Even now that I’ve prompted you to be conscious of it, the humour in your workplace interactions will be so familiar, so normal, so ingrained that you may find it hard to ‘stand back’ far enough to see it. Foreigners, on the other hand, tend to notice it straight away – or, rather, to notice something, not always immediately identifiable as humour, which they find baffling. In my discussions with immigrants and other foreign informants, I found that the English sense of humour, in various guises, was one of the most common causes of misunderstanding and confusion in their dealings with the
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