Humour me

We got an assignment about David Mitchell's Soapbox from our last English lesson and I thought I should do it right away before I'll forget it. I have to admit that I have too many things in my head these days and it sometimes makes me absent-minded. Most of the time I'm just thinking about my thesis... How should I do it? What should I investigate? There are just too many options... On top of my absent-mindedness I'm also too busy. After lessons I'm unfortunately not going home to watch nice comedies. Just like almost any other student I'm going to work. (To be more specific I'm going to sell wine in one of Helsinki's finest shopping malls.) When it comes to language practicing, there is still one bright side in going to work instead of laying on the sofa at home. Since we have such a fine shopping mall we also have lots of fine tourists as our customers. I bet that I'll talk English with more than five customers this evening. And after ten o'clock, when I'm free I might as well watch English comedies at home.

I didn't know anything about David Mitchell's Soapbox before I saw it today in the class. Surprisingly, the Brittish humour in the show reminds me of Finnish humour. What could be better than laughing at yourself and your own bad habbits? What could be more Finnish than ignoring the other people in public transports? (Everyone talking to his own iphone of course.) We cannot say that we're the Great Finland but I think that the Finnish audience gets the sarcastic point of the first joke as well.

In the classroom, we were talking about the relationship between humour and culture. I've many friends from different countries and I've noticed there's a difference between European humour and Asian humour for example. How did I notice it then? Well, sometimes with my two Japanese friends I just thought they had no sense of humour. I mean, they were laughing a lot and I just stood there without any idea about what was so funny. On the other hand, when I was living in Brazil my Dutch friend once told me: "Do you know what I most miss in Europe?" "Sarcasm!", she told. And she was right. Brazilians, as lovely as they are, mostly did not understand sarcastic jokes. They thought we were just being mean or meaning literally what we said. If you travel in different countries you should be quite sensitive when making jokes. And not be too sensitive when they joke about you. It took some time to realize in Brazil that it's very common to call people by different nicknames. With very rude nicknames from the European point of view! If you're chubby in Brazil you can easily called 'gordinho' (which means 'little fat') or if you happen to have a big nose they are going to call you 'narizão' (the big nose'). Maybe it's just us Finns who are too concerned about the way we look like. In Brazil it didn't seem to be a tabu.