When we read through humorous stories like Candide, we might have a chuckle or two at minor jabs towards ideas, people, and the like, but there's often a few things that might go unnoticed such as the careful euphemism describing rather close interpersonal connections between one Dr. Pangloss and one chambermaid. This is not a phenomenon exclusive to this passage either; chances are that we've missed a couple hundred punchlines (at the very least) in our lives, but we'll never realize that we've missed them. It's kept me up at night a few times, and I think this passage from Candide helps to demonstrate a few reasons why we might not realize why something is funny.
1. We don't understand the social or historical context.
Especially while reading older books like Candide, I've found myself confused at times by the social hierarchies and the cultural references thrown around throughout the book. While I've certainly tried my best to do enough Googling to understand some of the more explicit references, there's a solid chance that I have missed a couple that were more subtle. Even if we're able to get a decent sense of the cultural norms that lead to a joke, there's still a large difference in one's internal sense of that joke. One is a natural link to that reference, whereas the other is an artificially crafted relationship set up by Google (and hopefully not by Bing — or honestly, I doubt Bing could set up that relationship anyway).
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| Some jokes, however, seem to survive the test of time. |
2. We just don't understand the wording.
This point kind of relates back to point 1. When we're caught up in understanding English in a form we're not exposed to on a regular basis with our peers (basically anything written before maybe 1950? I'm not too sure), we spend a lot more time trying to parse out basic meaning, rather than attempting to find deeper meaning that is required to discover hidden humor. I found this to be a pretty common theme in satirical texts I've had to read in English classes: I'm so caught up in trying to understand the text that I completely misread the piece and forget or don't notice that it's supposed to be satirical. Kind of embarrassing. This theme extends to truly foreign languages as well. Studies have shown that we're more objective when thinking or understanding things in other languages, likely due to the fact that we're more focused on trying to understand the basic meaning of phrases rather than underlying ideas.
Candide, of course, is an originally French novel. When we read it in English class, we're reading scholars' interpretation of the original French, which not only introduces subjective biases but also hinders signals to the reader. For instance, Dr. Pangloss is giving the chambermaid "une leçon de physique expérimentale," which readers would then understand as also being a lesson in experimental physics, rather than solely the lesson in experimental philosophy that many English translations denote. Although a slight change, this variation helps readers better pick up on slight euphemisms and jokes, making a translated version less true regarding humor. It's certainly possible, but translating word play is often a completely different league of its own.
When I spoke with my friend from France, he noted that in his school, they never even read originally English novels in French class. Although a large reason was that they had a large enough canon of literature, another large reason was they realized the inherent problem with literature losing meaning during translation.
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| Pun in one language, relatively normal sentence in another. This pattern can be generalized to a ton of languages. |
3. We're not in the right headspace to expect humor.
The previous point is kind of a version of this point. When we read older novels, sometimes we might unknowingly expect there to be no humor as if people from centuries before us are incapable of laughing (I mean, the idea of monarchs laughing seems almost implausible). But obviously people born before the year 2003 also had their own jokes, and some inevitably trickled their way into literature, leading to a situation in which we might miss jokes simply because we don't expect there to be any.
As a broader description of this point, when we don't expect jokes to appear in the texts we read, we might miss out on even the plainest of jokes. If suddenly the front page of the New York Times was a satirical piece, I'd be certain that more than a few people would share on Facebook that "scientists unanimously agree that people on Facebook are the most gullible."
Overall, there's countless reasons why we miss these jokes, often never even standing a chance at understanding them (hence why this post includes "before it arrives"). For instance, some neurodivergent people have told that they have significantly more trouble understanding sarcasm compared with neurotypicals (not all neurodivergent people though!). It's always good to be mindful that our humor can be missed by people, especially on the Internet.
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