J-List is a wonderful toybox of things from Japan - come see
Every time you don't click over to J-List, God kills a kitten

The personal log of Peter Payne, owner of JLIST.com, the home of "wacky things from Japan"

Friday, November 21, 2008

My Knock Knock Joke Reconsideration

What if you met a Japanese person who went around telling "knock knock" jokes in English all the time? It would be pretty strange, I'd wager, and you might not know what to make of them. But that's essentially what I do in Japanese: making wry Japanese jokes called dajare (da-jah-reh), although in my family we call them dadajare, since I'm the Dad. As a strange side-effect of learning Japanese, my brain has developed the subconscious ability to come up with strange jokes whenever I hear a word or phrase that acts as a trigger, quite unrelated to what I'm thinking about at the time, and when the family does something together they know I'll probably be making little puns until they're groaning for me to stop. For example, one way to say "I don't have it" or "there aren't any" in Japanese is nashi, which also happens to be what those delicious Japanese pears are called, so naturally I might reply "Japanese pear" if my wife asks me if I have her car keys. In Japanese, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is called Pisa no Shato, and since the final word sounds like the French word for castle, I might make a bad joke about how I've always wanted to go see the famous Chateau di Pisa. The other day I was watching TV and needed to switch the sound from Japanese to English, and as I looked around for the remote control, my wife asked me what I was searching for. The Japanese word for "sound" is onsei (OWN-sei), which my brain told me is similar to the word for "eleven" in Spanish (once). So I said, "I'll give you a hint," and proceeded to count from one to ten in Spanish. The next number was eleven, and suddenly everyone knew that I was looking for the remote control so I could change the sound on the TV. For some reason, telling dajare jokes is the domain of middle-aged men in Japan.

6 Comments:

Blogger Peter in Japan said...

The jokes in this image, by the way, are: (pink) Deka ga dekasegi "The detective left home to work to earn money" (red) Futon ga futtonda "The futon blew away in the wind" (blue) Bokushi ga bokushingu "The priest is boxing" (yellow) Neko ga nekonda "the cat lay down." One famous joke I found while writing this was, when you're done eating steak you say 甘かった (umakatta) which is "it was delicious" but it sound like 馬勝った "the horse won [the competition]." So you then add on うしまけた "the cow lost [the competition]" (and therefore I'm eating it now).

10:16 AM

 
Blogger David said...

I have to stifle these urges myself. But you gotta figure that it's really irritating to other people -- I think the knock-knock joke analogy is spot-on.

In keeping with the toilet theme of the other post, I assume you also say "良いトイレ”(行っておいで)to someone who is leaving to head for the rest room?

10:27 AM

 
Blogger Peter in Japan said...

Ah, 行っトイレ would have been a great one to include! D'oh!

12:37 PM

 
Blogger Peter in Japan said...

When Spirited Away was popular (in Japanese, 千と千尋の神隠し) was popular, I went to a coffee shop. I got "1000 yen and 50 yen" (千と五十円) back from the cashier, so I said 千と五十円の神隠し, and busted her up laughing terrible.

12:39 PM

 
Blogger chris said...

I know there are PLENTY of times when
your kids pretend they don't know you
at family outings,lol. But,why did you have to switch the language over to English on the tube?

8:15 PM

 
Blogger chris said...

I know there are PLENTY of times when
your kids pretend they don't know you
at family outings,lol. But,why did you have to switch the language over to English on the tube?

8:16 PM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

 


,