Part 2. When humor crosses international boundaries, the first obstacle it encounters is translation, not only the meaning of words, but their cultural context.
So to begin to appreciate the Japanese sense of humor, perhaps we should hear it in a setting where it's been practiced for centuries.
300 years ago, during the Edo period, there began a school of entertainment called rakugo, comical storytelling. We still have those storytellers.
While yours is a stand-up comedian, ours sits alone on a stage on a cushion.
He begins telling a story interspersed with improvisation,
but he mimics the voices of several individuals and he differentiates these individuals being portrayed so clearly that the audiences is mesmerized.
An evening of rakugo is introduced by music, but after that, it's the storyteller who must hold the audience by the magic of his words alone.
The stories are about 20 to 30 minutes long, and it's likely that connoisseurs of rakugo have heard them before.
What they come to hear is not so much the story but the performance, the narrator's ability to weave a tale and to capture the essence of the characters through his voice.
One storyteller named Shijaku has taken up the challenge of translating and performing rakugo in English.
Western audiences have responded enthusiastically.
It's one of the few opportunities we have to get a real taste of traditional Japanese humor.
Heh, Heh, how much is it? Eh? No charge? It's free? Okay, I'll have another one.
Part 3. And its best, humor can reveal something about a culture.
It can also help to perpetuate stereotypes, the inscrutable Japanese, bowing all the time, taking costs of pictures.
Makes you wonder how the Japanese stereotype us.
We caricaturize Americans as obsessively telling jokes... feeling that they have to tell jokes, and Japanese, of course, do not respond.
However, Mr Muramatsu admits that there are a few stories which have a genuine cross-cultural appeal.
One that he particularly fond of involves an overcrowded lifeboat in a stormy sea.
To save the women and children, the captain has to persuade men of different nationalities to grab a life jacket and jump overboard.
How does he do it? To an Englishman, the captains says, it's the sporting thing to do. and he would naturally oblige.
To the German, he says, It's the captain's command! To the Italian, the captain says, Don't jump, it's illegal!
To the American, Don't worry, you are insured. To the Canadian, The Yank says he's staying.
Finally Mr Muramatsu always makes a point of letting the consensus-conscious Japanese be the butt for the joke's punch line.
The captain quietly approaches the Japanese and whispers to him, Everybody else is jumping.
Virginia Woolf once wrote that humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
She may be right, but if we can laugh at ourselves, perhaps that needs no translation.