A solid 30% of posts in my feed are German memes. I don’t understand the language, but I love the memes that I can’t read.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you could read them, you’d realize they’re all just the same banal pun.

    The Germans have one sense of humor, spread across the entire nation.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I bet they’re pretty efficient at making sure the German Sense Of Humour is properly distributed and every German gets allocated some of it at least some of the time.

      • amio@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I guess there just wasn’t much to go around, nationally speaking. (Henning Wehn does crack my shit up sometimes though, to be fair)

    • amio@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Did they finally get over the “Stör” thing? Because after two straight weeks of that shit, I just blocked whatever “me irl” was in German.

      German humor, it’s no laughing matter.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In all seriousness, the notion that Germans lack humor stems from the times when English and American people last got in contact with Germans in larger numbers: In and after WW2. Allied propaganda did paint the Germans as humorless (because they can’t be totally evil if they still have humor), and after the war, living in Germany was not exactly fun.

    In reality, Germans have a lot of humor, its style being similar to the British, but a lot of it is hard to translate or is based on experiences that non-Germans don’t share, like old German TV shows.

    • aidan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think the stereotype also comes from Germans often not catching onto sarcasm in English

        • aidan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It can be, but 90% of the people I interact with are non-native English speakers and it definitely feels a bit more common for Germans fluent in English to be bad at getting jokes.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      Ha ha ja just the other day Hanz made a funny joke he was going to arrive at 13:00 for his 13:00 meeting. We all laughed so hard. Naturlich he was perfectly on time arriving at 12:45, but we still laugh about it. When the meeting started he mentioned it and everyone was laughing and laughing for a good 30 sekunden or even a minute.

      That Hanz, such a jokester. And people say the German have no humor, ha that is a joke!

  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It does annoy me that the Devs built in a system to let you set languages but everyone just sets it to ‘duhhhhh I don’t know what language I’m speaking?!’

    But yeah I do like looking at the silly German words on pictures

      • megane-kun@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        A handful of months ago, I tried to actively use that post/comment language selector. However I ended up giving up because for some reason, only English is accepted. The other choices just resulted in the loading ring spinning forever and ever and my comment/post never being coming through.

        • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          maybe the community you were trying to post to has some kind of restriction regarding that setting? I’m not sure why someone would do that and whether it’s even possible in the first place but I know the UI is not reporting errors to the users in a lot of places. I also remember playing with that setting a bit and realizing it’s more of a nuisance than actually useful.

          • megane-kun@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            My guess at that time is that it was an instance setting or something. That instances have a list of languages it supports. It makes sense given the admins have to be able to read and understand the posts in order to do their job responding to reports and whatnot.

            But then again this was mid-June, there’s a lot of things happening, and I didn’t really explore the issue further, hoping that it’d be fixed eventually (once the more urgent issues got addressed).

            I actually set-up my account to have a shortlist of languages to use (English, my native language, and a few languages I dabble on).

            Come to think of it, I only see the language setting in the desktop/web interface. The mobile app that I am using doesn’t have it.

    • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Tell us you’ve never been married without telling us you’ve never been married.

    • Chetzemoka@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      We have a frequent flyer patient at our hospital who has aphasia, a brain condition which causes nonsense words to come out instead of what the person was intending to say.

      We have a NO idea what this person is saying, but his tone of voice and delivery are completely normal even though the content of the words are meaningless. So I can confirm, this guy cracks jokes and is hilarious (he laughs at his own jokes and you can’t help but laugh with him.)

      The German memes feel similar. I don’t understand the words, but the intent is clear enough for me to enjoy seeing them.

  • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When i was in university, a now fairly famous german comedian did a set. He comes on stage looking stern and unamused and tells us the comedy is starting now as he begins a timer on a stopwatch.

    His first joke proper was "some people say we getmans dont have a sense of humour… well i dont think that’s very funny. "

    I knew i was going to love that set immediately.

  • FollyDolly@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I keep clicking on those memes and laughing, and then having no idea why it was funny in the first place.