untranslatable humor

The humor in countless cheesy b-films is sure to get lost when translated to other languages. Take for example Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The french taunter scenes being funny is totally dependent on them being in English. The criterion laserdisc version of the movie has a short section which discusses what happened when these scenes were translated to Japanese. Almost all of the humor was lost. The Japanese version of the scene was re-translated back into English, and it made almost no sense at all. Completely un-funny.

Jackie Chan flicks are probably much more hilarious in Chinese, it's a shame I can't speak it.

Translation is an inexact science. The translatability of humour per se depends quite a lot on how you actually define translation - puns are, of course, unlikely to have word-for-word parallels, and jokes which rely on cultural references may not work even in different areas which notionally speak the same language, but if the texts are reasonably unrelated to the scene in hand, it may well be possible to work in a laugh at the same point for a completely different reason; this is a legitimate piece of functional translation. In media such as film and TV, where there are additional constraints of time and timing (for dubbing) and space (for subtitles), quite a high degree of information loss is almost inevitable. In practical terms the film translation business is almost entirely accountant-engineered - especially in cheesy b-movies - and rates are low enough that decent translators get out of it into something with less cachet but higher rates and less stringent deadlines when they can, so quality is not all it might be.

Indeed, lots of humor from movies is untranslatable, but here is one example of a dumb joke that is:

In the movie Beavis and Butthead do america there is a scene in which the main characters are trapped in the trunk of a car. Butthead finds a jack and starts 'jacking' away.
Hey Beavis, I'm jacking !

This translates quitte nicely to Dutch:
Hey Beavis, ik ben aan het krikken !!

Which means about the same thing, except where jacking is performed solo and 'krikken' involves another person (preferably of the opposite sex). And a 'krik' is the dutch word for a car's jack.

Offcourse in most languages a lot of words can be used to carry a second, naughty meaning.