Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc of Abbeville, Louisiana tells Groucho Marx a joke in French on the game show You Bet Your Life (1951) Source: • Dudley LeBlanc on You ...
haha Trust me, I can empathize! But in our defense, jokes are inherently more difficult to understand in any language, especially if they include a play on words or very specific cultural references. And they always tend to tell the jokes really quickly and/or they and others are laughing while they tell the joke. The punchline especially is always more difficult for me to get.
By the way, I’ve also experienced something similar with old recordings of jokes told in English from 50+ years ago, and it’s usually due to cultural references from that time period that no longer make sense to a contemporary audience.
