The French have jokes, but do they have a sense of humour?
'Baron, how did you find the English?
'Very distracting. They have a form of conversationcalled humour, which makes everyone laugh a lot.
'‘Humour—is this like esprit?
'‘No, not really.
'‘But then how do you translate it?
'‘Well, I can't.
We in France don't have a word for it.

'This scene in the film “Ridicule”, by Patrice Leconte, shows a marquis at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles telling other courtiers and their crinolined companions about his discovery of humour during a trip to England.
He tries to illustrate this peculiar phenomenon by telling a joke he has heard in England. No one laughs until another courtier adds a witty, slightly dirty remark to the English joke.If the Latin emotions of the French sit uneasily with humour, so does the French logical mind. French children are instilled with Cartesian esprit ...
When your correspondent was at university in France, she was told her poor performance was due to an Anglo-Saxon mind that made her unable to think properly, or rather logically. A French Cartesian mind does not know what to make of a nonsensical story, such as this one. “The governor of the Bank of England began an address to an assembly of bankers with these words: ‘There are three kinds of economists, those who can count and those who can't.'” A joke of this kind would be met with incomprehension by French listeners. It is not logical.Yet, despite translators' best efforts, a mésentente cordiale remains when it comes to funniness. At the end of the film “Ridicule”, mentioned at the start of this article, the hat of the Marquis de Bellegarde is blown away by the wind. Interrupting his lamentations, an English lord (who has caught the hat) remarks that it is better than losing one's head. Ah, cries Bellegarde, this is English humour!

Though the point of this article is to state that the French do not have a sense of humour (more on that someother time), it brings out the British sense quite well.