Getting the Joke in ASL
When Sam Corbin, the crosswords editor for the New York Times, took on the project of learning ASL, she couldn’t resist the temptation to do what she routinely did with spoken and written English: play around with words. Being something of a joker herself with a deep attraction to unleashing a pun, she became fascinated by how hand movements translate into humor.
“Like hundreds of other signed languages spoken around the globe,” she writes, “ASL expresses meaning through a combination of hand shapes and movements, palm orientations, use of space around the body and nonmanual signals such as facial expressions and lip movements. While in English, a given word’s definition tends to dictate its usage, each of ASL’s meaning-making elements convey definitions. Some signs may begin as one word but transform into a question with a shift of the eyebrows — or, with a different hand movement, become a clever turn of phrase.”
Read the complete article: American Sign Language Reveals Wordplay Beyond Sound — In a visual language, a subtle hand movement can help you get the joke.