From Gerald Erichsen,
Your Guide to Spanish Language.
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A. I have been assigned to do a Spanish refrain. I must provide a literal translation and the closest English refrain to it. My first one was easier said than done, to give an example. My new one leaves me completely lost. Please help! The Spanish refrain is "las burlas son víspera de las veras." It has to do with comedy, and I know you don't like to do translation, but if you have an understanding of the Spanish culture and what this might mean, please email me. Your help is greatly appreciated.

I won't give you the literal translation because a)I have a policy against doing people's homework for them, and b)you can figure it out with any Spanish-English dictionary.

Many proverbs (Spanish refránes) do require some knowledge of the culture to understand, but this probably isn't one of them. What you need to do is think of the language and word meanings in the broadest possible sense, a figurative sense, rather than rely on the literal meaning. If you can do that, you may see that this proverb really doesn't have much to do with comedy, just as "the early bird gets the worm" doesn't really have anything to with birds.

In this case, víspera, as any dictionary will tell you, has the literal meaning of "eve" or "the night before." But both víspera and its closest English synonym can be used in a broader sense. You're probably too young to remember the old protest song that said "we're on the eve of destruction," but that's a case where "eve" didn't have anything to do with the literal night before an event; rather it was used to mean that we're in the final stages of whatever comes before destruction. So the figurative meaning can be "prelude" or "that which comes before something else"; a loose translation of the refrán would be something to the effect of "humor comes before the truth."

As to the English equivalent, I can't think of one off-hand. The closest I can come up with is "In every joke there's a grain of truth," or better yet, "in every joke there's a germ of truth," but there very well could be one that's closer. Use your imagination. When translating from one language to another, it's important to translate ideas and concepts, not words. That principle is doubly true when it comes to understanding proverbs or refranes.