A Foray into Foreign Language Comedy

Chris

There’s a new show on Netflix called “Huge in France”, starring French comedian Gad Elmaleh. In the show, he plays a version of himself in which the premise has him moving from Paris to LA, to be closer to his son. The prolific funny man is immediately a fish out of water, as he is relegated to use a language he is more or less comfortable with. His English is good, as he can communicate what he wants, but when it comes to comedy, his character is simply unable to get any laughs. He tries his stuff at a local open mic night (inside a bowling alley), only to bomb miserably; this is from a guy who sells out stadiums in his native France. Afterwards he tells his friend, “I’m just not funny in English”. I wanted to contrast this scenario with a podcast I was listening to, which was promoting an upcoming Netflix special about a comedy gala featuring around 50 comedians from across the globe. The hosts of the podcast mentioned that many of the routines would be done in foreign languages, so people would have to read subtitles. This made me think about Gad, and his inability to be funny in English, yet these comedians had no problem being funny through subtitles. One of the comedians on the podcast said that the subtitles would obviously not capture everything about the performance because comedy is a subtle art, but that didn’t really matter because comedy was ultimately a written work and therefore should be funny on paper. He adds that “there are nuances and vocal inflexions that sometimes push a joke over but for the most part it should be funny on paper if it’s funny spoken.” So for the life of me, I couldn’t understand how Gad Elmaleh couldn’t be funny in English, at least not enough to make a few hillbillies at a bowling alley chuckle. I did a little research and found an article from the Language and Linguistic Compass journal (2009) which characterizes several semantic and pragmatic types of verbal humour. Going through it I realized that Gad’s comedy isn’t predicated at telling “jokes” (with a traditional build-up and punch line) but revolves around what the author calls “conversational humour” (Dynel, 2009). Gad tells stories, which Dynel calls “shaggy dog stories”, which are “lengthy stories without punchlines”  (Dynel, 2009). These stories aren’t particularly funny, but hinge on the way Gad tells the story. He does so by weaving language into a rich tapestry and by doing a variety of exaggerated impersonations. In doing so, he also involves the crowd, and kind of feeds off them in what the author calls “spontaneous interactional humour” (Dynel, 2009). I would be very surprised if he ever told a story in his routine the same way twice. His mastery of the French language is very impressive and I can see how his routine cannot be replicated in English. Since his routine goes way beyond telling jokes to invoke humour, it is evident that he would need to be armed with a rich knowledge of the language.

References

Dynel, Marta (2009). Types of Conversational Humour. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3 (5), 1284-1299.