Humour, from a deaf point of view.

Now, It may come as a surprise to some of you dear readers, but I'm not just a guy who writes rubbish reviews every week, I'm also a student.

My field of choice is British sign language and deaf culture. So from time to time you may see me put down my reviewers hat and talk for awhile about my understanding of the deaf community. that's what I'm going to do today.

For a hearing person it is easy to forget that deafness is not just a disability. To a deaf person being deaf is like being a different ethnicity, complete with its own culture, beliefs and community. To a hearing person the deaf community is like an alien culture and can be just as hard to understand.

But by looking at how the deaf community handles one of the most universal aspects of the human condition, the need to laugh and be entertained, I'm hoping I can give you, dear readers, a little understanding into the experiences of the deaf community.

Deaf humour is very different to hearing humour. In a hearing world humour is based on manipulation of words. Regardless of the way comedians structure their act it almost always follows a straight set up, punch line format ending with a pun or play on words.

Deaf humour tends to be different, the humour tends to arrive from visual approach to telling the joke, this makes it hard to translate into spoken or written word as the facial expressions and body language is lost when translated. That's not to say however there are not deaf “jokes” but they are not nearly as prevalent as hearing jokes.

Deaf jokes tend to end with a deaf person succeeding or winning because of their deafness, not in spite of it. Deaf individuals are proud of their deaf identity and the most popular jokes within the deaf community tend to show why the deaf person is better than a hearing person.

The vast majority of deaf humour however is visual in nature reflecting the way a deaf individual sees the world, unlike a hearing person who spends their whole life listening to the sound of the world a deaf individual will watch everything around them noticing humour where a hearing person does not. To a deaf audience a scene in a film completely devoid of humour could have them laughing hysterically. While the musical cues and screams of the victim in a horror film might chill a hearing audience to the bone, to a deaf audience the overacting and facial expressions could very well be hysterical

Unlike spoken word, deaf humour is a collective rather than competitive form of entertainment In signed communication as a story is retold it gathers flourishes from the people who sign it, each refining or manipulating the signs until the story becomes a collaboration of the group rather than a single persons anecdote. In this way a story can become funny because of the way the group has decided to sign it, rather than its content:

Deaf humour shows us just how strong the deaf community is. The very style of humour they enjoy is defined by a close communal way of story telling. Deaf stand up comedians are very rare, not because deaf people are not funny, but because deaf humour works better when group of friends tell each other storeys in a close and intimate way. In hearing comedy a person can not laugh at their own jokes without stopping the narrative flow, but when signing laughing does not stop you being able to sign and this allows even the person telling the story to enjoy its humour.

I'll end this now, with a few examples of deaf jokes for you enjoyment. 

A deaf couple check into a motel. They retire early. In the middle of the night, the wife wakes her husband complaining of a headache and asks him to go to the car and get some aspirin from the glove compartment. Groggy with sleep, he struggles to get up, puts on his robe, and goes out of the room to his car. He finds the aspirin, and with the bottle in hand he turns toward the motel. But he cannot remember which room is his. After thinking a moment, he returns to the car, places his hand on the horn, holds it down, and waits. Very quickly the motel rooms light up, all but one. It's his wife's room, of course. He locks up his car and heads toward the room without a light.

After observing a Deaf person in a public place, a hearing man decided to approach him and find out if Deaf people are literate. He wrote "Can you read?" and handed the note to the deaf person. Disgusted with this kind of ignorance, the Deaf person wrote back, "No. Can you write?"

Two deaf men are signing to each other.
The first man asks, "What did your wife say when you got home late last night?
The second man replies, "She swore like crazy!"
And the first man asks, "What did you do then?"
And the second man replies, "I turned out the light."