The success of reading, including reading as a part of foreign language acquisition, depends on numerous factors, such as motivation, academic emotions, engagement in reading, etc. Although the necessity to take into consideration a reader has been pointed out on many occasions, the culture-specific paradigms of emotional situations and their role in learning have hardly been discussed. The current study is aimed at exploring an emotional response to a humorous Russian-language text by representatives of two cultures; its primary target is to identify similarities and differences in the reactions of Russian and Chinese readers to a short story and the behavior of its characters. The survey was offered to Russian and Chinese university students, who had to evaluate themselves as emotional or reserved readers; to express their attitudes towards using emotion-evoking texts in the classroom and to evaluate a story from this perspective; as well as to use a list of emotional responses to choose the options describing how they felt about the story. The respondents also added to the list to specify their feelings and provided some comments. The experiment showed that emotion-evoking texts generate interest, creating a high learning motivation, which goes in favor of selecting educational texts that not only present a target language, but also truly engage learners. The survey results revealed the similarities and differences in self-identification through the lens of emotions and in the affective comprehension of a funny story, caused, among other things, by the nationally specific value systems of the respondents. Different proportions of particular emotions and different responses to the same situation in the Russian and the Chinese samples indicate the important role of cultural traditions and ethnically specific mentality. The characteristics of speech and verbalized thought observed at the emotional level of students of different cultural backgrounds should be taken into account by teachers of foreign languages.