Can we learn to laugh in another language?

While having my morning breakfast today, I was thinking of something: building on my previous post, where I was wondering if we can really understand and adapt to a new culture. I would like to ask why you think some movies are made to be exported and others are made to stay in house. Several times in my life, I noticed that the best movies I saw in a certain country were never exported while many less interesting ones were on foreign markets. What factors determine if a film is exported or not? Are they the ones that have the most stereotypes and ignore much deeper and mind-blowing cultural issues (these are the most interesting films, in my opinion)? Yes, I guess.

For example, I was thinking about the movie by John Turturro, Passione. To my knowledge it was not super successful abroad. No doubt, on the other hand, that a movie like Gomorra, about the mafia, sells better. What would an American, Asian, African, Australian, Indonesian, etc..etc.. person "see" in the movie Passione? Would they be able to appreciate it? Movies meant to be exported are often a "simplified" version of local cultures, but why so? Why keep limiting ourselves to stereotypes? Why not export the sincere, incomprehensible movies and slowly let foreigners adapt to them? Is that too complicated? Is that related to our obsession with simplifying everything in order not to deal with complexity?

When living in another country, I always get informed about the local comedians. I want to understand why people laugh with them and, if I don't find them funny, I want some local friends to explain to me why I am supposed to laugh at that particular moment! Someone could argue that you cannot learn culture-based humor, but I would try to challenge that argument. Because I did learn to laugh when French people laughed!

After spending some time living in France, I began hearing people talk about the Bronzés series, I tried to watch that movies and I found them totally uninteresting. But then I thought: I have to understand why everybody in the room is laughing but me. I told a friend and he suggested we watch the movie together, then something super fun happened. In the beginning he was "explaining" to me when to laugh and "why" and I mostly laughed because he was laughing. But then, as the movie went on, I started to laugh "with" him and not "because of" him. I felt great inside: Yes! I had managed to change my culture-based conditioning and get into a new one.

It was only after being able to understand and feel why those movies made people laugh that, in the end, I could decide by myself that that kind of movie was not my favourite one and that that kind of humor was not what cracks me up; but this time it was not because of the cultural barrier, it was just because of my personal taste! I could overcome cultural barriers and start from the same base of a real French person.

On the same token, I did experiments in other countries and with dramatic movies. If I find a movie from another country boring, I always wonder if it's because of my personal taste or because I didn't "get" it. This process is fascinating and this approach brought me to really broaden my mind. Perhaps, relating to my previous post, Competence or awareness, I would say that the simple fact of traveling around the world and living in another country without wondering "why" people like this and that, "why" they laugh for this and that, etc... etc.. diminshes our chances to step out of our cultural conditioning and step in a different one.

E.