FIQWS was a very new topic for me, as it was something I didn’t particularly find interest in at first, but slowly came to grow somewhat fond of it. I learned much, regarding how culture benefited from musicals and vice versa. I’m mainly glad about the class not being a typical English class — we weren’t forced to write stale essays for each thing we did, but rather we could write on a variety of things based on what we interacted with in class (or sometimes our own interests that were related to the performing arts), which is something I indeed am thankful for.
For the Analysis essay, I’ll be honest and say I feel like I didn’t gain much from this project. The main reason for this was that the prompt for this project felt more like a summarization of the Rent musical mostly, though I suppose that’s more of my own fault for treating it that way. This particular project is one I haven’t really benefited nor found any notable skills from.
After doing the Genre Translation Project, I will say that it was one of the more unique projects I’ve had to do, using a more unfamiliar medium to build off of an existing work of art (that being the musical Rent, in this case). The project helped me with reinterpreting, as well as adding on to, existing pieces of media to breathe new life into them and maybe make others see the original pieces of media in a new light. This was pretty interesting for me as I don’t think I’ve done a similar project of the sort back in high school, so it was a nice and fresh experience.
The Research Essay was the project that I had the most fun in, to be honest, with being able to write things not strictly related to musicals but performing arts in general.I will say, I did go a bit off of a tangent when relating my topic, the untranslatability of comedy across cultures and languages, but I think it relates enough, as comedy is something I’d argue to be a sort of “sub-art” of literature, with clever use of wordplay and such to achieve comedic affect. I wasn’t too interested in this project at the beginning, but later on I actually developed a somewhat sort of interest toward the actual topic in and of itself for the root of its problems and how said problems have been attempted to be worked around. I’d say I think I accomplished finishing this project successfully.
Overall though, I’d say the FIQWS courses I took helped shed some new light on topics I didn’t particularly think about before, that being about how performative art drives society and how society drives performative art. Musicals are something; I argue, not many people think too much about when they hear about art – usually it is visual or musical separately. Musical theatre breaks that thought though – or rather combines it, depending on how you look at it, add it incorporates both the visual and audible forms of art into a combined experience to move people and push messages of change (the best do it implicitly, so much so that you don’t even notice it for how natural it is).
Whether you browse internet forums, look at comment sections, or even send a text message to a friend or family member, you may notice that some write “lol – an expression signifying laughter for something that has comedic value (… hopefully not used passive aggressively). But when you look outside the box, you may also notice that when people text “lol,” they’re not just laughing; they’re performing a small piece of their own culture they’ve grown up in. As someone who primarily speaks English and is in a primarily English-speaking country as well, you may find someone writing Spanish and adding “jajaja” at the end of their sentence on the internet; and then, you see another person writing “www” after writing their sentence in Japanese. What are these rather strange terms? Surprisingly, they all mean roughly the same thing, but each one carries its own rhythm, tone, and identity. What makes people laugh, and how they express that laughter, shifts dramatically from one language and culture to another. A pun that’s repeated for months and months in English might make zero sense in Mandarin at all. Err, well, there are jokes in English that don’t make sense even in their own language, especially the recent jokes, but I digress.
I want to show that the comedic value of jokes and sayings is deeply shaped by the structural properties of the language used with it, and the cultural values embedded within it; take that away, and the thing is merely a former husk of what it once was. A joke that depends on tone or double meaning is almost always guaranteed to collapse entirely when translated. Humor doesn’t just play with words; it plays with the way people think, speak, and connect. You’ll eventually come to see that there is a significant link between culture and humor, but first, I want to go over WHY things may be different to translate in the first place.
Take, for example, the language I’m using right now to write this very sentence; English. English has its own group of “phonological, semantic, and syntactic features” that make it what it is (though it does indeed have roots with other languages, but I digress). If I were to say that English is very different from Chinese, you’d call me stupid by pointing out the obvious. They, in fact, are different, but… why exactly? Well, for starters, take a look at their origins. While there is no set answer, as we can only guess and reverse-engineer so much of pre-recorded history through fragments of an earlier day and age, an article by Pubmed (published by Ilia, Kseniia, and Elena under the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston) provides a well-reasoned timeline. While the origin of language has rather two separate topics, those being “the origin of language faculty” and “the origin of languages”, I will focus on the latter. To understand why jokes don’t translate, we first have to understand why languages differ in the first place, because, like I said, humor depends on the structure of language – its sounds, grammar, and meanings. All of which developed independently across different linguistic families, as you’ll come to see.
