A Crack at West African Humor

"A good sense of humor goes a long way toward smoothing out tricky situations," says my West Africa guidebook. So I thought I'd do a little pre-trip research by trying to find out what people in West Africa think is funny. That way, when a border guard gives me the stare down, I can say, "Have you heard the one about the monkey?" And I'll tell him a joke, which will make him wheeze with laughter and stamp my passport with flourish, bribe-free.

I came across this post on Yahoo called "More jokes str8 outta west africa." The joke is about a woman who wants to poison her unfaithful husband with cyanide, and so she goes to a pharmacy to get the poison. She eventually gets the pharmacist to agree to help when he discovers the husband is actually sleeping with his wife. 

This is not a good sign for the state of West African health care--and not the kind of joke I want to tell a border guard. 

I did some more searching for "West African humor" on Google, and I came across quite a few sites from Nigeria, including one that lists 2,224 Nigerian jokes. Infidelity is again a theme. Here's an example:

A man was sitting reading his papers when his wife hit him round the head with a frying pan.
'What was that for?' the man asked.
The wife replied, 'That was for the piece of paper with the name Jenny on it that I found in your pants pocket.'
The man then said, 'When I was at the races last week Jenny was the name of the horse I bet on.'
The wife apologized and went on with the housework.
Three days later the man is watching TV when his wife bashes him on the head with an even bigger frying pan, knocking him unconscious. Upon regaining consciousness the man asked why she had hit again.
The wife replied: 'Your horse phoned!!!'

Humor might be culturally relative; however, a British psychologist named Richard Wiseman devoted a year of research to discovering the world's funniest joke. Maybe I'll give that one a try in West Africa. Also, a recent survey by the social network Badoo.com of 30,000 people across 15 nationalities revealed that Americans are perceived as the funniest people on earth, and Germans were voted the least funny. Given that I'm an American of German ancestry, this might leave me trying to be funny and failing miserably. My guess is that if I can at least laugh at myself, I'll get at least halfway across the border.


Photo courtesy of Josh Pesavento (broma)

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