I usually understand a joke when first told to me.
Not normally, but I used to work for a Japanese company and sometimes their sense of humour passed me by until they went away chuckling.
I remember stuffing up a project one time and the boss came in to see me. He said, "If you ever do that again I will bring a ceremonial knife into this office and watch you ritually disembowel yourself." That was 25 years ago and I'm still trying to work out if he was joking.
No problem, Didge. You should have told your boss that you would select him as your kaishakunin, or second, whose ritual duty it would be to decapitate you immediately after you had disemboweled yourself.
Since the disembowelment would not be immediately fatal, your boss would be charged with murder under Australian law, so if your boss refused to act as your second, you would then know he was not really serious about his adherence to Bushido. On the other hand...
As I'm sure he would have told you, "This is all very compricated."
Well, of course it's "compricated"! You would take a ritual bath, put on a white robe, write a death poem , drink a ceremonial cup of sake, all before you could even start with the disembowelment!
No one said it was simple.
Here's a poem for the ceremony:
The boss said, in tones dark and dreary:
"This time, Didge, you DO hara-kiri!"
But the boss hadn't reckoned
Being named Didge's second,
And QUICKLY tossed Bushido theory.
Oh, very apt.
No, because I often am the one telling the joke.
Well several times it can take some time for me to get a joke.
I would prefer a third answer: yes and no!
Normally not, but in case of very foul, insulting jokes, I cannot laugh, and there might also be a different sense of humour in other languages and cultures.
⭐ Click here to see the recent version of this page ⭐