Literature on the translation of humour is almost non-existent, the most notable contributions to the topic still being those collected in Laurian (1986) and Laurian and Nilsen (1989). In Vandaele (1993: 7-42) I tried to demonstrate that most of these essays (a) argue from within prescriptive paradigms-telling the good from the bad—and (b) are “impressionistic” in the sense that they accept humour as an apparently monolithic and intuitive phenomenon. 1 I find it difficult to compare ST and TT humour without any reference to a more explicit descriptive framework of humour per se. This article mainly presents a functional, though still tentative taxonomy for the description of humour in screen comedy.

My humour analysis draws on the well-known concepts of incongruity and superiority and argues that, when redefined, these notions do not represent incompatible views on humour but always refer to each other in very specific ways, thus contributing to a more complete description of the phenomenon. Analysing translational shifts will come down to comparing the different types of interaction between incongruity and superiority that are present in original and translation. While the main part of my essay is concerned with rendering humour describable, at the end I shall briefly demonstrate that the methodology does serve translational analysis. To illustrate all of this, sequences are taken from the films The Naked Gun and A Fish Called Wanda and the former film’s French and Spanish dubbed versions.