The rea­son why Britons believe that the Ger­mans have no sense of humour is a lan­guage prob­lem, not a humour prob­lem. One example:

The Ger­man phe­nom­e­non of com­pound words also serves to con­found the Eng­lish sense of humour. In Eng­lish there are many words that have dou­ble or even triple mean­ings, and whole sit­com plot struc­tures have been built on the con­fu­sion that arises from deploy­ing these words at choice moments. Once again, Ger­man denies us this easy option. There is less room for doubt in Ger­man because of the language’s infi­nitely extend­able com­pound words. In Eng­lish we sur­round a noun with adjec­tives to try to clar­ify it. In Ger­man, they merely bolt more words on to an exist­ing word. Thus a fed­eral con­sti­tu­tional court, which in Eng­lish exists as three weak frag­ments, becomes Bun­desver­fas­sungs­gericht, a vast impreg­nable struc­ture that is dif­fi­cult to pen­e­trate linguistically.

Why many Amer­i­cans miss the irony in British humour.

It’s not so much about hav­ing a dif­fer­ent sense of humour as a dif­fer­ent approach to life. More demon­stra­tive than we are, Amer­i­cans are not embar­rassed by their emo­tions. They clap louder, cheer harder and empathise more uncon­di­tion­ally. It’s an open­ness that always leaves me feel­ing slightly guilty and apolo­getic when Amer­i­can per­son­al­i­ties appear on British chat shows and find their jokes and sto­ries met with tit­ters, not guf­faws, or their achieve­ments met with silent appre­ci­a­tion, rather than claps and yelps. We don’t like them any less, we just aren’t inclined to give that much of our­selves away. Mean­while, as a Brit on an Amer­i­can chat show, it’s dif­fi­cult to endure pro­longed whoop­ing with­out intense, red-faced smirking.

via Mind Hacks