I read a book last year (Song for a Whale) about a Deaf girl who would play a game with her grandfather where they would create a story together while using the same hand shape all throughout. So maybe they would make a fist, or ann open palm, or a “y” shape and then the story was created using signs that used that hand shape. If you couldn’t continue the story with the same hand shape you lost. Not exactly a pun but I thought it was interesting.
Yes! And they work a lot like the puns in spoken languages - you got two things that are conveyed in a similar way, but have a different meaning, so you sub one into another creating an unexpected result.
For example, in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) I’ve seen once a person starting with a “I don’t give a fuck” [signs: today I don’t-care], and then immediately “distorting” the don’t-care into a “poor thing”/“I feel sorry” - because even if the gesture is different, the hand configuration is the exact same, using the ring finger at 90° from the palm. (The other person was clearly amused.)
That’s a pun, in the exact same way as starting with a spoken word, pausing, and then completing it in a way that conveys something else.
Depends on what you mean by puns. As someone else pointed out, some signs in and of themselves are jokes, but there are also plenty of jokes in ASL in particular that don’t translate super well, so they’re really only funny in the language.
I don’t know about puns but I once saw a documentary about a deaf and mute married couple who had a baby. The interesting thing was that the baby started “babbling” with its hands. Can’t remember if it was deaf and/or mute as well.
I had asked DDG for a translation and it only told me about “dumb”. In the back of my head I thought that there was a better word but it wouldn’t come to me.
I know historically “deaf and dumb” meant deaf and mute, but, at least in the classes I took in college, I was told we don’t use that terminology anymore, for hopefully obvious reasons.
This isn’t replacing a euphemism with another one. Dumb has a completely different meaning that’s not even close to ‘cannot speak’, while ‘mute’ conveys exactly that.
I mean she’s standing right next to him and it’s very obvious. I’d say it’s his dry humor that he deliberately doesn’t acknowledge what the audience is laughing about. He wouldn’t have said “you shouldn’t laugh about that” unless that’s the additional joke.