A study by Dokuz Eylul University, where research concludes that, a lot of the time, the pun is lost in translation due to how finicky it can be to especially translate comedy rooted so deep in the languages – and by extension, cultures – structure.
Sure, humans eventually expanded from one point outward geologically during pre-recorded history, but spoken language didn’t come out until most likely thousands of years later (as more basic vocal noises and drawings were more than enough to convey ideas at the time), and Arbib Michael A. more or less agrees by saying ”that the evolution of language is rooted in the execution and observation of hand movements, leading to the emergence of sign language, which was thereafter extended to speech”. Somewhere along the way, people discovered how to make different noises in tandem, which eventually led to words strung together to make sentences, and therefore, language. Skipping the processes of the evolutions of the languages themselves, we can conclude that English, being a West Germanic language, and Chinese, being a Sinitic language, have completely different parent languages, and consequently, completely different structures; while the idea to convey, well, an idea was the same, the process was very different due to this; people simply having had chosen different sounds for different things in different places, all eventually trickling down into the vast series of languages we have today.
Coming back to the main topic, a research paper called On Untranslatability of English Linguistic Humor by Qian Han, from Dalian University of China, has an excellent example; take the punny sentence “We have courses to make grown men young and young men groan”. This sentence would be easily translatable in Chinese; however, the sentence would practically lose its meaning. Think about what makes the sentence punny in the first place: the word play on “grown” and “grown” – they have practically the same pronunciation in English, and this sentence takes advantage of that. In Chinese, though, this functionality is lost. This can be called a “Phonological” joke, where the joke uses the patterns of sounds in a language to make itself work. Take another example from the same paper: the sentence: “[Person 1] There is a man outside with a wooden leg named Smith. [Person 2] What is the name of his other leg?”. Here, the sentence takes advantage of English’s rather ambiguous style of applying descriptions and characteristics to things, as English rather relies on context, much like…. Every other semantic feature in English. Specifically, “the phrase ‘named Smith’ is the attribute of ‘a man’. But they are separated by another phrase ‘with a wooden leg’. So ‘named Smith’ can be taken as the attribute of ‘a wooden leg’, too.”. In Chinese, however, the language is structured more rigidly. This could be considered a “syntactical” joke, where the joke uses the “parsing” (meaning breaking-down) system of the language to make itself work.
As we now know, humor is universal, though not necessarily global. What I mean is that, while humor is an experience that all cultures across the world experience, but things cultures can find humorous may be, in fact, polar opposites. Universal key themes exist, such as “politics, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender and age”, as quoted from the book Language and Humour in the Media (this is more for cultures that more closely align with the traditional definition form “culture”), though there, does exist other topics that are related to the culture in and of itself). The book also provides a good example of something that’s tied to one culture, specifically the one we are in every day – concurrent Western culture. It’s been noticed that ageist humor, made from “the social construction of age in the US”, is seen as a “discursive strategy for social interaction”. This is further explained by the reasoning that “In American culture, and indeed in most of the industrialized West, the majority of the stereotypes associated with old age are negative in consequence of the fact that the prevalent discourse of aging is one of inevitable and irreversible decline”. On the topic of humor within culture, another interesting situation arises with what jokes people say, as well as how people “adopt the humor frame” (as cited by Comedic Convergence: Humor Responses to Verbal Irony in Text Messages), which is most commonly seen in everyday conversations. Depending on the current culture sphere people might be interacting in, they will of course act accordingly to humor. Said article also states that “Hearers can even contribute more humor by ‘playing along with the gag’ (Hay, 2001: 61). This can include agreeing with and adding to an instance of verbal irony (Ex. ‘Man, I would hate to be super rich’//’Yeah, that would be terrible’) or co-creating a joint fantasy (Ex. While cutting a sandwich ‘Ok, now I’m making an incision in the patient’//’Careful Doctor!’). Shared verbal irony is an example of what Attardo (2002) would call mode adoption”. Depending on the cultural context, people may respond in different ways.
