Wordplay thought over deeply in the context of language.

In the last blog post I talked about the play on words in America and Japan and concluded that people in Japan considered play on words to be lower-level compared to other “sophisticated” form of laughter. But I did not provide any reasoning behind it. I’d been wondering about it for a while, until I read something on the way back from Tokyo to Toronto when I went back to Japan over the Thanksgiving break. I picked up a Japanese newspaper and found an article about wordplay, written by a professor at a national university in Tokyo. He showed several examples where everyday conversation gets confusing because of heterographs, or two different words with two different meaning having the same sound. He gives an example as follows:

A housewife went to see a doctor and described her health problem. Right after her explanation, the doctor says, “That must because of KARE-.” The housewife likes KARE-, a kind of fish, and KARE- food, but wondered how the doctor knew about her preference. Her family laughed at her, saying, “That’s KARE-, as in getting old. ”

Japanese words “getting old,””Limanda yokohamae fish,” and “curry” are all pronounced the same. They are written differntly using chinese characters, which represent meaning, but their pronunciation is the same. This is nothing peculiar to the Japanese language. A good equivalent in English would be the words “write” and “right” having different meanings but sharing the same sound.

What’s so special about the heterographs in Japanese language then? The professor claims that the Japanese language has so many more heterographs than other tongues and thus has variety humor or wordplay using heterographs.

Getting hint from this article, I thought again about the tendency of Japanese people to consider wordplay as inferior. Because Japanese language has so many heterographs, which is caused by the limitation of the sound of Chinese characters, Japanese people considers wordplay to be lower-level, because they are so used to it in their daily lives. In other words, the word-play has to be pretty good to make people laugh. This seems to be a very good example of the influence that language has over the style of laughter.