Cold Jokes and Their Origins
"The phonological basis of Japanese cold jokes is that Japanese has no tonal system and thus an abundance of homophones."
Jilin University is a notable institution in Northeast Asian studies. Once, reading a paper in the university’s social science journal, I came across an essay on the phenomenon of dajareh (cold jokes/puns) in Japanese, which argued that the phonological basis of Japanese cold jokes is that Japanese has no tonal system and thus an abundance of homophones. Wu Chinese has anywhere from eight to ten tones; even so, tone-based cold jokes are quite prevalent. The Xiaolin Guangji (Forest of Laughter) was written in Wu dialect, and my cold-joke education came from Qian Zhongshu of Wuxi and Han Han of Shanghai. Compared with northern-style stand-up comedy, the Shanghai-style qingkou / huaji-xi also features far more punning jokes—Zhou Bochun’s Thirteen People Playing Mahjong, for instance.
Kant said that the comic consists in the vast disparity between expectation and outcome. In fact, brain-teaser cold jokes do exactly that: they set up a typical life scenario, guide the listener toward an obvious conclusion, and then reveal the surprise. Rakugo too is long and winding, all preamble, until the final punch line falls lightly into place.
The essence of punning cold jokes lies in the asymmetry of mastery between speaker and listener over the phonetic inventory of a language. It is hard to say whether Mandarin creates a foundation for this or narrows the gap. Jokes that “require two languages to understand” are an extension of wordplay, built on different languages rather than different words, so they equally satisfy the gap rule. Taking Li Juan for Juan is just a chuckle, but the near-homophony of scheiße (German) with the Chinese sha yi si (“what’s the meaning”) is more startling.
Perhaps writing systems also play a role, since it is harder for people to link logographic characters to sounds than it is with phonetic scripts. The German egal wie joke can only be understood if you know the spelling; by contrast, the English whatever joke is comparatively weaker. Japanese completely separates the writing system from the phonetic system, producing a rare and widespread scale of phonetic wordplay. For example: Panda = panda = pan-da = “it’s bread.”
Contemporary scholars study dialectology using Middle Chinese as the baseline. If, like me, one mistakenly uses Mandarin as the baseline for identifying phonological features of dialects, errors are inevitable. But is it even scientific to use Middle Chinese reconstructions as a standard? It is certainly not correct to use Mandarin as a basis. Perhaps the right approach is to abandon a baseline pronunciation altogether and study each dialect’s phonetics directly.