So there are actually some German wartime jokes that are actually quite funny. Here’s some that I heard:
" Where I live there’s now a lot of warehouses, there were houses and there were houses, and there were houses!"
“How can you tell an optimist from a pessimist? The optimist is learning English and the pessimist is learning Russian.”
One day at the barracks there was a soldier on his knees looking around the ground, picking up random papers he found and going “no, no that’s not it”. His officer asked what he was doing, “I’m looking for my special paper”. He sent him to the doctor and he was declared insane, when the doctor gave him his discharge papers he explained “ah, there’s my special paper!”
It’s just a coincidence that the same words are homonyms in English and German in this case: “Warehouses” = “Warenhäuser”, “There were houses” = “Dort waren Häuser”.
You don’t even have to translate to colloquial German as the other comment suggests, a word-by-word translation works here.
So there are actually some German wartime jokes that are actually quite funny. Here’s some that I heard:
How would a German joke work based on english homonyms?
English and German derive from a common root language, so I’d honestly be surprised if there weren’t some that do.
It’s just a coincidence that the same words are homonyms in English and German in this case: “Warehouses” = “Warenhäuser”, “There were houses” = “Dort waren Häuser”. You don’t even have to translate to colloquial German as the other comment suggests, a word-by-word translation works here.
So I went and googled it out of curiosity, after remembering that German for was/were (in some form anyway) is ‘war’.
I found this in a thread about Downfall and a translated joke where someone was wondering what the original was:
hm thanks
these are wunderbar