The joke is a kind of text of unknown origin, oral, popular and brief, to which scholars have paid very little attention. In this work, we depart from the children´s jokes to draw some lines of analysis that would allow us to deal with the joke in the frame of a general theory of laughter. According to us, this cannot be understandable without referring to the interdiscourse, the set of mechanisms to which we do not have direct access but which determine what we do, think or say.

According to the Bible, a disrespectful use of God’s name may be perceived as blasphemous or at least profane. In order to avoid the risk of violating that religious and linguistic taboo, sensitive language users representing the Judeo-Christian world have developed various euphemistic ways of referring to God. On the other hand, however, jokes that include God’s name and laugh at him are not uncommon in Western culture. Assuming a linguistic-semantic perspective, the present paper examines a group of “God jokes”, which are jokes that contain God’s name and were tagged with the word god in the collection entitled “The best god jokes”, published on the website unijokes.com. The aim of the study is to identify the place and role of God’s name in the semantic script of “God jokes”, or in other words, to check “how much” God there really is in the text of jokes that are supposed to laugh at God, potentially violating the religious taboo. Following the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Raskin and Attardo 1991; Attardo 2001), the use of God’s name is analyzed in the knowledge resources of the semantic script of a joke: the target, the script opposition, the situation, the narration, and the language.

The subject of this article is a reflection on the potential difficulties with interpreting humorous texts, especially jokes. The basic assumption of many theories of humour is the belief that a surprise is a necessary element of humour. Many verbal jokes are based on the so-called “surprise effect” (cf. Hurley et al. 2011: 53) – the occurrence of an unexpected, surprising element in the punch line of a joke. We assume that it is a significant factor that decides that humour is a difficult challenge for the interpreter. The article presents the results of a study involving the 2nd year master’s students of applied linguistics at the University of Warsaw. In this study, we analysed both the original texts (verbal jokes) in German and English, as well as their oral translations into Polish, and the results of this comparative analysis were confronted with the reflections of the authors of translations, who self-evaluated the difficulties of the original text and the translation solutions used by them. In this study, we also compared the assessment of how funny the jokes were in their original language and translated into another language.