As the world becomes more interconnected online, we’ll notice differences in humor – and by extension, culture – that remind us that language isn’t just a communication tool, but a reflection of a worldview that we inherit. Understanding these differences doesn’t separate us – In my opinion, I’d say it rather allows us to appreciate the creativity and cultural depth behind what makes different people laugh, for the ocean of what is language to have flown and trickled down across thousands upon thousands of years to have given us these specialized, individual rivers that, even now, connect to others and allow us to connect to others.
Works Cited
Han, Qian. “On Untranslatability of English Linguistic Humor.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 6 Feb. 2011, https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.1.2.149-152.
Heydon, Georgina, and Sajjad Kianbakht. “Applying Cultural Linguistics to Translation Studies: A New Model for Humour Translation.” International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 31 July 2020, p. 1, https://journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJCLTS/article/view/6311/4437.
Sittara, Mariya G., et al. “Translating Humor: Cross-Cultural Challenges in Ramona Quimby Series.” PAKISTAN LANGUAGES and HUMANITIES REVIEW, vol. 8, no. III, 30 Sept. 2024, https://doi.org/10.47205/plhr.2024(8-III)01. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.
Rent, a musical made by Jonathan Larson, still stands out even among contemporary musicals for its iconic raw honesty and emotional resonance, which I argue is driven mainly by the seamless synergy between the music and dialogue carefully crafted to intertwine into a beautiful experience of colors and emotions. Rather than treating the songs as separate moments from dialogue simply, Rent blends the dialogue with the music so that the story flows naturally, creating a lived-in world where it feels like the characters express themselves authentically. This fusion not only defines the tone of the musical but also deepens character development and enhances the show’s emotional impact on its audience.
One of the most striking ways I’ve noticed Rent achieves this is through its conversational lyrics, which often blur the line between dialogue and song. For instance, characters shift from speaking to singing mid-conversation, making it feel as though music is a natural extension of their thoughts. Though maybe not too uncommon, this well-used technique is nonetheless striking when done well, as it reflects the chaotic, improvised lives of the characters themselves, mirroring the “bohemian” lifestyle of the artists, lovers, and friends in this play showcasing a slice of life within New York’s East Village. The music never feels forced; it rather feels as if it emerges from the dialogue, stressing the authenticity that defines the show.
This interplay between music and dialogue also enhances the character development we see develop in the musical. The way characters communicate musically really reveals their personalities and struggles. When the song “La Vie Bohème” starts playing, the overlapping lines of dialogue and song highlight the community’s collective spirit, yet also show their individual quirks and desires. On the other hand, more intimate moments, such as during “One Song Glory”, expose a character’s vulnerability in a way dialogue alone couldn’t achieve with the same… emotion. Larson’s choice to let characters break into song mid-thought , in my opinion, really captures their emotional volatility and conveys inner conflicts that words alone couldn’t express.
This synergy of music and dialogue strengthens the emotional impact of Rent. The audience experiences the characters’ highs and lows in real time, with the music amplifying their words and feelings, and along with that, the audience. When dialogue merges seamlessly into song, the transition itself becomes emotional—reflecting how grief, love, anger, or hope overflow into something greater than speech alone, when done right. The tone of the musical, raw and unpolished yet deeply heartfelt, emerges directly from this blend, leaving audiences with the sense that this isn’t just a performance, but a glimpse of a life of some real, relatable people.
From these points, I make the argument that the style Rent demonstrates its powerful relationship between music and dialogue in musical theater is what makes it so iconic and revolutionary. By weaving these two together, Larson created a show that captures the messy, vibrant energy of its characters and their world, and made it feel so… real. The synergy between these things not only set the tone well but also allowed the narrative and emotional weight of the story to resonate long after the curtain fell.
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