Tales of Juha Part III

Up until part three of Tales of Juha I found all of the humor quite relatable and surprisingly, I really wasn’t getting caught up in any cultural barriers. For some reason, I felt as though cultural barriers were present in much of the third section. This section was full of stories about donkeys, corrupt judges who openly take bribes, and tyrannical leaders. Not exactly the easiest topics to relate to. That’s not to say that none of the stories were funny or enjoyable, but I found a majority of them much harder to relate to everyday American life than the stories in the previous two sections.

I don’t think the presence of cultural barriers makes the stories any less entertaining, in fact, I found myself more actively reading because I was constantly trying to figure out what was going on and relate it to my everyday life. However, the cultural barriers did keep a majority of the stories from being truly funny. Not many of these stories resonated with me at all and I just wasn’t able to relate with them. This inability to relate is what I believe kept me from finding many of these stories the belly laugh type of funny that was present in the first two sections. If anything, many of these stories were a “haha I have a feeling that was supposed to be funny but have no idea what you mean but I’m going to laugh anyways so that I don’t feel awkward/courtesy laugh” kind of way. One of the sections that I had particularly high hopes for and that I was quite disappointed by was “Boastfulness and False Pride.” I was imagining what an American version of this section might include and since America is full of boastfulness and false pride, the possibilities were endless.  Not to ridicule these stories, I found most of them at least entertaining, but the section was definitely not filled to the brim with belly laughs like I was expecting. Maybe this was because Arabic culture isn’t consumed by false pride and boastfulness like American culture is? Since my conversation partner is from Saudi Arabia, this is definitely something I intend to ask him about in one of our meetings this week.

The one story that I did find extremely funny and relatable in the False Pride section was the one where Juha’s friend told him he was going to interrupt him with a nice “ahem” every time that he caught him exaggerating. I found this story relatable because I have a good friend who everyone knows is a huge exaggerator. After we all got to know him well, a few of us in the group began calling him out every time that we caught him exaggerating. It got to the point where he couldn’t get through the first few sentences of a story without getting interrupted. I also found the story where Juha’s friend interjects with the true story before Juha can even begin exaggerating funny and relatable for many of the same reasons.

In many of the blogs so far and in class, people have associated relatable with funny and I couldn’t agree more. Tales of Juha has really made me think about relatability in regards to humor.  I had never really thought of the correlation before, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that being relatable is a requirement for something to be funny. We find comedians funny who discuss things that we can relate to, we find crazy pet videos funny because we all either have pets or know people who do and we can relate to these situations, and we find America’s Funniest Home Videos funny because we have all had things like that happen to us or they are realistic enough that we could see them happening to us.

This is why humor rarely transcends cultural boundaries. Cultures are so different that it is nearly impossible for people from different cultures to be able to relate to each other and their daily activities. Because of such extreme cultural differences, it is shocking that Tales of Juha is able to transcend cultural boundaries (at least for the first two sections) as well as it does.