An immigrant's observations on humor and cultural competence
By JD Goulet
29 September 2023
We have found the European Portuguese people have a delightful sense of humor, but one that might catch an outsider off guard. We’ve only been here for going on seven months now, so I’m obviously not any sort of expert on the Portuguese culture, sociopolitical subtext, history, etc. and don’t expect I ever will be as competent in these areas as a person born and raised here, but I do have an outsider’s perspective with some observations to share that maybe my readers will find interesting, whether you are a fellow immigrant in Portugal, a traveler or Digital Nomad exploring humor in its many cultural contexts, or maybe even a Portugal native who wonders how a newbie like me perceives the folks in my adopted country. I welcome readers to share any of your own encounters with Portuguese humor and any disagreements you might have with me about my observations. And if you’re a native Portuguese speaker (European or otherwise), you are most welcome to comment your thoughts!
In addition to sharing my delight over the ways we’ve seen the sense of humor expressed here, I will also share about some instances where I’ve witnessed cultures collide—where the humor expressed was missed with embarrassing results or when some important context was unknown that made conversational participants uncomfortable—and where I’m able, I will try to dissect what happened.
I would describe the European Portuguese sense of humor as a sort of blunt, deadpan, or even “dad joke” kind of humor. One funny conversation I had in our first week here went like this:
Me, in a bakery, to the man behind the counter: Eu falo um pouco de Português. Fala Inglês? I speak a little Portuguese. Do you speak English?
Man: Parece-me que estás a falar Português! Sounds like you're speaking Portuguese to me!
Americans, can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em
Another day we were at PCDiga, a store that sells computer and gaming related products. I explained to the man at the desk that I'd lost my wireless mouse and needed a new one. He said, “So you need a wired mouse?” I stared blankly while trying to process his question. Then he laughed and says, “It's a joke!” And then I got it, and feeling sheepishly slow on the uptake, I started laughing.
One night as we hopped into a Bolt (which is like Uber), my fiancée asked the driver, Fala Inglês? and the driver said, “No, but I speak English!”
When we were telling one of our friends here about that last conversation he said, “That's a very Portuguese thing. If you ask someone if they know what time it is, they may very well answer yes and just walk away.”
One of our Brazilian friends here pokes fun at our learning European Portuguese and says, “Why do you want to learn that archaic form of Portuguese when you could learn modern Portuguese?” We did not understand some broader cultural tensions at play in his good-natured statement, however, when repeating the comment to a European Portuguese person.
About two weeks ago, we were having a casual conversation with our friendly neighborhood veterinarian, speaking in the best Portuguese we could muster interspersed with a lot of English when we couldn’t find the words. She asked us if we were taking Portuguese language classes as she poked and prodded our sick dog. My fiancée explained that we hadn’t taken formal classes yet, but that we were trying to learn via immersion for now, which has been interesting since we have a mixture of both European Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking Brazilian friends. Then, thinking she was being funny, my wife-to-be innocently repeated what our Brazilian friend had said in jest about European Portuguese being archaic and not modern Portuguese. The change in our vet’s demeanor indicated that this might have been an offensive thing to say, and as she poked to find any of our dog's sore spots, we’d obliviously poked at one of her sore spots.
Summarizing research by David Hector Monro in Ethnic Humor: What Do Portuguese People Laugh At?, Pedro Martins explains the theories behind why we laugh:
…people laugh either to release tension and accumulated energy (Relief Theory), to reveal the absurd [sic] of certain behaviours and situations (Incongruity Theory), or to show superiority over others (Superiority Theory).
Martins, drawing from the work of Mahadev Apte, goes on to describe ethnic humor as:
…a type of humour in which fun is made of different traits of a group and/or its members thanks to their social, political, cultural, religious and economic background…
and says that ethnic humor serves these social and psychological functions:
- it may substitute physical aggression
- express social criticism
- help the preserving, defending or enhancing of the ego of a certain community, and at the same time
- it may also simply entertain.
I can see, reflecting on the vet visit, that number 3 was at play. First, Martins states that “Brazilian people… are regarded with malice” by the European Portuguese, and goes on to explain:
As in most cases of ethnic humour, based on physical and psychological attributes, Brazilians are here criticised and discriminated against for their lack of intelligence. It represents therefore a clear example of the Superiority Theory which, in this case, may also be linked to the historical relations between both countries. If previously Portugal used to dominate and subjugate the Southern American territory, as well as its people, for almost four hundred years (16th–19th centuries), lately (especially in the last decade) Brazil’s economic and political role became everyday more and more important. This new and unexpected reality stung Portugal and its national pride and status so that Portuguese people had to create different ways to claim their (pseudo) superiority over their former colony.
What I suggest we witnessed when the vet didn’t react the way my future wife anticipated when trying to make a joke, was wounded national pride. It’s not the first time we’ve noticed evidence of it here. And it’s one thing for a European Portuguese person to use self-deprecating humor about their own country, culture, and people—which they definitely do—but it’s another for a foreign person to engage in it, even unknowingly.
To unpack this, I will first return to Martins:
Portuguese people can also be very critical about themselves.
