147 Humor

Noma Bar, the renowned illustrator, artist and original designer of the Chineasy characters, comes into the Chineasy studio to talk with ShaoLan about humour and the use of humour in his work. Indeed, one of the successes of the Chineasy characters from the books is that they combine the meaning of the character with a sense of humour, which in turn allows them to be remembered with much less effort. Noma and ShaoLan discuss some of the processes of working on these.

The Chinese word for humour 幽默 is more of a phonetic translation from English than a semantic one, so interestingly 幽 means quiet, or hidden, while 默 means quiet or silent, so 幽默 can be taken to be ‘”the hidden silence,” although the most important part is simply the sound of the word, which is a sound close to the word ”humour.”