IT’S NOT remotely funny, not having a sense of humour. Irony is your enemy, wit your nemesis. You live life stalked by the fear that another punchline – which, inevitably, you won’t get – lurks around every corner. In company, you sit in dread when the funny anecdote comes around, watchful for a sign that the moment to laugh is near and joining in, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, though usually you have no idea why.
You write indignant ripostes to scandalously misguided newspaper articles, only to be told the piece was written tongue-in-cheek. Life, it seems, is one big joke you haven’t been let in on.
Accusing someone of lacking a sense of humour is a suitably grave charge, then, but the insult is all the greater when the wit of a proud nation is drawn into question. The French have grown wearily accustomed to such slurs from foreigners; that their witty pretensions are hollow, their levity a sham. When I mentioned to another foreign journalist that I was writing about France's sense of humour, she presumed it would be a very short piece. After all, isn't French humour an oxymoron? Like all national stereotypes, the truth is messier. French political satire – fed by a cast of public figures straight from a joke-writer's pen – has been flourishing of late, with Les Guignols de l'Info, a political puppet-show, the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaînéand a host of radio satirists making the genre consistently sharper, more intelligent and funnier than anything I've seen in Ireland. In stand-up – which doesn't have much of a history in France – the success of some of the most popular mainstream performers is admittedly mysterious, but then there are some genuine grade-A performers to be found on stage in Paris every week. It's true that French TV, with its fondness for endless variety shows and puerile japes, produces some staggeringly lame comedy, but so does TV everywhere.
And yet it's an inescapable fact that funny things happen differently in France. Light-heartedness and sarcasm don't infiltrate everyday life like they do in Ireland. The French generally don't do self-deprecation. The Irish may not be as funny as we think, but many of us are constantly alive to the possibility that everything we hear may be sarcastic. Not in France, where, thanks to the widespread practice of flagging lightheartedness combined with a penchant for compartmentalisation in so many aspects of life, a French joke generally comes when you're most expecting it. Often it will be announced in advance, or be followed by a qualifier such as Je plaisanteor Je rigole(I'm joking). To avoid misunderstanding on the printed page, the French have devices for such flagging. There's the ubiquitous exclamation mark, which can infuse even the most turgid text with a sense of high drama. When newspapers quote someone making a self-evidently jocular remark, they'll often add, helpfully, "he joked". The word humourwas little known in France before the Revolution – esprit(wit), farce(practical joke), bouffonnerie(drollery) and humeur(a state of mind or mood) were all common, but not humour, and it was only in 1932 that the Académie française accepted it as a French noun. But the concept, in the loose way that we understand it in Ireland, has never fully taken hold. The French comic tradition is about wit, clever wordplay, caricature and l'humour engagé, and these remain the strongest veins of the country's comedy.
Some of our outsiders' misgivings surely have something to do with the fact that comedy can be so specifically national, relying on a shared grasp of subtle signals, markers and in-jokes that you can only absorb by growing up in a community. Irish people get American comedy partly because the lines between the two cultures have been blurring for decades, but I once showed a good episode of Father Tedto a room of multinational housemates in England and they found it as funny as a funeral. Recently, a French magazine published a commentary on Horse Outsideby the Rubberbandits in which the author insisted on seeing the song as an angry denunciation of Ireland's economic and social malaise. There's no entirely satisfactory way to translate into French what an Irish person means when they say they're "just having a laugh".
The French way of thinking about humour may also have something to do with the Cartesian logic instilled in schoolchildren from an early age and drummed into the elite through the grandes écoles, finishing schools for France’s ruling class. In a world where structure, order and logic are the master nouns, the room for nonsense and absurdity is limited.
And yet the French seem to have plenty to laugh about, and foreigners' mystification couldn't bother them less. Their love for Jerry Lewis, the American slapstick merchant they call le roi du crazy, endures, while Woody Allen's bourgeois angst goes down very well. Their cartoons are world-class and their comedy film industry is a major money-spinner. And then, of course, there's literature. The latest novel from the supposed miserabilist Michel Houellebecq, the Goncourt-winning La Carte et le territoire, is not only his best but also his funniest. Then again, maybe it's just that my sense of humour has gone native. Je plaisante!