ABSTRACT
The duo's director, Hal Roach, saw opportunities in the European market but also understood the problem of language barriers. As jokes play on either linguistic or cultural incongruity or a combination of both, it is unlikely that two languages will possess the same lingua-cultural inconsistencies to create an instance of wordplay that will be an identical of the original. Charles S. Gulas and G. Weinberg's discussion of global advertising explores the dangers of how ignoring subtle differences in language and culture can change a serious message into a comic one and vice versa. Humour is most culture-specific when language and culture are combined to create a comic effect. Verbal humour with a visual anchor takes translational difficulty up a notch. Likewise the screen translator has to juggle with different combinations of verbal, visual and acoustic features all of which are superimposed on one another to create an amusing whole.
