What Funny Talks Reveal about Japanese Culture and Language

Abstract

For the last 10 years, the author has collected funny talks roughly two to three minutes in length, made by various Japanese speakers. One point that has been made clear by these talks is the fact that people’s funny talks show cultural and linguistic differences that surpass the differences among individuals. This paper shows the following two features of Japanese culture and language from two aspects of content and manner of funny talks: (i) Japanese people tend to narrate their own funny experiences much more than ready-made jokes and anecdotes; (ii) Japanese people are lenient about disfluency. They even allow for a “pause/prolongation + continuation” type of disfluency within a single morpheme. These two features are not independent of but interconnected with each other by the nature of spoken language.