A Comparison of Taiwanese and Japanese Appreciation of English Jokes

Abstract

As shown in their languages, Japanese society is more hierarchical than Taiwanese society. A more hierarchical society produces less humorous people (Lin,1976; Abe, 1995). This study compares Taiwanese and Japanese appreciation of otherversus_x000D_ self-deprecating jokes according to 200 Japanese and Taiwanese university students’ evaluation on a seven-point Likert scale—1 for ‘extremely dry’ and 7 for‘extremely interesting’—to 11 English jokes._x000D_ After gathering data from more than 500 students, we discarded those who are relations of lawyers, then divided the rest into four piles—Japanese male, Japanese female, Taiwanese male and Taiwanese female—shuffled them and used the first 50 sets of responses from each pile for this study. Two-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) together with post-hoc Scheffe’s test found that ethnicity plays a more significant role than gender in different appreciation of both self- and_x000D_ other-deprecating jokes. In three jokes, Japanese and Taiwanese appreciation levels are not significantly different. In the other eight jokes, Taiwanese appreciate them more than Japanese. Taiwanese are more eager than Japanese to understand an incomprehensible joke; in both nations females are significantly more eager than_x000D_ males. Verbal jokes please Japanese less than Taiwanese.