According to the Relief Theory and Incongruity Theory, we may naturally argue the [examples of self-deprecating Portuguese] jokes are no more than ironical but it is also defendable that they rather reveal a very strong social critique with two main interpretations: on one hand, they represent an opportunity to point out different faults, incongruities and defects of the Portuguese society as well as that of its members and, on the other hand, they work as a social reaction so that the negative aspects of the Portuguese community may be minimised and eventually accepted. Laughter is thus supposed to stand as the true remedy towards the enhancement of society.
As with other former conquering and colonizing empires—like Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and others (and I would argue the United States is in the earlier stages of this post-imperial transition now, too)—I think the Portuguese people are grappling with their changing national identity. Over the course of hundreds of years, this tiny but once-powerful nation of brave explorers transitioned from a world civilization-altering empire—with Portuguese men sailing where no European men had sailed before, building new international trade routes, altering cuisine from Northern Europe to Africa to Asia to South America, and participating in extraction of wealth and enslavement of human beings, etc.—to a country humbled by roughly 40 years of surviving under a fascist dictatorship and trying to recover from that period for nearly the last 50 years (and doing a pretty fantastic job of it, in my opinion).
Portugal currently ranks within the 20 poorest countries in Europe and has been facing a declining population as young, educated people leave the country for higher wages elsewhere, which is one of the drivers behind the government’s policies that have enticed so many foreigners—especially foreigners with money—to relocate here. So essentially, the one-time colonizers are now themselves having to invite a reverse colonization of sorts and well… that does funny things to the national psyche, and not haha funny.
So, if we consider the power dynamics at play using our uncomfortable conversation with the veterinarian as an example, we see a person from a nation (Portugal) that has colonized and previously employed jokes that punched down at another nation (Brazil) as a display of their superiority and is now faced with becoming the butt of jokes that punch back.
Fellow immigrants from the U.S. take note, it’s a delicate area for us bumbling, culture-lacking ‘Muricans to stumble into! Self-deprecating humor is totally how I cope with the embarrassment of being an American in Europe, by the way.
It does often feel embarrassing being from the United States as an immigrant in Portugal. Sometimes it’s the cluelessness of another American that makes you want to wear a T-shirt that proclaims something like, “American, but not that kind.” A recent exchange in a social media group for immigrants that I'm in serves as a good example of this kind of second-hand embarrassment.
Now, I’m even less familiar with the nuances of the Açorean sense of humor, having literally only spent 5 days on one of the islands, and though they are Portuguese, they do absolutely have their own unique culture there, even on an island-by-island basis, having formed their own cultural identities over the nearly 600 years since the first Portuguese sailors found the uninhabited island chain.
Maybe I’m just better at detecting a sense of humor when I see it, or at giving people from an unfamiliar culture the benefit of the doubt, but that is not the case for one American woman who I will call Karen. Karen has lived on São Miguel Island for 4 years and is married to an Açorean native with whom she has two dual-nationality children. She posted in an online forum for immigrants a rant about what she perceived to be a horrible experience of rudeness and discrimination from a local Açorean business owner. She had rented a rowboat for her kids, who learned the hard way that one of the oars floated and the other didn't. The non-buoyant one sank to the bottom of the lake. When she went back to the boat rental business to return the boat and the sole remaining oar at the end of the day, she told the owner (who, based on interacting with him earlier that day, she knew spoke English) that one of the oars had sunk. His response to her was (paraphrased), “Well, they better dive down and get it!”
Now, as this woman has lived on São Miguel Island for 4 years and has a Portuguese husband, you'd think she'd have learned to detect the local sense of humor in that time. I’d only been there for 2 days at this point, and on the mainland for 4 months, and even I recognized this as a classic example of the kind of joke you frequently hear from the Portuguese people. But no, this woman was immediately angry and defensive and blamed the man for the oar sinking, at which point he stopped responding to her in English, which really made her mad.
From her point of view, if he knows English, he should speak English to her because her Portuguese (after 4 years of living in Portugal and having a Portuguese husband and mixed kids) is broken. She took his refusal to further engage with her in her language as deliberate discrimination against her as an American. And then, to make matters worse, she declared it was clear evidence of how much every Açorean hates Americans.
sigh
Someone in the forum asked her, “Well, did you offer to pay him for the oar your kids lost?”
“Of course not! Why should I?! It's not my fault one oar floated and the other didn't!”
Then she went on to basically say “How dare he treat me like this when my taxes pay his salary!”
You can imagine how the conversation continued to spiral from there. It was stunning. I tried to go back to check on how things were going for her the next day, hopeful that perhaps she’d seen she was in the wrong, but the entire thread was gone. I will never know whether an admin deleted it or she did, but regardless, it was a pretty shameful display of willful cultural obtuseness.
So uh, if you’re an American moving to or even just visiting another country, please remember to stay humble and give people the benefit of the doubt so I don’t have to wear an “I’m not like those Americans” shirt lol. And if I’m ever coming off as one of those Americans, please tell me. I genuinely don’t mean to be. I try to be so mindful of being curious in a culturally sensitive way that I was a bit stressed out figuring out how to discuss what I think was going on in our conversation with the veterinarian in a way that hopefully wasn’t offensive to anyone.
I hope you’ve found this enlightening and entertaining. Wherever you are in the world, I welcome your thoughts about culture and humor! And for more reading on humor and cultural competence, I suggest the four-part series on this topic by Nolan Yuma that starts with What Makes Something Funny? The Psychological Theories of Humor.
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