Back in 2019, I went through a bit of a phase, posting a flurry of answers on Quora. The following is one of my favourite posts, the most popular, in terms of readers and upvotes, of any answer I wrote.
It made me laugh when I wrote it and it still makes me laugh reading it now. It’s a little bit about cultural similarities and differences and a little bit about deadpan humour, my favourite form.
And the punch line has a touch of the paraprosdokian about it. (For a definition of that term, watch any video of comedian Stephen Wright.)
Here it is.
What similarities have you noticed between Kiwis and Aussies?
I believe that Kiwis and Aussies generally share the same sort of humour i.e. find the same things funny.
I spent several years in the US in the 90s – at a college where there were a handful of Australians and New Zealanders – and noticed that the average American did not recognise humour in the same way as Aussies or Kiwis did.
Things will have changed, but in my experience (and probably due to my personal preference for situational deadpan humour), when I was with Antipodeans I didn’t need to preface my attempts at humour with “this is a joke”.
However, with many of my American friends, they would say “was that a joke?” and I would have to explain myself.
Or – and this amused me – “are you being sarcastic?”
Again, things will have changed, but I found that Americans tended to misconstrue a lot of Antipodean humour as sarcasm, assuming that it was an attempt to convey contempt.
Aussies and Kiwis generally tend to like “having a go” at one another, with playful banter or biting wit that can possibly be mistaken by outsiders as hurtful insult. But, then again, that may have just been my group of friends at that place and time, and our observers.
However, this happened a couple of weeks ago. A friend in the US posted a meme showing a road “2000 years old, built by The Romans”, still going strong. On the other side of the picture was a road with potholes, “6 years old, built by the Indiana Dept of Transportation”.
(There seem to be quite a few memes about Indiana highways. I understand that The Brickyard is the only 2.5 mile stretch of road anywhere in Indiana that doesn’t have potholes.)
Anyway, so I wrote a reply saying:
“And look where the Romans are now… They spent too much resource on building roads, not enough on continuing to exist.”
To which an (American) friend of my friend – I didn’t know him – wrote in response: “You have no knowledge of history.”
I thought he was being sarcastic.
No, just joking. I laughed so hard at that response that I dropped my copy of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter Scheidel (an interesting book, worth reading; however, it does get a bit repetitive with its references to the Gini coefficient), and I momentarily lost the page I was on.
If any of my Australian or New Zealand friends had read my post, they will have known I was being facetious. In fact, I don’t even think they would have to know me to know that that was a joke.
Australians and New Zealanders share the same sort of humour, and sometimes observers will misunderstand them because of it.
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