[edited from The Motley Fool]

AMERICAN JOKISM:
You have two jokes
They share a huge apartment in New York which they pay for by working in a coffee shop
One is straight in real life, but gay on TV
They were both written by a room full of Harvard graduates

FRENCH JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You go on strike because you really wanted a melancholy song from Edith Piaf

JAPANESE JOKISM:
You have two jokes
They are one-tenth the size of an ordinary joke and produce ten times as much laughter
You use them as the basis for a series of anthropomorphic cartoon characters called “Jokémon” and market them worldwide

GERMAN JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You re-engineer them so they are no longer funny and send them away to be tested to destruction by a national standards institute

ITALIAN JOKISM:
You have two jokes, and apply to tell them on TV
You succeed after sending a photo of yourself as a balding, middle-aged man weighing 23 stone
The show is hosted by seventeen 25-year-old models with impossibly large gravity-defying breasts
There is an oompah band in the studio that strikes up when you tell one of your jokes
The girls giggle continously whilst you tell them
At the end of the show, the audience breaks out in wild applause and you are treated as a folk hero
You are never heard of again

SWISS JOKISM:
You have 5000 jokes, none of which are yours
There is an ongoing problem with some of the Jewish ones
But you charge all their owners for letting you laugh at the punchlines in private

CHINESE JOKISM:
You have two jokes
They have not been approved by the Central Peoples’ Council for Recreational Culture
300 people laugh at them and are immediately arrested

IRISH JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You apply to the EU for a subsidy and build a new cultural centre in Dublin where they can be performed in Gaelic
You tell everyone that Ireland is a poor rural country full of folklore and strange literary happenings
Georgian terraced houses in the city centre surge above €5million for the first time

ENGLISH JOKISM:
You have two jokes
You practise them in the bath