In the Balkans, Croats are thought of as humorless. This applies especially to Zagreb and its environs. Indeed, Dalmatians and Slavonians are far from humorless. By way of an example, Croats are considered incapable of making a funny movie, a genre in which Serbs and Bosnians are considered as far superior. Most Croats would agree with this assessment, and every new movie is examined from the vantage point of humor. Is it funny enough? Sadly, every single movie that comes along fails to impress in connection with humor. At best, it falls flat.

The same holds for jokes. It is interesting to note that the only jokes associated with Zagreb are about Bobby and Rudi, which have a distinctly Austro-Hungarian ring to them. They are out of fashion by now, but they are still around. Nowadays, many of them can be found on the World Wide Web. It does not take much effort to find out that jokes about Count Bobby and Baron Rudi actually come from Vienna, though. There is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the two (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/count_bobby). Now that the bourgeoisie of Zagreb is thinning out, the jokes about Bobby and Rudi have lost their punch. And the bourgeoisie was largely from elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The best explanation for all of the above is that Zagreb is a black hole in cultural terms. Having grown into a city in a bit more than a century, it is a hodge-podge of Croats from all across the country, as well as many others from further afield. Whatever is funny to some is not funny at all to others. Little is shared in this melting pot that has grown with every war in the Balkans, and especially with World War I and II. In short, Croats will be thought of as humorless for many more years to come, if not forever. As time goes by, the melting pot is likely to grow and grow. By and by, Bobby and Rudi will also disappear without a trace. The Austro-Hungarian empire vanished from the face of the earth an entire century ago. Well, a couple of years less.