Pourquoi les expatriés n'ont pas d'humour

[Nick de Cusa]

To expats, laughter can be the best medicine

By Hettie Judah

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

BRUSSELS: "I could feel it in my body and in my brain," recalled Stephanie Mitchell, 51. "It was as if there were micromuscles that I never realized I had been clenching 24 hours a day. I suddenly felt them relax. It was amazing."

This moment of muscular bliss came not at the hands of an alternative therapist, but in the audience at Stand Up Brussels, an English-language live comedy show.

Mitchell, a lawyer from the northwest of England whose peripatetic career has left her feeling more at home in China than in Europe, speaks excellent Mandarin, taxicab Cantonese, functional French and dysfunctional Spanish and German. Yet she acknowledged that it was "almost a physical relief to be able to hear humor in English."

Comedy nights in English are an increasingly frequent occurrence in cities with large expatriate populations. Berlin, Cologne, Bonn and Paris have hosted regular events.

Stand Up Brussels started in 2002 when David Lemkin, 40, a British lawyer, booked a clutch of acts from the British comedy circuit to play in Brussels. Lemkin, who lives in London, entered into the project partly as an entrepreneur and partly as a "comedy anorak," or a slightly obsessive fan.

The program now runs as many as eight gigs a year, and has provided Lemkin with the foundation for a second career in stand-up comedy.

At a recent Stand Up Brussels, the audience, having shared a lot of laughs over the past six years, held Lemkin in affectionate regard. Among the suited bureaucrats and groups of rugby players who meet in the theater lobby to share a curry before the show, the atmosphere seems blandly light-hearted.

But for those who live outside their native country, comedy in daily life is deadly serious. The question of when to laugh and at what is a vexed one. Working alongside those for whom English is a second or even a third language, native English speakers quickly learn that sarcasm and flippancy don't translate and, in fact, often upset people. Communication becomes an earnest pastime, and once you have knocked the comedy out of your conversation, it is hard to get it back.

"When I stayed with friends last year in Australia, it felt almost like I was visiting a new country," recalled Abby Bailey, 33. Away from home for five years on public relations jobs in Singapore and Belgium, Bailey still reads the Australian newspapers and keeps in close contact with friends, so she was shocked by the sudden capacity for miscommunication, the words she didn't hear and the jokes she did not get.

Paul McGee, 44, a native of Edinburgh, compares his loss of the humor reflex with an athlete's falling out of condition. "A boxer who trains hard is fast with his arms and his reflexes," McGee said. "If you live in Britain and have a group of friends with whom you exchange one-liners and banter, your brain is much faster; you're not held back by how you're talking, your choice of words or sentence structure. Over here, you lose practice; the one-liners are in your head, but maybe five seconds too late."

Perhaps this is why a cathartic comedy event took root in Belgium, a country where almost no one can escape operating outside his native language. Even the simplest signs are usually offered in the country's three official languages: French, Flemish and German. And in Brussels, home of the European Union, trilingualism is for wimps: the EU works in 23 official languages, and to be considered a linguist in these parts you need to excel in at least five.

Polyglotism, however, has its downsides. "I can be incomprehensible in three languages," Mitchell joked. "As you get more minimally competent in more languages, your fluidity and elegance slide downhill. I definitely feel that my vocabulary has shrunk."

To Mitchell and other regulars, the comedy nights offer a different kind of language lesson, and one that apparently needs just as much work as Slovene or Maltese: learning to find things funny again. Top comedians have crashed and burned on stage in Brussels, and not for want of talent: One who tanked appallingly went on two weeks later to win the top comedy award at the Edinburgh festival. People love being in the audience surrounded by the laughter, but it takes practice to respond with the crowd and feel in on the jokes.

"When I first went, it was just so nice not to have to concentrate," Bailey said. "Not to have to work for it, but to relax and hear jokes in English. Now I go because I find it funny - funnier than I did when I first got here - because my understanding of the jokes has improved."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/08/athome/acomedy.1.php