BEN YAGODA at Lingua Franca doesn't like the "historical present": the tendency to use the present tense to describe past (and literary) events, as in this example from a radio interview about Lawrence Wright's book on Scientology:

At some point L. Ron Hubbard takes to the sea and he moves the main people in Scientology to the sea with him. ... So at some point he decides to come back to land. He needs a safe place to be and a place where Scientology can flourish and he chooses Clearwater, Florida.

Mr Yagoda concludes that describing the past this way is a crutch: "it's essentially a novelty item. It's tacky. Give it a rest." I don't quite agree, but his description of the historical present prompted this digression on another use of the present tense that he points out: jokes. (More specifically, jokes in the form of a funny story.)

Here's a well known example, which inspired the name of a book on punctuation that sold in the millions:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

The panda walks in, orders, eats, and draws a gun.It would be weird to begin a joke—in English—with "a panda walked into a bar and ordered a sandwich."

But that's not how all languages work. In looking around at joke websites, I found that conventions vary a bit. This joke, in Portuguese, sets the scene in the imperfect (a tense used for continuous or repeated actions in the past), before moving to what we might call the jocular present:

Um homem estava com a família visitando o zoológico, quando chega um funcionário todo afobado e diz:

— Senhor, senhor!

O homem responde:

— O que foi? Qual é o problema?

— Uma desgraça! Sua sogra caiu no poço dos jacarés.

O homem, na maior calma, diz para o funcionário:

— Não quero nem saber! Vocês é que tratem de salvar os jacarés. A man was visiting the zoo with his family, when a flustered employee comes up and says

- Sir, sir!

The man responds

- What happened? What's the matter?

- A disaster! Your mother-in-law fell into the alligator pool!

The man, supremely calm, says to the worker

- Not my problem! *You* try to save those alligators.



A look at a couple of Spanish joke websites show some jokes beginning in the imperfect, while others start in the present tense. German websites (like this one) show the English-style preference for the "jocular present":

Zwei Männer im Supermarkt stoßen zusammen. Meint der eine völlig aufgelöst:

"Entschuldige, aber ich bin total durcheinander, ich suche meine Frau!"

Darauf der andere: "Mir geht es auch so, seit 30 Minuten suche ich schon.

Wie sieht Deine denn aus?"

"Meine hat schwarze lange Haare, ist 1.80 m groß, braungebrannt, vollbusig, schlanke Figur, hat einen superkurzen Mini an, ein weißes enges Top ohne BH und Schuhe mit sehr hohen Absätzen. Und wie sieht Deine aus?"

"Scheiß drauf, wir suchen Deine." Two men bump into each other in the supermarket. The first one says, distraught

"I'm sorry, but I'm completely flustered; I'm looking for my wife!"

The second replies "Me too; I've been looking for 30 minutes."

"What does yours look like?"

"Mine has long black hair, 5'11", tan, busty, thin, has a super-short miniskirt on, a tight white top and no bra, and high heels. What does yours look like?"

"Screw it; let's look for yours."

(No comment on the quality of the jokes here. This is strictly hard-core linguistic analysis.)

I would have assumed all languages use the jocular present if not for the memory of one session with my Arabic tutor. My exercise was to read a corny joke (which I can no longer remember) in a newspaper, and then tell it to my tutor without looking at the paper. An twist was that it was written in modern standard Arabic in the paper, but I had to deliver it in (Palestinian) spoken dialect, which involves a non-trivial translation process on the fly. This wasn't easy in the first place, but what really threw me was when my teacher repeatedly stopped me and had me render everything in the past. Every verb, every bit: "A man walked into a restaurant and said... And the woman said back to him..." It was surprisingly frustrating. I kept naturally switching to the present, and my teacher, equally annoyed, kept making me switch back. "Why are you saying everything in the present tense?"

Not sure that my teacher wasn't just unusual, I did a little searching and found this Arabic joke:

سأل المعلم تلميذاً

ما هي الرياح؟

فأجاب التلميذ : هواء مستعجل

The teacher asked a pupil: What is wind?

The pupil replied: air in a hurry.

This is interesting, because Arabic sometimes uses the present tense to describe past events.

The world's best-known linguist, Noam Chomsky, has staked a career on the theory that all natural languages share a universal grammar. Whether he is right or not, the jocular present doesn't seem to be a part of it.

If you speak another language well enough to know jokes, what tense do you use in telling them?