Britons fail to understand German humour

The Guardian looks into the belief widely held in Britain that the Germans have no sense of humour, and finds that German humour exists, but the British fail to recognise it: "The trouble with joking in German, the comedian Stewart Lee explained in the Guardian a couple of years ago, is the grammar. It is hard to set up a punchline when you have to put the subject of the sentence near the start - and anyway, big, clunky compound nouns don't lend themselves to the sort of double meanings that fuel British humour. If the theory is right then Germans don't lack wit, just the sort of wit that sounds good in English. That hasn't stopped generations of British writers from claiming Germans are humourless. ... But German humour is out there. The point is that the British don't get it."

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