Last night I was FUNNY in French! I'm still grinning about how clever I was. It was like the part in Almost French where she makes her first joke in French, except that hers was unwitting and mine was on purpose and about 20 times better.
Here's the scene: I'm out with Dorothée, her friend F who I already knew, and some guys she knows who I had just met. One of the guys, R, says that he knows everything and I can ask him any question I want. So I asked him why so many married French men don't wear wedding rings. This is a true phenomenon, by the way, and of course the first response that comes to mind is that they are trying to get away with something when they are away from their wives. But the weird part is that often times it's men who are in committed marriages. I can't figure it out at all. Anyway, R tells me that it is because of work. He works in heating, and he tells me this story about another guy he works with who stuck his hand in a heating appliance machine-y thing while wearing his wedding ring and impaled it on some metal part of the machine. If he hadn't been wearing his wedding ring the metal thing would have just slid (glisse) right across his hand. Okay, I'll give him the heating industry, but then I continue:
Me: So what about in the office?
R: There are lots of things that glisse in the office, like pens, pencils, papers...
Me: Riiight. It's the secretaries who glisse.
Then D and F started chuckling, followed by the rest, and I recieved the congratulations of everyone for my quick thinking and clever comment (and a few congratulations from myself). I am so proud of myself! I'm not the kind of person to toot my own horn, but this was really, really good and I feel really good about myself for saying it. It's the kind of joke the French love too because I was playing around with the language, it's sexual, and there are a few subtley different meanings of the verb glisser, so I feel really good about myself.
Except I also feel like I can never equal the glory of the first joke and if I do manage to make another joke it will probably be a total let-down. I may just rest on my laurels.
4 comments:
Haha! That's great!!
The only person who ever found me funny in French was Viany. And that's because she loved my sarcasm. But I guess being sarcastic in French and actually pulling it off was a feat.
Yay! Much better than my one french joke: "C'est quoi la différence entre un campeur et un rappeur?" "Le rappeur nique sa mère, et le campeur monte sa tente." I forget who I tell, so everyone's heard it five times. I should buy a book . . .
Ummm... is it a bad sign if I didn't really get your joke Andromeda?
Lol, its ok, it's not that funny. It's just a play on the word "tante" and "tente" and "monter" can mean set up (your tent) or like, "ride" and then the rapper always says in his songs "nique ta mere" and all that. . . it's kind of dirty, but those seem to be the majority of French jokes, non?
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