ぜんぜん面白くない冗句
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It's Murphy's Law if you don't get the joke in Japanese
Monday, Jan. 23, 2012
By MARK SCHREIBER
Special to The Japan Times
If you miss the punch line to a Japanese joke, don't feel bad. It's simply unrealistic to use something as elusive as humor to measure your ability to understand a foreign language.
On the other hand, knowing what makes people laugh is a great incentive for language study.
Years ago, I found the lessons in my university's Japanese textbook rather dull, and set out to supplement them with more amusing materials.
I was reminded of those efforts last August, when I read the お悔やみ (okuyami, obituary) of veteran TV entertainer Takehiko Maeda (前田武彦), who had passed away at the age of 82.
I'd enjoyed a book by Maeda — long out of print, alas — titled 「毒舌教室」 ("Dokuzetsu Kyoshitsu," "Lessons in Poison-tongue [malicious language]"), published by Kobunsha in 1969.
Maeda's "lessons" were basically sarcastic jibes or insults aimed at people in different occupations. One I recall, directed at a yakitori (grilled chicken) shop operator, involved a customer complaining about the grisly texture of the skewered meat by inquiring, この鳥、餓死したのか (kono tori, gashi shita no ka? Did this chicken die from starvation?). To which the proprietor laconically retorted, いや、 コレラで... (iya, korera de..., no, [it died] of cholera ...).
Japanese, to their credit, do not like to be left out of a good gag. One of the most successful examples of marketing American humor here was the translation of Arthur Bloch's book, "Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong."
Murphy's Law postulates "If anything can go wrong, it will." It's said to have originated from an American engineer named Edward Murphy, who was working on deceleration research for the U.S. Air Force back in the early 1950s.
In Japanese, Murphy's Law is rendered as 失敗する可能性のあるものは、失敗する (Shippai suru kanōsei no aru mono wa, shippai suru, a thing with the possibility of failure will fail). While not a literal word-for-word rendering, this does a good job of conveying the meaning while retaining the brevity and irony of the original. By contrast, a well-known commentary to the law, マーフィーは楽天家だった (Māfī wa rakutenka datta, Murphy was an optimist), could be translated directly.
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