Taste of Uzbek Humour
Nassreddin Hodja, aka Molla Nassareddin, Uzbekistan
Nassreddin Hodja, also known as Molla Nassareddin, has been a prominent figure in the literature of Uzbekistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey for centuries. Here you will get a taste of the type of humour that his stories usually have.
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Two sides of a river
Deductive reasoning
Eat, My Coat, Eat
Naughty Boy
Nasreddin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side: - "Hey! how do I get to the other side?" - "You are on the other side!" Nasreddin shouted back.
"How old are you, mulla?" someone asked, "Three years older than my brother." "How do you know that?" reasoning. "Last year I heard my brother tell someone that I was two years older than him. A year has passed. That means that I am older by one year. I shall soon be old enough to be his grandfather."
The Hodja was invited to a banquet. Not wanting to be pretentious, he wore his everyday clothes, only to discover that everyone ignored him, including the host. So he went back home and put on his fanciest coat, and then returned to the banquet. Now he was greeted cordially by everyone and invited to sit down and eat and drink. When the soup was served to him he dunked the sleeve of his coat into the bowl and said, "Eat, my coat, eat!" The startled host asked the Hodja to explain his strange behavior. "When I arrived here wearing my other clothes," explained the Hodja, "no one offered me anything to eat or drink. But when I returned wearing this fine coat, I was immediately offered the best of everything, so I can only assume that it was the coat and not myself who was invited to your banquet."
(Adapted form: http://eurasia.travel/uzbekistan/people/famous_people/hodja_nasreddin/)
One day the Hodja bought a donkey at the market place. He held his new donkey by its halter and started to walk towards home, pulling the donkey behind. Two rogue teenagers saw the Hodja and his donkey, and decided to play a trick on the Hodja. They were going to steal the donkey and see if they could get away with it.
One of the rascals quietly came up behind the Hodja, loosened the halter, took it out of the donkey's neck and put it around his own neck. The other boy took the donkey back to the market to sell. Hodja, unaware, continued to walk home, pulling the boy instead of the donkey.
When they reached home, Nasreddin Hodja turned around and saw the boy in place of the donkey.
`Who are you?' he questioned the boy.
`Ahh Effendi,' the scoundrel feigned, `you are not going to believe my story. I was a very naughty boy. I misbehaved all the time and made my mama miserable. When she couldn't bear it any more, she put a curse on me and I turned into a donkey. When you thought me good enough to buy, the curse is erased. Thanks to your charity, I became a boy again.'
`I will let you go, but never again torment your mama.' the hodja said, `Be a good boy from now on!'
The next day Nasreddin Hodja was in the market again, looking for a new donkey to buy. He saw the donkey he had bought the day before, the one that had turned into a boy. The Hodja went up to it and whispered in its ear:
`You naughty boy! You disobeyed your mama again, didn't you?'
(Adapted from: www.readliterature.com/h010506.htm)
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