The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,– the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as ‘an animal which laughs.’ They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

— Henri Bergson, Laughter, 1911

In 1890, a Leipzig chocolate maker named Wilhelm fell in love with a girl named Minna. Her father disapproved of the match, so the two exchanged letters by leaving them in the trunk of an oak tree in the Dodauer forest. Minna’s father eventually relented, and the two were wed under the tree in 1891.

Since then the hole has become a public letter box for people seeking romantic partners. Anyone can send a letter to be delivered to the tree, and anyone can read, take, and answer any letter. At least five, and reportedly more than 100, marriages have been brought about in this way.

“There’s something so magical and romantic about it,” ex-postman Karl-Heinz Martens told the BBC in 2018. “On the internet, facts and questions match people, but at the tree, it’s a beautiful coincidence — like fate.” Here’s the address:

Bräutigamseiche
Dodauer Forst
23701 Eutin
Germany

Good luck!

In his 1991 book Human Universals, American anthropologist Donald Brown listed “features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception”:

• fear of death
• tickling
• baby talk
• territoriality
• rites of passage
• hairstyles
• belief in supernatural
• dance
• containers
• jokes
• shame
• turn-taking
• weapons
• myths
• musical variation

The whole list is here. “We can look forward to the time when a great many cultural features are traced beyond the time and place of their invention to the specific features of human nature that gave rise to them,” he wrote. “The study of human universals will be an important component of that task.”

(Donald E. Brown, “Human Universals, Human Nature & Human Culture,” Daedalus 133:4 [Fall 2004], 47-54.)

Modern pizza toppings are commonly thought to have originated in Italy, but in fact they were developed by Italian immigrants in the United States and then exported back to Italy. Syracuse University anthropologist Agehananda Bharati calls this the “pizza effect” — the elements of a nation’s culture are sometimes developed elsewhere and then reimported. Further examples:

• Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade was invented for the James Bond film Spectre and then adopted by the city.
• American blues music influenced English musicians in the 1960s, who then exported blues-rock to the United States.
• Adapted from India’s chicken tikka, chicken tikka masala became one of the most popular dishes in Britain before being re-exported to India.
• Yoga became popular in India after its adoption in the West.
• Salsa music originated largely among Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants to New York in the 1920s and then spread throughout the Americas.
• Teppanyaki, the Japanese style of cooking on an iron griddle, grew to prominence in America in “Japanese steakhouses.”

The pizza example continues to “echo” between the Italian and American cultures: American tourists sought out “authentic” (non-American) pizza in Italy, and the Italians met the demand by creating brick-oven pizzerias. The Americans then carried these back to their own country. Stephen Jenkins of Humboldt State University writes, “Hence, Americans met their own reflection in the other and were delighted.”