Forget language, I once asked a Taiwanese colleague to tell me joke that is really considered funny in Taiwan, his response: "For example this is funny, a Polar bear that is cold on the North pole." Ok... I wonder what our jokes sound like to him...
(BTW I had a beard at the time.)
"A cannibal passed his brother in the woods."
My favorite: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?
He worked it out with a pencil.
Two horses go on a date. First they go and have a few drinks, and then they go to the restaurant. After that, they decide to go to the movies, and they go in one of those theaters with a big balcony in addition to the floor seats. They sit on the balcony and the movie starts.
After a while, one of the horses gets bored and decides to stretch its legs a little and walk around. It approaches the balcony railing and has a look around, at the people down on the floor seats, because it's more interesting than the movie itself. But suddenly, from leaning too hard against the railing, the horse falls down the balcony onto the people below.
The other horse doesn't notice at first. But after a while, it realizes the first horse is missing, so it looks around, looking for it. It approaches the railing, looks at the floor seats, and suddenly trips and falls down on the people below.
At this point, a very annoyed gentleman shouts: "hey, up there! Would you stop throwing horses??"
There you go.
Original version:
"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." - E.B. White