Scott and the team attempt to prove that Germans have a sense of humour by telling jokes to unsuspecting members of the public in Germany, dispelling the stereotype that they can’t take a laugh.
The feature, designed to challenge the notion that Germans lack a sense of humour, sees Scott and his team stopping people on the street in Germany and telling them jokes to try to make them laugh. Scott goes first with a joke about two fat blokes in a pub (“you’re round”—”so are you, you fat git”), which the German listener finds “not really” funny, though she does smile politely. When challenged about the difficulty of making jokes to German speakers who all speak perfect English, Scott notes the challenge of the language barrier.
A team member attempts a cricket joke about a man visiting the doctor with a cricket ball stuck in his backside, but the German listener doesn’t understand the wordplay on “how’s that?” and fails to find it amusing. Scott suspects the cricket reference may have been a poor choice for a German audience. Another team member tries a cannibal joke (“two cannibals eating a clown—does this taste funny to you?”), which also falls flat. Throughout the feature, the German listeners remain polite but largely unmoved by the jokes, though Scott insists that at least one person did crack a smile. The segment plays on the comedy of the team’s struggling attempts to bridge the humour gap between British and German sensibilities.
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