that joke isn't funny any more...

My team at work have developed a real liking for rubbish jokes.

I think it all started when my wife started bringing home packets of Carambar every time she returned from work. As well as being slightly old-fashioned caramel flavoured sweets that seem designed to pull out your fillings, each wrapper also has a set of jokes (in French) on the back.  These jokes are so famously bad that "blague Carambar" has entered the French lexicon as a phrase that means "cringeworthy joke".

I think part of the appeal for my team is my translations: they hand over the wrapper and I do the best I can to make sense of the joke for them.  The challenge is that many of these jokes rely on a play on words that is quite difficult to translate when you only have a somewhat functional grasp of French. 

This one had everyone in stitches:

"What's a dentist's dream?"
"To live in a really big house".

I think something must have been lost in translation there.

I find myself sometimes texting some of the more baffling ones to C. for a proper explanation.  Almost invariably they just aren't funny, but it's good to know that for definite.  At least my comic mistranslations seem to be amusing.

Here's my current favourite.  It's not a Carambar joke, mind.... but it did make me laugh.

Ready?

Jokes about white sugar are rare.  Jokes about brown sugar? Demerara.*

Go on, it's okay to admit to me that you laughed before you groaned. Everyone does.

I have a friend who is particularly sensitive about cultural appropriation: she's a white westerner but has the most highly attuned filter to other people's possible offence that I have ever come across.  I can't help but wonder if she might pull me up on that gag because it seems to encourage the teller to adopt a particular accent in the pronunciation of that last word. 

Maybe I'll tell it to her and find out.

I'll perhaps leave the props in the dressing-up box.  Some gags are good enough to stand on their own two feet.

---

* I may not be blogging much at the moment, but you're glad you stopped by just for this, aren't you?

but i am un chien....

As is the custom, I brought back some sweets from France for my team at work. I brought back some Carambars. You’ve probably had them yourself, but they’re stick shaped chews that come in original caramel, assorted fruit flavours and have truly terrible jokes on the back of the wrapper. We’ve had fun this week as my team have handed me their wrappers and asked me to explain an awful pun that hinges – for instance - on knowing that the French word for canvas is the same as the word for web (Q: what do spiders dream of? A: having their webs/canvases hung in the Louvre. Boom boom).

There have been a couple of jokes that have genuinely made me laugh though:

Qu’est-ce qui a des poils et vend des medicaments?
.....Un pharmachien

Okay, so it doesn’t translate perfectly into English, but that’s pretty funny, no?

Pharmachien!

They also have something similar with the punchline “un electrichien”. (Quell metier les chiens peuvent-ils exercer?)

Say what you like about the French, but they certainly know their way around a good chien joke.

I just might die with a smile on my face after all....

We came home from Running Club this evening to the sight of our cat, flat on her back with her legs akimbo, showing her foufou to a couple of passing strangers.  Slut!  When she saw us coming, she tried the same trick with us, but when you know that she lets it all hang out for complete randoms, you're much less likely to be seduced by the little harlot's charms.

Honestly.  Cats.

The New Yorker seems to like cats too, as these cartoons demonstrate. It's not just high-brow profiles of people you've never heard of that have been keeping me away from my Joseph Heller, you know.

Of course, this being the New Yorker, they do sort of spoil things by somewhat over-analysing things. Even after quoting E. B. White’s famous adage that “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”... they still come up with this graph.

Hmm.  On reflection, maybe it's because of things like this that I like reading the New Yorker.  You might not have noticed as I think I hide it very well, but I'm a smart-arse, you see.

In case you needed to ask, I like the stuff on the top-left hand side of the graph.

Of course I do.