Yes. On the Mainland, it's just cold -- generally somewhat sardonic. Where I'm from, we usually say (in English) that people telling such jokes are "cold" or say, "That's cold," in response to such jokes.
Elsewhere (I'm guessing mostly Taiwan, and this may be an older use), it's just a bad joke.
Really? Because when someone says "That's cold" to me I usually take they mean that what the person said was cruel or unfriendly... thus the confusion... but after being told some 冷笑话 they sound more just like "bad jokes" to me lol.
Well, sure, but all I'm saying is that from where I'm from I've never heard of such thing - in fact if someone said to me "I'll tell you a cold joke" I'd take it to mean they were giving me a cruel insult. So I guess "bad joke" would probably be an adequate translation in contexts where you would want to lean more towards the target text (i.e. English.) Interesting that urban dict (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cold%20joke) has a entry about it too.
Like what the above posters have said. But 冷笑话 can also be funny in a sort of distorted sense, not your typical brilliant jokes, but makes you laugh at the bizarreness of it.
An Example: why cant penguins fly? because they dont have money to buy air tickets!
Cold jokes can be language-specific too because many of them are puns on local words.
An Example from a Taiwanese comedienne: Why do people say Doraemon is helpful? 为什么人人都说小叮当乐于助人？
Because he always extends round hands. 因为他经常伸出‘圆’手。
Doraemon has round paws. The chinese word for 'round' is 圆, which shares the same pronounciation as '援'. The phrase '伸出援手' means extend a helping hand. The joke makes no sense in English, but in Chinese, it's quite a clever wordplay.
Also, like what poubelle says "Just because the expression means such where you are from does not mean that it does not mean something different elsewhere."
because of different languages, cultural etc, the way we regard jokes is different. That may also be why you didn't understand your Chinese friend's explanation.
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Elsewhere (I'm guessing mostly Taiwan, and this may be an older use), it's just a bad joke.
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"Cold jokes" can be bad, cruel, sardonic, etc. It all depends.
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An Example:
why cant penguins fly?
because they dont have money to buy air tickets!
Cold jokes can be language-specific too because many of them are puns on local words.
An Example from a Taiwanese comedienne:
Why do people say Doraemon is helpful?
为什么人人都说小叮当乐于助人？
Because he always extends round hands.
因为他经常伸出‘圆’手。
Doraemon has round paws. The chinese word for 'round' is 圆, which shares the same pronounciation as '援'. The phrase '伸出援手' means extend a helping hand. The joke makes no sense in English, but in Chinese, it's quite a clever wordplay.
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because of different languages, cultural etc, the way we regard jokes is different. That may also be why you didn't understand your Chinese friend's explanation.
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In this article it says in English the correspondence is "Anti-humor"
http://www.douban.com/group/Gia-club/ contains a lot of such "Anti-humor"
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