Humour in the politically correct minefield

'Just for the record, Canadians are not humorless. We're humourless, OK? And in case you're planning a trip, jokes in Canada are not illegal. They're just federally regulated. And a good rule of thumb is this: We're not humorless about Anglophone Canada. Want to make a cheap crack about curling, or the Queen, or redneck Albertans? Feel free. But we are humorless about Francophone Canada.
It's not so much that Francophones themselves can't take a joke, but that the bien-pensant Anglos who police English Canadian culture don't want to risk letting them be put in the position of having to take a joke, lest it tear the country apart. There's a lesson here, both for the European Union and an increasingly Hispanicized U.S.: Gags are one of the great pillars of a common culture, but they're one of the first things to get lost in translation--and if you can't share a joke, it's hard to have a shared culture. That's why multilingual societies tend toward the humorless: see Switzerland and Belgium. (For the purposes of the preceding racist generalization, I should point out that I'm semi-Belgian.) '
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/352/30/

I just love Mark Steyn- not in a poofy, gay sort of way, obviously, but in a 'Why can't I be even 10% that funny?' sort of way. Read the whole piece- its laugh-out-loud funny. But his point, that multi-lingual (and multi-cultural) societies are a lot less humorous than than mono-lingual ones is one I can personally attest to. When I lived in Alabama, there was a continual stream of wisecracks, gutter-jokes and witticisms bandied about, very often scabrous and filthy, very often massively politically incorrect and most of it extremely funny. Nobody thought much of it, and because the jokes were aimed at everybody, nobody could take offense without appearing sad and self-pitying. Its a great situation to be in, even when you are the butt of the joke sometimes. You just suck it up and take it like everybody else does.

When that camaraderie and shared world-view are damaged or extinguished, like in my office in London for instance, jokes become mine-fields. Each one could get you sacked for racism, sexism, being insensitive to the disabled or one of a million other crimes against political correctness. So nobody makes jokes. Its dull, its dreary, its just like the Soviet Union but its safe. I really really must move to somewhere where they still crack jokes, or I'm slowly going to go mad.