Forget language, I once asked a Taiwanese colleague to tell me joke that is really considered funny in Taiwan, his response: "For example this is funny, a Polar bear that is cold on the North pole." Ok... I wonder what our jokes sound like to him...
I'm not sure if he is trying to tell some version of this joke, but here it goes:
(for context, dad jokes are often categorized as "cold jokes" here in China/Taiwan, since often its humor is not appreciated by the audience and thus making the vibe "cold")
So a polar bear become bored one day and had nothing to do. So he started to pull off his own hair. One, two, three. One by one the hairs were pulled off. After a while, the polar bear suddenly said: It's pretty cold out here!
Every couple of weeks I decide that the current state of affairs simply takes too long and switch things around, only to keep that going as an infinite loop :/
Haha, well, I hate shaving and that's why I often have a beard, you could call me lazy. My Taiwanese colleague was usually not so direct by the way, I'd call him shy but a very nice, warm person.
If you're referring to people spamming "desu" with a picture of Suiseiseki from Rozen Maiden, that's not meaningless. The original joke is that the character uses "desu" at the end of her sentences way more than is required by normal Japanese grammar. Other characters have similar verbal ticks, e.g. Kanaria with "de kashira".
There's a joke in French about two horses that go to the movies, I usually can't finish telling it from laughing too hard, yet people often find it extremely lame and unfunny. You can't explain humor I guess.
OK, I'll try. Keep in mind that English is not my first language.
Two horses go on a date. First they go and have a few drinks, and then they go to the restaurant. After that, they decide to go to the movies, and they go in one of those theaters with a big balcony in addition to the floor seats. They sit on the balcony and the movie starts.
After a while, one of the horses gets bored and decides to stretch its legs a little and walk around. It approaches the balcony railing and has a look around, at the people down on the floor seats, because it's more interesting than the movie itself. But suddenly, from leaning too hard against the railing, the horse falls down the balcony onto the people below.
The other horse doesn't notice at first. But after a while, it realizes the first horse is missing, so it looks around, looking for it. It approaches the railing, looks at the floor seats, and suddenly trips and falls down on the people below.
At this point, a very annoyed gentleman shouts: "hey, up there! Would you stop throwing horses??"
I think a polar bear that is cold on the north pole would be funny as a visual gag most places if executed well, because it breaks assumptions about polar bears. But for some reason when written down it's harder to make it fit the assumptions of the structure of a written joke in many cultures that seems to expect an action. To make it funny in writing, I think many place you'd need a more complex delivery wrapping creating a story around how you ran into this polar bear and it terrified you, but it turned out it was just cold and looking for some way to stay warm.
