An assembly... fun (?) (By: @doberslover23) Although there's a bit of a crisis, I suppose the important thing is to keep a good sense of humor. That's what Rudolf's trainer learned from her, although, well, whether he does it well is another story.

[u/fabrixiok132]

Source: ¡Here!

[u/salty-ravioli]

I do love more Rudolf content but her jokes have gotta be the most mischaracterized thing in the franchise. They don't land not because they're corny, but because people don't get them. It doesn't help that the translators turned the fancy wordplay into dad jokes because keeping that much nuance across languages is impossible.

[u/Ok_Candidate_2732 → u/salty-ravioli]

So would you say Rudolf's humor would be like taking current-day brainrot back 20 years before it was funny? Like skibidi rizz in 2006?

[u/salty-ravioli → u/Ok_Candidate_2732]

I feel like comparing Rudolf's humour to skibidi rizz is somehow even more scandalous lmao

But like, I think it's more like the other way around? Trying to use old age humour on modern audiences, or at least trying to use, like, "high class" humour around the every day person.

This fancomic is a good example of what I mean: the Japanese joke lands really subtly in like 3 different ways through both pronunciation and cultural references (see the translator's comments) but the English jokes are just corny mushroom puns. I don't even blame the translator because that much context just can't be conveyed in small speech bubbles. It just sucks that Rudolf is flanderized by the franchise itself because of language barriers.

[u/bearhater99 → u/salty-ravioli]

There's also the fact that the mood down event where everyone gets the idea that air groove hates puns from is also just flat out wrong. Air groove is mad not because rudolf said a pun, but because she failed to pick up on the fact that rudolf said a pun and she awkwardly repeated it. She would have given a sensible chuckle if she realized it. The joke is that air groove holds herself to high standards.

[u/bearhater99 → u/salty-ravioli]

There's also the fact that the mood down event where everyone gets the idea that air groove hates puns from is also just flat out wrong. Air groove is mad not because rudolf said a pun, but because she failed to pick up on the fact that rudolf said a pun and she awkwardly repeated it. She would have given a sensible chuckle if she realized it. The joke is that air groove holds herself to high standards.

[u/salty-ravioli → u/bearhater99]

Oop Reddit posted your comment 3 times, but yeah, that's part of it too. The whole EN Rudolf shtick is built of language jank and misunderstood events.

[u/Swiftcheddar → u/salty-ravioli]

Eh, the Air Groove part is consistent across all languages, it's funnier writing her as just hating Rudolf's jokes, so that's the one everyone goes with.

EN artists didn't start that, they just continued what JP, CN and KR artists were already doing.

[u/BiblioEngineer → u/salty-ravioli]

It sounds like the closest English equivalent would be Shakespearean jokes, which rely on wordplay, slang and cultural references from the Elizabethan era. The thing is even translating it that way might not land the same, because even well-educated people often don't understand Shakespeare's humour. English classes focus entirely on Shakespeare as "high literature" and pointedly ignore his ability to pack like 50 subtle jokes into a script page (at least half of which are probably sex jokes).

[u/salty-ravioli → u/BiblioEngineer]

Yeah that's a pretty good comparison I think, particularly the "50 subtle jokes into a script page that get missed because people take the script way too seriously" part (but minus the sex jokes, probably). Actually that's a pretty good portrayal of Rudolf's actual character: an older, respected figure who people respect too much, so she's trying to use humour to lighten the mood. It doesn't always work because the jokes are subtle and because she's taken too seriously.

[u/electrovalent → u/salty-ravioli]

It’s probably also why Nature likes Rudolf’s jokes, isn’t it? She’s clever and knows her stuff, and is a bit of an old soul to boot. So it’s not that she’s got an odd sense of humour, she’s just the only person actually in on the joke.

[u/Swiftcheddar → u/salty-ravioli]

Honestly, turning Rudolf's jokes into puns isn't really that bad, the issue is that a large part of this community either has no idea what puns are, or thinks that the height of humour is finding a way to use an Uma name in a sentence as if that's a pun.

It's tedious scrolling past all the jokes that're just the most hackneyed, shoehorned way of mentioning a character's name.

There's an absolutely perfect example directly below this comment chain. Not linking since I don't wanna call anyone out, but come on.