You are baiting me aren’t you…
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He’s baiting us all. 
The first American preteen kneejerk response to most any assertion is, by default, “Yeah, right,” and it’s downhill from there. Sarcasm develops quite early.
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That is becoming increasingly incorrect, though. Especially my younger generation. I don’t think we could get by without our sarcasm! So, I believe we all just have a lot of misconceptions about each other!
( I think Americans think the English are serious. So, the opposite! Funny!)
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If the Japanese didn’t understand irony, I am a Cat wouldn’t be one of their most iconic novels.
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Don’t know that one!
The cat in the story uses super high-register Japanese, which is lost in the English version of the title. In Japanese it’s 吾輩は猫である (わがはいはねこである).
So, it’s just a normal cat, but it talks like a nobleman or something, so it’s ironic.
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So what is high register Japanese?
What I was eluding to with the part about “talks like a nobleman.” Are you familiar with register in linguistics? It’s how words feel appropriate for different situations, like… you probably wouldn’t say “defecate” outside of a technical, medical context, and you wouldn’t say “crap” in that context.
吾輩 is a personal pronoun that suggests the person has a very high level of self-importance. You wouldn’t hear it in regular everyday Japanese, except perhaps as a joke.
If it was normal-register Japanese, the cat would say something like ぼくはねこだ
Both 吾輩は猫である and 僕は猫だ would translate to English as “I am a cat,” but the first sounds like a pompous nobleman said it. But the cat is in fact just a normal house cat in a normal house.
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I wasn’t familiar with it until I just looked it up. Interesting. I also looked up the book. Now I want it! 
The book is actually in the public domain so you can read it online for free: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000148/files/789_14547.html
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Perhaps the first one could be translated to We are a cat, with the royal we?
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Wonderful! 
Though, it is in Japanese, which I can’t read yet. 
I was wondering about sarcasm in Japan, I had also read that they couldn’t understand it. So it would only be a misconception some foreigners have ?
I’ve seen recently a video about the differences between Japanese and Western comedy from the channel “find your love in Japan”. video
He says that he can’t make people from other countries laugh with his Japanese humor. And that Japanese people don’t usually think sarcasm is funny or relevent.
Not that this thread doesn’t have enough of this, but I’ll jump in with my own experiences anyway.
Currently living and teaching in Japan in the countryside and sarcasm is definitely just an issue of communication. One of my coworkers speaks great English, and we go back and forth with sarcasm regularly both in personal conversations and during class, in both English and Japanese.
One day one of my students accidentally said good morning to me at the end of the day, so I responded with “happy birthday” and I can’t remember the last time we’ve used the a “proper” greeting since then.
I could go on, but to cut it short, these are just two of the clearest cut examples. I don’t know if I could find a Japanese coworker or friend that I haven’t used sarcasm with at least once. It’s 100% about delivery and reading the person/situation, as it is with all sarcasm.
Came this close to taking your bait, @timh. I regularly argue with my English friends here about what they find funny…
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It’s completely normal for there to be instances of different cultures not finding the other cultures’ humor funny. The mistake is in assuming that it means they don’t have a sense of humor (or sense of sarcasm, in this case).
To me, it just boils down to the fact that in order for someone to understand you are being sarcastic, they have to have a really good grasp on what they should expect from you, because sarcasm is a violation of the expected response. When people from different cultures are dealing with each other, there’s a lot of tentative feeling out of the situation, because they just aren’t sure what to expect, or they assume that they interpreted you incorrectly.
Think about if someone tried to be sarcastic to you in Japanese. Most of the users here are just struggling with trying to understand the grammatical structures of the Japanese, never mind moving beyond that to a second hidden meaning.
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I laughed out loud at the birthday thing!
It’s true. Not everyone finds the same thing funny. There are a lot of different types of jokes and styles of humor. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they have no sense of humor if it isn’t the same as ours.
Maybe you find this interesting. I was a bit surprised when I saw this. It’s just a guy lying in order to get a joke out of it though so not really irony but whatever:
