Saturday, April 28, 2012

#34 - Priest or beast


                                         1. Priest: Boys! Stop fighting immediately!
                                         2. Priest: Apologise and shake hands.
                                         3. First boy: I'm sorry.
                                              Second boy: I'm sorry.
                                         4. Priest: Now hug and kiss.


I find this dig at the Church over their child abuse scandals pretty hilarious.


Saturday, April 21, 2012

#33 - Temperatures


                              How is it outside?                                 Hot?
                              Guess.                                                        Cold.

                              Warm?                                                      Cool?
                              Also cold.                                                 Warmer.

                              Cold?                                                         Very cold!
                              Hot.                                                             Yes.


As well as writing sharp cultural and political satire, Raczkowski also likes to play with language. Not all of his linguistic jokes survive translation, but this one happily does, as the "warmer...colder" system of hints for guessing games is used in both English and Polish.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

#32 - Logos



                                       Man: In the beginning was the word.
                                       First child: What word?
                                      Second child: BOOM

UPDATE 19 March 2015: Replaced image with larger version and changed translation at suggestion of Krzysztof Kozłowski.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

#31 - The blame game


   Who is better?                                            Who is worse? 
 Who is stupid?                                           Who is wise?
    Who is right?                                              Who is wrong?
Who wants to reach agreement?              Who's guilty of causing conflict?

Sunday, April 1, 2012

#30 - The killing joke


Man: Life is an April Fool's joke in which everything turns out to be true.


Some classic Raczkowski pessimism coming through. I'm not really happy with my translation. It hinges on the word informacje, which doesn't quite mean the same thing as English information, especially not in this context. Suggestions?

Update: A commenter informs us that informacje means both news and content of a joke, so it's a subtle overlap that can't really be reproduced in English.