I am still waiting for someone to publish a concise history of humor from the 30 years of the Heisei Era. Thinking back, I can recall two bestselling books that conveyed American-style humor in translation. Both appeared in the 1990s, and they demonstrate how Japanese people, much to their credit, take a strong interest in what makes people in other cultures laugh.
The first was ASCII's translation of Arthur Bloch's 1977 book, "Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong."
You probably know マーフィーの法則 (Māfii no Hōsoku, Murphy's law), which postulates that "if anything can go wrong, it will." Or, in Japanese, 失敗する可能性のあるものは、失敗する (Shippai suru kanōsei no aru mono wa, shippai suru, A thing with the possibility of failure will fail).
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