bringing up the “rire”

There's an unwritten rule of comedy that you should never brag about your own jokes - if they're funny enough, your audience should do that for you.

Of course, there is always the exception, and I'm quite proud of the day I got a genuine giggle out of someone even when I was speaking a foreign language.

"What's that you're writing there?" asked the curious fellow student sitting beside me in French class.

"Oh, nothing" came my hurried reply.

"You're scribbling out all the answers so you can cheat on the test, aren't you?"

"No!"

"Really?"

"Well, yeah, maybe a little bit."

"How can you read it when you write so tiny?"

"Years of practice."

"But wouldn't it be easier to just learn the words?"

"Well here's the thing - I find writing them out like this actually HELPS me learn them. Half the time I don't even need to look at the notes, I just remember them from writing them out.”

"So where do you put them for to look at them?"

"On the chair here, between my legs. See? It appears that I'm looking down at my page, but I'm also looking at the notes. Simple, eh?"

"Yeah, I suppose so."

Though I didn't know this guy too well at the time, I was pretty sure he wouldn't tell the teacher what I was up to.

But I would have never have guessed that the very next week I'd see him peering down between his own legs during the exam!

Come to think of it I HOPE that's what he was doing...

Still, at the time I was strangely flattered, so much so that deep down in my subconscious, I must have made a pledge to make sure this guy would be best man at my wedding in 2006.

But that's not the thrust of my story. I'm telling you about these weekly French tests because in essence they were responsible for every scrap of knowledge of the language still resting in my brain today.

I never did the whole "spend a summer in France" thing, nor did I know anyone with whom I could practice. All I ever had was my daily classes with Mr Simm.

Looking back I have to say he was a good teacher. I don't think his regimen of weekly exams was his ideal method for instructing us, but since a student's experience of the Irish school system can only be shown by your performance in one exam, ie the "Leaving Certificate", he probably figured giving us regular practise in test situations was the way to go.

He also held the belief, and rightly so, that 6th year students (like high school seniors) should by then be well grounded in basic grammar, and all that was needed was to improve their vocabulary.

To this end, he would bring in French newspapers from Monday to Thursday and read selected articles from them, picking out words he felt that were important to us and we were to write them down. His test on the Friday would comprise ten words from the overall set, and our score would also provide him with an easy way to mark our weekly report cards.

Whether or not he knew I was cheating, or indeed whether or not he would have cared even if he did, I was in a place at the time where I didn't give a damn about actually learning anything, I just wanted to get through that particular class and move on to the next one.

Little did I know that some of the words really did burn themselves into my memory...

The year was 2003. Sandra and I went to Barcelona for a weekend to visit a friend of hers who lived there. On the way back, we had to pass through Orly airport.

She didn't do French at all in school, so between the two of us, I was the "expert", though I insisted that I had absolutely no conversational French - even if I COULD put together a sentence to ask a question, I'd be terrified as to what would be said back at me.

So for the length of our four-hour layover in Paris, we plodded along using English when a push came to a shove, hoping we wouldn't offend the locals too much. But it was an airport, so by and large they were used to it.

When it came close to the time of our flight, we had to go join a queue for the check-in desk. At least we HOPED it was the right check-in desk. The sign above this one wasn't even in French, it just had a series of numbers, but one of them appreared to be our flight number, and it was the only queue for our airline, so we assumed we were safe.

That's when a middle-aged French woman tapped me on the shoulder. Here's how my wife heard the exchange.

"Bleh bleh bleh bleh Dublin?" said the woman.

"Bleh bleh bleh" came my reply.

"Bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh - bleh bleh?"

"Bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh, bleh bleh. Bleh bleh, bleh, bleh."

"Ah...bleh bleh bleh?"

"Bleh - BLEH!!!!" *shrugs shoulders*

"Oh, ha ha ha! Merci!!!!" (of course she knows merci)

Sandra looked at me with amazement as the woman walked away from me, still laughing.

"I thought you couldn't speak French?"

"I can't! But that was weird - it was like she was speaking in tongues, I just knew everything she was saying to me!"

"So what did you say to her?"

"Oh just that I find the French accent irresistible and to meet me behind the Tie Rack in fifteen minutes for a quick snog."

"Seriously..."

"She just asked me if this was the check-in desk for Dublin. I told her I thought it was, because the flight number is up there on the screen. What she said next I wasn't sure about, but by her inflection I took it that she asked me was I sure, so I just wanted to say to her "I HOPE so!" and the translation somehow fell out of my mouth."

"Bloody hell - she laughed so loud I thought you'd told her a dirty joke or something!"

Now just so we're clear, I never said I made her laugh by saying something really funny – is it my fault she was easily amused? Or who knows – maybe I said “J'espère!!!” in such a way as to sound like it’s “two penguins walk into a bar, etc”…

Still, the fact remains, I used a foreign tongue, tried to be funny and got a laugh.

As far as I'm concerned that counts, so I'm claiming it as a story I can tell my grandchildren.

And you of course. But only in English.

I'm just wondering if something like this would have happened had I chosen to learn German instead...

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