A solid 30% of posts in my feed are German memes. I don’t understand the language, but I love the memes that I can’t read.

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
    1011·
    1 year ago

    one of my fav light bulb jokes…

    how many germans does it take to change a lightbulb?

    one because they are efficient and without humor.

      • AGuyAcrossTheInternet@kbin.social
        25·
        1 year ago

        Thanks to you, I have overdrawn my Tageslachkontingent and will either have to compensate by laughing less tomorrow or filling out a Tageslachkontingenterhöhungsantrag.

        • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
          12·
          1 year ago

          Bevor sie ihren Tageslachkontingenterhöhungsantrag abgeben können müssen sie mit dem Formular 36A erstmal zu Frau Maier gehen und sich die Sondertageslachkontingentbewerbungsunterlagen ausstellen lassen. Damit kommen sie dann bitte wieder zu mir und wir schauen dann mal.

      • wgbirne@feddit.de
        19·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, funny story:

        I work for the government and once during an inspection they noticed that a light on the roof our building needed to be replaced.

        What should be a 5 minute task took many months. Why? Safety rules state that only roofers are allowed to enter the roof, but only electricians are allowed to work on anything that has to do with electricity which includes changing a light bulb. So we had to wait a couple of months for one of the electricians to get certified as a person that can enter the roof.

        • Jesus_666@feddit.deEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          Last winter, in order to protect the dwindling completely full strategic gas reserves, the government issued an order for all govenment-owned office buildings to limit the central heating to no more than 19° C because that seemed to be the most pointlessly bureaucratic solution at the time.

          This included buildings that don’t even use gas for heating. Remote heat? Geothermal heat? Free waste heat that you have to actively vent to the atmosphere in order to lower the room temperature? Yep, all required to not exceed 19° C. The building I worked in at the time (for a company that rented some excess floor space) actually wasted energy adhering to this well thought-out rule.

           

          So yeah, I’d say that in order to change a lightbulb you need at least 1000 Germans. You need both chambers of parliament to create and pass a new ordinance that applies specifically to this lightbulb (and several other contexts it has no business applying to but does because it’s too vaguely worded). Then you need at least three different expert panels to advise the government, regulatory agencies to make sure the ordinance is adhered to, licensed trainers to make sure the people executing the job are formally certified to do so… Actually, we might have to get the European Parliament involved; the new ordinance might benefit from being propoted to a European standard.

          I’ll get back to you about this in about three to five years; we need to get this figured out.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
    812·
    1 year ago

    If you could read them, you’d realize they’re all just the same banal pun.

    The Germans have one sense of humor, spread across the entire nation.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    52·
    1 year ago

    In all seriousness, the notion that Germans lack humor stems from the times when English and American people last got in contact with Germans in larger numbers: In and after WW2. Allied propaganda did paint the Germans as humorless (because they can’t be totally evil if they still have humor), and after the war, living in Germany was not exactly fun.

    In reality, Germans have a lot of humor, its style being similar to the British, but a lot of it is hard to translate or is based on experiences that non-Germans don’t share, like old German TV shows.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
      211·
      1 year ago

      Ha ha ja just the other day Hanz made a funny joke he was going to arrive at 13:00 for his 13:00 meeting. We all laughed so hard. Naturlich he was perfectly on time arriving at 12:45, but we still laugh about it. When the meeting started he mentioned it and everyone was laughing and laughing for a good 30 sekunden or even a minute.

      That Hanz, such a jokester. And people say the German have no humor, ha that is a joke!

    • aidan@lemmy.world
      18·
      1 year ago

      I think the stereotype also comes from Germans often not catching onto sarcasm in English

        • aidan@lemmy.world
          13·
          1 year ago

          It can be, but 90% of the people I interact with are non-native English speakers and it definitely feels a bit more common for Germans fluent in English to be bad at getting jokes.

          • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
            10·
            1 year ago

            Happens with americans too… they seem to completely miss sarcasm sometimes. Humour is very cultural (and often plays into things a native of the country would know but someone outside sometimes wouldn’t).

            • aidan@lemmy.world
              21·
              1 year ago

              That isn’t what I said though, which is that specifically I notice it with Germans.

  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
    22·
    1 year ago

    It does annoy me that the Devs built in a system to let you set languages but everyone just sets it to ‘duhhhhh I don’t know what language I’m speaking?!’

    But yeah I do like looking at the silly German words on pictures

      • megane-kun@lemm.ee
        4·
        1 year ago

        A handful of months ago, I tried to actively use that post/comment language selector. However I ended up giving up because for some reason, only English is accepted. The other choices just resulted in the loading ring spinning forever and ever and my comment/post never being coming through.

        • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
          4·
          1 year ago

          maybe the community you were trying to post to has some kind of restriction regarding that setting? I’m not sure why someone would do that and whether it’s even possible in the first place but I know the UI is not reporting errors to the users in a lot of places. I also remember playing with that setting a bit and realizing it’s more of a nuisance than actually useful.

          • megane-kun@lemm.ee
            4·
            1 year ago

            My guess at that time is that it was an instance setting or something. That instances have a list of languages it supports. It makes sense given the admins have to be able to read and understand the posts in order to do their job responding to reports and whatnot.

            But then again this was mid-June, there’s a lot of things happening, and I didn’t really explore the issue further, hoping that it’d be fixed eventually (once the more urgent issues got addressed).

            I actually set-up my account to have a shortlist of languages to use (English, my native language, and a few languages I dabble on).

            Come to think of it, I only see the language setting in the desktop/web interface. The mobile app that I am using doesn’t have it.

            • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
              9·
              1 year ago

              “im” is often used as an abbreviation of “in dem” which is the direct translation of “in the/this” but it is also used as an abbreviation of “in einem” which directly translates to “in a” and somtimes “im” is just translated as “in”

              Let’s take “Der Saft ist im Glas” as an example.

              If you are trying to say that it is in a specific glass that you could point to, you would use “in dem”. If you are just talking about the general method of storing juice you would either use “im” or to be more precise “in einem”. Using “in einem” tells you that it is in a glass but the actual glass isn’t really specified or relevant right now.

              “Der Saft ist in einem Glas” is basically the same as “Der Saft ist im Glas”. But it is very different from “Der Saft ist in dem Glas” which is also basically the same as “Der Saft ist im Glas”.

              To translate these:

              “Der Saft ist in einem Glas” => “The juice is in a glass”
              “Der Saft ist in dem Glas” => “The juice is in the/this glass”
              “Der Saft ist im Glas” => “The juice is in the/this glass” or “The juice is in a glass”

              As a bonus:

              “Das passiert im echten Leben” => “That’s happening in real life”

              Always fun to think about the weirdness of my mother tongue :)

              Edit: These abbreviations are mostly used when the context already makes it clear which it is going to mean. Otherwise they are just confusing.

  • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    When i was in university, a now fairly famous german comedian did a set. He comes on stage looking stern and unamused and tells us the comedy is starting now as he begins a timer on a stopwatch.

    His first joke proper was "some people say we getmans dont have a sense of humour… well i dont think that’s very funny. "

    I knew i was going to love that set immediately.