“Children always know when company is in the living room—they can hear their mother laughing at their father’s jokes.”  —Source unknown¹

One of the questions I get the most as a TV translator is, “Isn’t it hard to translate the jokes?” What they mean is, “Isn’t it hard to translate the jokes so that they’re still funny?”

And it is hard sometimes, of course. Humor doesn’t always translate across cultural lines or language lines. But over the course of my career, I’ve built up a system for myself to handle wordplay and such–I even made it one of the topics of my Translation Tricks panel at Anime Central this year, which I actually think was the topic the audience got the most engaged in. So although each case is different, and sometimes you do hit an impossible one, at least I’ve got a bag of tricks that I can try on a joke to try to carry the funny over. Most of the time it works out.

What are really difficult, at least for me, are the jokes that aren’t funny. Something you never think about until you actually become a translator: how do you translate a bad joke? A joke that’s sort of funny, but mostly lame? A joke that’s actually designed to fall flat? It’s incredibly challenging to walk that line between “this is a joke that tried to be funny and failed” and “this is a joke that is genuinely funny.” Because if the joke isn’t funny in the source language, but my translation is funny, to one degree or another my translation has failed. And if the whole point of the joke is its unfunniness, then I’ve failed completely.

So okay, then: the translation shouldn’t be funny. But in that case, how do I get across to the audience that the non-funny dialogue I just wrote is a joke? Somehow I have to encode a “should have been funny but wasn’t” signal into the dialogue without actually producing funniness. I have a few vague theories, but I’m still not quite satisfied with any of them. Often I second-guess myself: Will the audience really get that joke if it’s not funny? Will they think it was a funny joke that got translated unfunnily? Will they even be able to tell it’s a joke at all?

It’s times like this that make me realize how lucky I am to have grown up in a sporadically funny family. My father and many relatives on his side of the family seem to embrace the philosophy of “Tell all the jokes as they occur to you, just in case.” A joke never had to be a good joke to get told by my dad or my uncle. Funny jokes are the best, of course. Ideally the joke should be funny… but if it’s discernibly a joke, then funny or not, you might as well tell it. And often they got equal pleasure out of the horrible ones, and even tricked me through some sort of osmosis into doing the same. My mother and her siblings tell their own jokes, of course, but they don’t seem to take the same primal glee out of it, and they seem to value funniness as an essential component of joking. Even as a young child, it was pretty easy to discern the stupid jokes from the clever ones by whether or not Mom would laugh.

Now, as an adult, I’ve come to respect that sometimes the stupid jokes take their own brand of cleverness!

~~~~~¹Fun fact: in Japanese there’s a term specifically for jokes somebody’s dad would tell: oyaji gyagu, or “Dad joke.” It’s that particular brand of joke that only your dad or other men your dad’s age tell, but which they seem to universally love. My personal theory is that when you become a dad, you activate a special part of your brain that produces that specific flavor of humor. But even if you’re not a dad, if you’re like me, some small part of you secretly enjoys it.