In one of my philosophy of aesthetics classes in college, we read an essay by someone making the point that both humor and art connect with their audience through shared experience.
Darmok and Jalad is interesting as we don't know their history but by mapping language to our experience we gain insight and thus shared experience... Shaka, when the walls fell.
I heard something on a podcast a week ago that blew my mind: tribesmen who come from cultures without a word for "blue" cannot distinguish _the actual color blue_ when shown a series of swatches of different colors (blue, red, green, etc.). The author was using it to point out how in Homeric poetry we have references like "wine-dark sea". The way our culture encodes information seems to go as deep as even our _basic perceptions_ which is just wild to think about. Temba, his arms wide.
Darmok and Jalad is interesting as we don't know their history but by mapping language to our experience we gain insight and thus shared experience... Shaka, when the walls fell.