The ''Joke''ular Tense?

Sitting in a cold air-conditioned office waiting for some inspiration to strike, when in walks a certain colleague armed with a joke.  Then poof an epiphany!  It wasn`t the joke – it wasn`t that funny, but the idea of telling a joke or recounting an anecdote and one`s ability to pull it off in another language is a good barometer of fluency.  Now that`s not suggesting that my colleague is not fluent, because he is – he`s just not that funny.  For my part, it might be some time before I reach that level in my Portuguese - to pull it off effectively, the art of telling a good joke.

 

When we tell a joke or recount a story we often use the Historic Past or Jocular Tense – I know, one more tense all of you need to learn.  We see evidence of it everywhere, yet some in literary circles deride it suggesting the tense is a crutch and, that we should avoid using it – I disagree.

 

Digging a little, I found out more about the historical present, which then led me to one of the fundamental uses of the tense – in telling jokes or stories.  Moreover, who doesn`t love to tell a story.

Here`s one I found

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"Well, I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."  Get it? No?  The panda walks in, orders, eats, and draws a gun, then shoots and leaves… Now? I mean, It would have sounded weird had it gone, "a panda walked into a bar and ordered a sandwich, shot some people and left.”

Interestingly that's not how all languages work. In scanning through a few joke websites, I found that conventions vary.  Take this joke in Portuguese, which sets the scene in the imperfect (a tense used for continuous or repeated actions in the past), before switching to the jocular present:

Um homem estava com a família visitando o zoológico, quando chega um funcionário todo afobado e diz:
— Senhor, senhor!
O homem responde:
— O que foi? Qual é o problema?
— Uma desgraça! Sua sogra caiu no poço dos jacarés.
O homem, na maior calma, diz para o funcionário:
— Não quero nem saber! Vocês é que tratem de salvar os jacarés.

This is all to say that there is a certain math behind the science of delivering a joke, something to most native speakers comes naturally, and for those who are not, something that becomes a lifelong study.  I know for me it will take at least a few more years before I get to that level of fluency in Portuguese, but I am encouraged that I am getting closer.  Perhaps a similar goal should be adopted by students of a second language to map your own fluency for 2014 and beyond.