Some jokes don’t translate. That’s how you know a language has its own personality.

Humor sits in the deepest part of a language. A joke runs on shared references, on the exact rhythm of a phrase, on a word that means two things at once in that language alone, and every one of those breaks in translation. What refuses to carry over is evidence that a language is more than its vocabulary.

Ask somebody bilingual to explain a joke that does not work in English, and let the explanation be unfunny. Notice what it tells you about what their language finds absurd. If one of yours falls flat in another language, that is a border rather than a failure.