View Content #27039

By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

Last week comedian Tito Ybarra posed this question on Facebook: How many Ojibwes does it take to mow a lawn? Answer: Four!!! Three to do the mowing, and one to sing the Ojibwemowin song. The post came with a video of exactly that: three men mowing, while dancing to the song that Tito was singing. Ojibwemowin is the name of the Ojibwe language, and it's pronounced like the English phrase "Ojibwe mowin'." At this time, the post has 394 likes and 214 shares, an indication of how well this bilingual joke has resonated among Anishinaabe people and language activists.

This week, celebrate multilingualism by going on a translanguaging quest, and then inviting your students to do the same. Your quest and theirs is to find some multilingual jokes, and then to see who can create their own original jokes.

Start with the understanding that what you're looking for are not jokes about bilingual people, but rather jokes that require knowledge of multiple languages to be funny. Here are a few places to start:

• If you Google "bilingual puns," you'll be rewarded right away with a good selection. You can also Google for specific language pairs, such as "English Korean bilingual puns." 
• Reddit is a good source of bilingual jokes. Here are two good threads to start with: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/aazvp9/anyone_got_any_good_bilingual_jokes/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/34czul/whats_the_best_bilingual_wordplayjoke_youve_heard/
• Wikipedia has an entry that includes eleven different language pairings with example jokes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilingual_pun

Choose a selection of jokes to share with your students. Some of the jokes you find may not be appropriate for your classroom context, which is why it's a good idea for the teacher to go on his/her own quest as a first step.

Once everyone understands the punchline of each joke you share, you can send students on their own quests to find more bilingual jokes. Your main objective here is for students to see how prevalent multilingualism is in the world, and how common it is for people to make use of multiple languages at once for communication. In addition to Internet searches, students may ask multilingual people they know if they know any good jokes. Rather than a short-term assignment, consider keeping a running list or log book of these jokes over the course of several weeks or longer.

Encourage students to create their own original bilingual jokes. You can have a tournament in which the class votes on the funniest joke, bracket-style. For guidelines and inspiration for setting up such a tournament, see this InterCom article: https://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/24750.

Have fun, and remember to celebrate your ability to use multiple languages at once to make people laugh (or groan)!