I don't think it would be funnier. It's trying to tell two jokes at the same time, which dulls both of them. One is a slightly complex perspective shift; the other is a dirty pun.
If I were writing that joke, I'd avoid the word "came" entirely for precisely that reason. If I were performing it in a show and had to stick to the script, I'd shade the sentence in a way that took the emphasis off the word. (The key word in the gag is "father".)
That's just my opinion, of course. You tell your jokes any way you like. I'm just speaking from my experience as a Shakespeare actor, where a lot of my effort is finding ways to help guide an audience through a text that is well-crafted but intricate, and the real meaning is sometimes obscured.
Sadly it wouldn't work in the German translation. As "came here frequently" with would be grammatically correct (in German) as "came to here frequently".
"Hier gekommen" (came here) and "hier her gekommen" (came to here) differ. One would need to translate it more freely and that would probably loose the raunchyness.
Würde nicht funktionieren, weil es die zweite Bedeutung von "ist oft hierher gekommen" nicht beinhaltet. Zumindest nicht, wenn man es grammatikalisch korrekt haben wollen würde.
Translation:
Wouldn't work because it doesn't include the second meaning of "has come here many times". At least not if you wanted it to be grammatically correct.
Can you elaborate? I’m afraid my Greek is just about at the level of “Ενα τσαι, παρακαλώ” followed by the Athenian responding in English to correct my pronunciation.
(Disclaimers: crude content ahead; also, explaining a joke makes it unfunny.)
Ancient Greece is sometimes associated with pederasty [0], where adult men have sex with younger (teen-aged) boys.
GP wrote:
> I don't think that would work in Greek.
IIUC, GP's point was that commenting the word "came" is ambiguous in English, but not in the joke's original language.
My pun was that there are two ways to interpret "that wouldn't work in Greek". The first being what GP meant. The second being that if a Greek man were to ejaculate when in Rome, it "wouldn't work" to father anyone, because it would be anal sex, and therefore unlikely to impregnate their partner.
After a little more reading, I get the impression that while pedastry may have been common for ancient Greek philosophers, it may have taken a form other than anal sex.
IIUC, in their society, anal sex (with anyone, including women) was considered vulgar. At least according to their surviving writings; no idea about common practice.
Disclaimer: Not my area of expertise. I'm just going from a few additional resources I found on the topic.
Ah that makes sense, I was coming at this from the wrong direction and assumed it was supposed to be an assonance rather than a reference to one of the oldest contraceptive :)
Oh naturally. I tried to stuff in as many puns as possible, so I when I looked up synonyms and learned a new word that looked like a perfect fit, I just had to experiment. :)
