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.
one of my fav light bulb jokes…
how many germans does it take to change a lightbulb?
one because they are efficient and without humor.
Thanks to you, I have overdrawn my Tageslachkontingent and will either have to compensate by laughing less tomorrow or filling out a Tageslachkontingenterhöhungsantrag.
Yeah, funny story:
I work for the government and once during an inspection they noticed that a light on the roof our building needed to be replaced.
What should be a 5 minute task took many months. Why? Safety rules state that only roofers are allowed to enter the roof, but only electricians are allowed to work on anything that has to do with electricity which includes changing a light bulb. So we had to wait a couple of months for one of the electricians to get certified as a person that can enter the roof.
Last winter, in order to protect the dwindling completely full strategic gas reserves, the government issued an order for all govenment-owned office buildings to limit the central heating to no more than 19° C because that seemed to be the most pointlessly bureaucratic solution at the time.
This included buildings that don’t even use gas for heating. Remote heat? Geothermal heat? Free waste heat that you have to actively vent to the atmosphere in order to lower the room temperature? Yep, all required to not exceed 19° C. The building I worked in at the time (for a company that rented some excess floor space) actually wasted energy adhering to this well thought-out rule.
So yeah, I’d say that in order to change a lightbulb you need at least 1000 Germans. You need both chambers of parliament to create and pass a new ordinance that applies specifically to this lightbulb (and several other contexts it has no business applying to but does because it’s too vaguely worded). Then you need at least three different expert panels to advise the government, regulatory agencies to make sure the ordinance is adhered to, licensed trainers to make sure the people executing the job are formally certified to do so… Actually, we might have to get the European Parliament involved; the new ordinance might benefit from being propoted to a European standard.
I’ll get back to you about this in about three to five years; we need to get this figured out.
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.
Okay but the “nett hier” joke only get better the more it is repeated, I enjoy every time it shows up
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.
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.
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.
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!
I think the stereotype also comes from Germans often not catching onto sarcasm in English
Which is a pitfall for anyone conversing in a language that isn’t their first, I’d say.
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.
Thanks for reminding me I could use Google Lens to translate the German Memes.
According to that this joke goes: My Dad asked me if I have a favorite fruit. I told him “Papa, ja!” Literally “dad, yes!” But also pun for “papaya,” a tropical fruit.
A+, good joke and not too bad to translate.
I have no idea what’s going on here, but I’m just imagining this is what happens after the 2nd frame:
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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
It would probably get used more if there was some way to set a default for your own posts.
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.
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.
