures, because as we know is difficult to German people to laugh at a joke told by an Italian and vice versa.
If we flip through the pages of a whatever encyclopedia, we will find at the word ‘ intercultural communication’ this definition: “ a form of dialogue among different cultures. Individually, it offers the likelihood to extend our own cultural baggage through the knowledge of traditions, usages and customs different from those proper of the society we usually live in.“

But a logic consequence, which usually occurs, is that the subjects committed in the communication may not understand each other and may not realize such misunderstanding, until they run into a failed comprehension. Indeed what Delia Chiaro claims is that “the concept of what people find funny seems surrounded by linguistic, geographical, sociocultural and personal barriers.”

In order to understand humour, an interlocutor should know, besides the grammar structures of a language, also the sociocultural ones implied in the humorous text...

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