Funny Man
(By the way the picture here as absolutely no relevance to the story, I just wanted to show another picture of Sammy.)
Being funny in another language. It’s pretty tough. I remember seeing an Eddie Izzard documentary where he was going on a world tour and he was trying to do the shows in each country in that countries language. What really struck me was that he had to change more of the content for America than he did in France, Italy, Germany or Iceland. You see whilst he was speaking different languages in France, Italy, Germany and Iceland the content was more or less a literal translation, in America he had to change huge amounts of content, from makes of cars, to TV and film references.
I, on a much smaller scale, have run into the same problem here in the US. Obviously I am not in the same league as Mr. Izzard but I have found it quite challenging on occasions to be funny in a relevant way. You see there are a lot of cultural references that we have in the UK which are just not relevant here. Conversely sometimes I will say a perfectly normal British saying and everyone will fall about laughing because here it is not a saying at all.
I tell you this so that you will understand how happy I was when 2 of my favourite stories translated very well. One of them was the time I pissed on a guy in Yorkshire, and the 2nd was my trip to Estonia. I had my audience in stitches and it felt good to know that you can have universal stories that translate all known international boundaries. But then again pissing on a Yorkshire man is inherently funny.
Being funny in another language. It’s pretty tough. I remember seeing an Eddie Izzard documentary where he was going on a world tour and he was trying to do the shows in each country in that countries language. What really struck me was that he had to change more of the content for America than he did in France, Italy, Germany or Iceland. You see whilst he was speaking different languages in France, Italy, Germany and Iceland the content was more or less a literal translation, in America he had to change huge amounts of content, from makes of cars, to TV and film references.
I, on a much smaller scale, have run into the same problem here in the US. Obviously I am not in the same league as Mr. Izzard but I have found it quite challenging on occasions to be funny in a relevant way. You see there are a lot of cultural references that we have in the UK which are just not relevant here. Conversely sometimes I will say a perfectly normal British saying and everyone will fall about laughing because here it is not a saying at all.
I tell you this so that you will understand how happy I was when 2 of my favourite stories translated very well. One of them was the time I pissed on a guy in Yorkshire, and the 2nd was my trip to Estonia. I had my audience in stitches and it felt good to know that you can have universal stories that translate all known international boundaries. But then again pissing on a Yorkshire man is inherently funny.
posted by Nick at 3:58 PM
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